June 17, 1927
Imperial Valley
People often ask, but Nathan, what of that builder of readymades, Dada Queen, and muse of Duchamp, Baroness Else von Freytag-von Loringhoven? Didn’t she suicide in 1927?
I can’t say that this piece of action art, now lost, carries the hand of the master, but I can’t rule it out either. Further investigation is necessary.
June 16, 1927
Los Angeles
Chemist Fred Paguilnati had been minding his own business in his home at 1528 Redondo Boulevard when local law enforcement came by for a visit. Which was understandable, since Fred’s chemistry business was less about mixing Bromos and more about tending to his 200 
cases of assorted liquors, at his home bootlegging operation (complete with full bottling plant). Proprietor Fred had driven the coppers away with a gun but they’d come back with full force and broken down the door. And so before Municipal Judge Stafford went Fred, where today he was told he could pay $500 ($5,975 USD2005) or take fifty days. He took the fifty days. Ah, this, just a day like any other, here in Volstead-era Los Angeles.
To our left, Fred’s house, center, as perhaps a Prohis Chopper might see it.
In related news…yes, we all know that Prohibition turned ordinary people into criminals, and gangsterism left corpses stacked liked cordwood on our streets, but let’s discuss something serious for once—stick this in your if-it-ain’t-one-thing-it’s-another file:
The article notes, just as one example, that cigarette comsumption was up 400%. Thanks a lot, Wayne Wheeler, for turning us into a nation of fat, toothless, wheezing, cancer-ridden sclerotic emphysemics.
June 10, 1927
Santa Monica
—The Lord to Job, on his buddy the Leviathan
Harry G. Cole, special police officer and deputy sheriff of Santa Monica, was walking along that part of the map generally marked by wind gods and sea-serpents, you know, Santa Monica, when he chanced upon a great and insolent rahab, if not the very World Serpent, Mr. Kooky Quinotaur, yep, that Time-to-Come feast-tent leviathan of a Leviathan himself. (Oh, for the life of the Leviathan, roaming the watery abyss, romping with daughters of Canaan, siring Merovingian kings, cavorting with Atlanteans and generally making mayhem on the seashores of California!)
Let’s hear Harry tell of it:
“As I was coming by the Sea Breeze Club the watchman was out spraying the dust down. I stopped long enough to pass the time of day and started south to finish my night work. When about one-eighth of a mile south of the clubhouse I notice something out about where the swells break, and at first thought it some kind of wreckage, but soon discovered it was a live thing. At first I thought it was a mammoth shark with a fin about three feet sticking out of the water and the top of its tail about twenty feet back, also sticking out. But soon a head about the size and shape of a seal’s appeared about ten feet ahead of this fin and then its neck.
“’Well, Mr. Cole,’ I says, “you and your dog are surely seeing things.’ Mike, my dog, had discovered it too by this time. I left my car and ran back—yelled to the watchman, ‘Come here quick! What is that out there?’ It was going north as fast as I could run. Then up came the head about three feet out of water…as near as we could guess it showed from thirty to forty feet, and whet it turned seaward we could see there were two of those big fins, or sails, about two feet apart and exactly abreast of each other.
“Last year several of the men working on the Gables Club said they saw an immense sea monster just off shore—four or five saw it. But I thought they were seeing things and let it pass my mind. But now I know that such things do happen in that old pond.”
The press wryly noted that perhaps the seabeast was screen bogeyman Lon “Man of a Thousand Faces” Chaney. This is unlikely, as Chaney was busy over at Metro where in fact, on this day of 10 June, it was announced by Thalberg that Chaney would pair with Tod Browning (yet again) in The Hypnotic, whose plot would hinge on science’s strange new discoveries in the realm of mesmerism and mental waves; this picture would go on to become famous “lost” film London After Midnight.
In any event, Chaney does not appear in the greater list of cryptids. As to whatever type of yet to be catalogued by the piscatorial expert seabeast Cole saw, he said "If I didn’t have a witness to this I never would have never enough to tell what I saw. I have been night patrolling in that territory for six years and maybe it is time I was getting goofy.”
June 9, 1927
Hollywood
Readers may remember this recent post about an animal-mauled Hollywood boardtreader. Now, encounter another actor attacked by beast—just as Bela Lugosi would one day meet a Brooklyn gorilla, 21 year-old actress Doris Williams (known on the stage as Doris Dore) has met her own New Yorker.
The anthropoidal New Yorker in question, all simian of structure and with “arms like a gorilla," broke in and attacked Doris this morning at her 1924 North Argyle apartment, who when she fought back, began slashing at her. She fainted, and awoke in a pool of blood, to find the prehuman had carved seven examples of the letter “K” on her person.
Doris met this preadamite character at a wild party in New York, where he forced her to sign some sort of “mysterious paper.” Mr. Missingus Linkus then followed Doris across the continent, annoying her with threats and anonymous letters.
Doris had come to out West to portray Hester “Pregnant Out of Wedlock” Griffiths in Dreiser’s “American ‘Filthy Bedroom Scene’ Tragedy” in its Hollywood premier at the sunarc-laden January 17 grand opening of the Wilkes’ Vine Theatre.
Which she did, her monkey-man close at heel, and after the show ended, knocked around and did whatever it is young ladies do in Hollywood. Captain of Detectives Slaughter has been busy trying to piece the events of the evening of June 8/early morning of June 9 together: Doris had been out with two married men (now sought for questioning), drinking it up at a local Italian place—she admitted to “feeling pretty good” when she returned but denied that these gents came back to her apartment with her—although other residents had complained to building manager Mrs. A. C. Black that they were disturbed by the loud noise and laughter emanating from within. Doris’ neighbor describes that later, she heard Doris telephone in a local Western Union call: “Come on over in a hurry. Door unlocked.” Said neighbor then recounts assorted door slammings, water runnings, medicine cabinet openings, and: “I heard her put down the folding bed. I next heard her walk out of her apartment and go down the stairs and open the front door. A few minutes later I heard her running very fast back to her apartment. Within a short time I heard a man talking with her. His voice sounded to me like he was angry with her. They remained there for a while and finally went out together. I went back to sleep.”
(Above, Doris’ apartment building, top center, across from the Castle Argyle.)
All grist for Detective Slaughter’s mill—the only thing lacking being corroborative evidence regarding Doris’ New York Gorilla story. Compounding Slaughter’s doubts thereof is information received from Doris’ friend George Lamont, who told detectives that last week, out-of-work Doris wished to arrange some daring publicity stunt (which George had sagely advised against).
Despite his misgivings, Detective Slaughter declared “We are giving Miss Williams the benefit of the doubt until it is proven otherwise. If she was attacked as she says she was we will do everything within our power to bring the guilty party to justice.”
It is of course not our place to judge whether she was in fact visited by a penknife-wielding primate from the Empire State, or this was a case of Morton Downey swastika prefiguration. Rather, we will leave it to our able readers to gaze at Ms. Williams’ visage and discern for themselves probable likelihoods.
Tim Coyne of The Hollywood Podcast rode along on The Real Black Dahlia crime bus tour and prepared a cool little piece for BBC 5’s Pods and Blogs program (or programme, if you will) explaining Beth Short and our fascination with 1947 LA and the odd characters in her orbit to a nation that doesn’t know the case.
Here’s a link to the MP3 of Tim’s interview with Nathan and me.
May 27, 1927
Inyo County
“The Owens Valley is worthless to the White Man.”
—United States Surveyor A. W. Von Schmidt, 1856
Well, A. W. was no man with a vision. William Mullholland, now there was a man with a vision. He saw a great city, abloom in the desert…
But blooms wither without water. And the Owens Valley, the “the Switzerland of California,” whose magnificent Owens Lake is full of that juicy Sierra Nevada runoff, has plenty.
There could be few endeavors more challenging than starting a company more venal and corrupt than the Los Angeles City Water Company, but Mullholland and his buddy Frederick Eaton—the Mayor—did so when they disbanded the LACWC and drummed up something called the LA Department of Water and Power in 1898. Whence came the three decades for which everything that pretty fountain in Los Feliz stands: the secret land deals with Teddy Roosevelt to screw the Owens Valley farmers out of an aqueduct; the bribery to then buy those same water rights; the purchasing (with a syndicate of pals, like Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis) of tracts in the San Fernando Valley when, unbeknownst to all, that water would then go to irrigate (guess where?) the San Fernando Valley; the Times manipulating rainfall totals to create a false drought and publishing scare articles to push more public bond issues to buy this cabal more water, ad nauseum.
On May 21, 1924, with their aforementioned Owens Lake a dusty salt flat, the farmers rebelled; a group of forty masked armed ranchers seized and opened the aqueduct’s Alabama Gates and dynamited part of the system north of Lone Pine. On May 14, 1926, a hole was blown in the structure south of the Alabama Hills spillway.
Which brings us to this day in 1927. It’s the cool of the early morning, 2:30am, and Tom Spratt and his nephew Lew, aqueduct employees, are huddled in their hut. They’re doing their best to look after that portion of the aqueduct that runs along No Name Canyon…little did they know the telephone wires were being cut. Then four men entered. Unmasked, but armed. “We’ll take you for a walk,” said one. “There’s going to be a dynamiting here.”
And was there. Two cases of blasting gelatine were floated down into the siphon with time fuses and the blast, at the low point of the siphon, tore the pipe in two, and the water, at capacity flow of 375 feet per second, blew out 450 feet of iron pipe, at nearly ten feet in diameter. And with that the gentlemen departed.
The papers took great pains to assure the public that while 500 acre-feet of water had been lost, there would be no shortage to the city. More importantly, there would be great pains taken to apprehend these “blacklegs” who perform “guerrilla warfare,” “prompted, it is assumed, by real or fancied grievances of Owens Valley residences against the water department.”
Mullholland, when asked if he had any comment, said he could not do so adequately without using unprintable words. The Board of Water and Power Commissioners posited that “the motive for this outrage is not definitely known, but reasonably may be suspected as connected with the efforts of certain landowners in Owens Valley to force this board to buy their lands and pay exorbitant prices therefore.”
Added Councilman Criswell, “These vandals are being supported and encouraged by Los Angeles Corporations and by a Los Angeles newspaper.” Councilman Colden declared the dynamiting “an act of Bolshevism that should be punished” and “an attack on the rights of every Los Angeles citizen.”
And what becomes of this story, you ask? Well. On the very day—March 12, 1928—that 67 year-old Owens Valley rancher Perry Sexton confesses on the stand and describes in detail how he blew up the No Name Siphon, William Mullholland’s greatest and most hubristic achievement met its fitting end.
May 20, 1927
Lincoln Heights
Cinema actor Gordon Standing, of noble acting stock, had played Horatio in the “Modern Hamlet” on the East Coast stage. Back East he’d starred in Lasky, Vitagraph, Inspiration and D.W. Griffith film productions. But then he got it into his head to come Out West. Though he’d been wounded several times in the Marine Corps during the Big Scrap, nothing could have prepared him for the horrors of Hollywood.
At first, all was well at Selig Zoo Studio. Standing’d been working alongside his old buddy Elmo “First Tarzan” Lincoln and a new buddy, one giant lion, in the cheapie serial “King of the Jungle.” Apparently Standing had been getting along peachy-like with his new feline friend, until Standing changed his make-up, putting on a beard, and old Leo didn’t recognize him. The maned one attacked! It took fifteen men to pull the animal off Standing, who was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital with severe bites and slashes about the neck and shoulders. King of the Jungle was no match for King of the Beasts. (Interestingly, allmovie.com would have us believe Standing was trampled by a "rampaging elephant;" perhaps they were thinking of the elephants that graced the entrance to the zoo.)
The Selig Studio had a "jungle area" in which to film, but their lions weren’t of the perfoming type; the question stands, then, was the rent-a-lion that killed Standing none other than famous snarling L. B. Mayer sidekick Slats, denizen of Gay’s Lion Farm (where lions would run amok a mere sixteen months later)?
RRRRAARRRRR!!!!!
A quick check-in see how our friends Down South are faring!
Look away, indeed.
May 19, 1927W. F. Linder is an unfortunate man. To begin with, he crashed his car. Into another car. Driven by a lawyer.
That other-car-drivin’ Los Angeles attorney, J. Irving McKenna, sued Linder for $12,000 ($142,542USD 2007) in damages. That was Wednesday. Today, two more damage suits were brought—seems passenger Mrs. Catherine McKenna is also a lawyer, and is counsel for her husband, who appears as her attorney; she demands $20,000 ($237,570USD 2007). Oh, yes, and Anna C. McKenna, another member of the family, is also demanding $20,000, and aforementioned Catherine is as well asking for $300 in medical expenses and $5000 in loss of earnings.
Drive carefully, folks.
One Thomas Little was attempting to raid the fabled Utt avocado groves down in Lemon Heights when he ran afoul of ‘cado guard George Henning. The two struggled for possession of a revolver while the two careened down a hillside in Litttle’s truck before Little was at last apprehended.
But, with Little having stolen nothing, how could it be proved that the value of what he intended to steal was more than $200? It was therefore up to Justice Morrison to determine the value of the accused man’s intended grand larcency haul. Dep. Dist.-Atty. Collins produced the fifteen empty sacks that Mr. Little had in tow; the court estimated these sacks would likely hold fifteen hundred pounds of the bewitching fruit, and further determined that these be worth more than the lowest grand larceny charge of $200.
All that notwithstanding, it was declared at the hearing that Little came quite close to being caught in a bear trap.
