July 14, 1927
Los Angeles
Clifford J. Morgan needed some dough—hey, don’t we all—and what surer way to procure some than to stick up a gas station? So he hailed a dimbox and told the hack to take him off to the filling station at Jefferson and Figueroa. There the would-be highwayman told the taxi to sit tight, strolled into the oilpit, stuck a gun in the ribs of one C. F. Williams, relieved him of $45 ($537 USD2005), sauntered back to his waiting hansom, and motored away. Unfortunately for Williams, do-gooders Ralph Paine and W. Burke were in the station at the time, and, grabbing Officer Best along the way, found Williams’ taxicab quite conspicuous in its lines and coloring and was thus followed easily. At 51st and Central the trio caught up to and apprehended our hapless and callow highwayman.
Vehicles-for-hire made the news again today in the strange case of five year-old Kenneth Stubbs, who had been placed by his mother Della in the home of Mrs. Bertha Whitiker at 3040 South Hoover. Mrs. Whitiker reported that a man called at the house, purporting to represent a local orphanage in which the boy’s mother wished to place him. After a brief conversation, the man departed. Two hours later, another man arrived in a taxicab. Mrs. Whitiker saw the little Stubbs boy invite the man into the apartment before witnessing said man scurry away with the boy in his arms, and the taxi speed away. (Estranged husband John Stubbs, up in Vancouver, is said not to know of Della’s whereabouts and therefore could not be part of this misuse of our public transport.) No further mention of the Stubbs kidnapping, or of little Kenneth Stubbs, is ever made in the Times.