A Flood of Youths

September 2, 1947
San Francisco

According to a poll conducted by the California Committee for the Study of Transient Youth at the state borders and in 15 California cities, up to 400 young people, 18-22, are entering California each day without their families. Most have left jobs in their home states in the belief that prospects for employment are better in California, and are “puzzled and resentful” to find this is not the case.

Further reading: A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970

Everybody’s in Showbiz

September 1, 1947
West Hollywood

Yesterday, Marguerite Kelly’s apartment door, at 1334 Olive Drive just off the Sunset Strip, was framed with fragrant honeysuckle. Today, the County Coroner defaced it with a sticker meant to seal the contents until her next of kin could be notified.

Marguerite, 29, was a blues chanteuse who never quite made it. After seven years in Hollywood, her small trust fund was nearly depleted and occasional cafe gigs weren’t replenishing it. Her longtime friend Charles T. Young, 59-year-old retired market exec, took her out to fancy dinners, but seemed disinterested in making things more permanent. She began making notes to herself, analyzing her sad situation.

So after one such evening out with Mr. Young, Marguerite topped off the champagne cocktails with a shot of gas from the stove. Arriving the next morning, Young smelled rotten eggs mixed with the floral vines. With the aid of apartment manager W.J. Ferry, he forced the triple-locked and bolted door.

Inside lay Marguerite, nude, tangled in her blankets, nearly dead. Beside her, a note to Young, calling him the greatest man in the world. It begged “don’t cut my hair, just cremate me.”

Young expressed surprise that his ladyfriend had felt so strongly for him, and suggested that had he known, he might have done something about it. Too late now. She died and was taken to Utter-McKinley mortuary.

Marguerite has a sister in Milwaukee who may come and claim her sheet music and other remnants of life in Los Angeles.

Suggested reading: Hollywood Babylon : The Legendary Underground Classic of Hollywood’s Darkest and Best Kept Secrets

1334 N. Olive To-day

Curious that the blues chanteuse should off herself before she had the chance to play the very House of Blues itself. The site of her old place smells not of honeysuckle, now, but of the HOB parking lot which replaced it.

Now that’s something to sing the blues about. That and our having lost the Utter-McKinley where she was taken. Where, we trust, she was cremated, hair and all.

Careful Who You Stop For…

August 31, 1947
Baldwin Hills
When electrician Walter Haselbuch saw two men waving red-bulbed flashlights at the intersection of Jefferson Blvd. and Harcourt Ave., he assumed they were police officers, perhaps operating one of the LAPD’s celebrated (and ACLU-defying) crime-stopping blockades. But when he pulled over, the men robbed him of $186 in cash, a $150 watch and a ring valued at $1700.

Suggested listening for prospective flashlight bandits: Waiting for the Electrician Or Someone Like Him (Firesign Theater)

The Corner of Jefferson and Harcourt

Now, according to historical currency conversion, the buying power in Haselbuch’s pocket was $1,638. His watch was worth $1,321 and his ring $14,972.

Can’t help but get the feeling that Haselbuch was something more than an electrician. I don’t know what those fellows were doing with their flashlights on the corner that night, but they weren’t looking for an honest man.

Incident on Primrose Ave.

August 30, 1947
Hollywood

18-month-old Robin Maria Dier found a little piece of metal, a bolt or a screw, at her home at 6323 Primrose Ave., and playfully stuck it in her mouth. Her mother saw her do it, and tried to take it away, but the child toddled off without releasing her prize.

A few moments later, she was gasping and turning blue. The Fire Department inhalator squad arrived and fed oxygen to Robin for 90 minutes, while Dr. Nicholas Mamulario of Hollywood Receiving Hospital performed a tracheotomy. Her condition appeared to be improving, so the technicians prepared the child for the trip to Children’s Hospital. Then she died.

Suggested reading: How to Baby-Proof Your Home

Et in Ann Arbor Ergo

August 27, 1947
Arcadia

She’s home!

Ruth Alice McLaren, 15-year-old runaway, has turned up in Ann Arbor, Michigan after her overly generous tips to a beautician raised the snipper’s suspicions. Now her mother is heading East to reclaim the young lady from the local juvenile hall, while Ruth’s invalid father Russell steams at home at 23 Fano Street.

What of the $2400 in cash (meant for the girl’s college education) that she pinched from the fruit jar last time she left the house? While the girl initially told officers she was a war widow on the run from her in-laws, she quickly ‘fessed up. Seems she met a man in a Pasadena movie theater, and agreed to pay both their ways to Ann Arbor, where her friend said he planned to enroll at the University.

Ruth was a big spender-but mainly on herself. In addition to visiting the beauty parlor, she bought a fur coat, flashy duds and a radio. So who can blame her pal for taking a powder with $1000 of the fruit jar bounty soon after they reached the Mitten State?

But there’s $402 left in the kitty. Which should be just about enough, after travel expenses, to pay Ruth’s way through beauty school, where if she’s very lucky she’ll run into tippers as big as herself.

Suggested reading: Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures

23 Fano Street To-day

Aye, wee Ruthie McLaren, a gal after my own heart. Any fifteen year-old with a penchant for thievery, and men met in movie houses, quickens the heart of this tender lad. Sure, she might have been better off at the College of Ave Maria than at Mary’s Beauty College, but with her autodidactic doctorate in Acquiring Fur Coats, apparently she doesn’t need either institution.

Hard to tell from where she hailed, as there’s no 23-the house numbers go from 19 to 25:

And what, pray tell, is the deal with this structure – had it been a modest battenboard-clad house, onto which were built multiple units?

Only Ruthie can tell us now. I picture her as still smelling faintly of delicately toasted host wafers, and sacramental wine, and freshly dressed hair.

My Mother-in-Law is SO Tough…

August 26, 1947
Los Angeles

Mothers-in-law are bad enough-but no one ever told David Richard, 22, what a pain in the caboose his STEP mother-in-law would be.

When young David left his room at 424 N. Alfred Ave. today on his way to the wholesale house where he works, he discovered his wife’s stepmother, Mrs. Rose Wolfeld, 54, snoozing in his car.

In retrospect, he ought to have taken a trolley, but he woke the woman–and was she ever in a mood. She began by berating him for failing to provide a home for her poor grayed head, and when he got behind the wheel she whipped out a metal bar and clocked him a few times on the noggin. He ran to the house with step-mamma in mad pursuit, while wife Louise, 19, watched in horror.

The victim never did make it to work, spending the day at the Hollywood Receiving Hospital getting stitches in his scalp and on his right wrist (defensive wounds). Mrs. Wolfeld meanwhile was booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon.

David told police that he and Louise married last March, and had been fending off Mrs. Wolfeld ever since. She insisted the couple provide a home for her, but when they moved into the single room on Alfred Ave. three weeks ago, they made it clear that there was no room for the extended family.

Mind you, if Mrs. W had gotten in a couple more whacks, there just might have been-.

Suggested reading: Mothers-In-Law Do Everything Wrong: M.I.L.D.E.W.