Random Shots From Our 12-Bore

March 9, 1907
Los Angeles

The Insanity Begins

Led by I. Newerf and J.B. Dudley, the automobile owners of Los Angeles are fighting a new city ordinance that bans parking within 40 of downtown intersections. Newerf, the West Coast representative of Goodyear Tire Co., and Dudley, a car salesman, received citations for violating the law and have pleaded not guilty.

In April 1909, Dudley pleaded not guilty to involuntary manslaughter after hitting street inspector Woodman J. Thomas on Broadway near 5^th Street. He was sentenced to five years’ probation in March 1910.

Disgraced Woman

Hazel La Doux, a.k.a. Hazel Rogers, hid her face with a veil as she was tried on charges of forgery.

“Her downfall is said to be due to a man named William Rogers, an alleged Ascot tout who deserted her,” The Times says. “It is charged that Miss La Doux forged the name of Mrs. John Brink on a check for $120 and cashed it.”

La Doux told police that she and Rogers used a scheme in which she took a job with a reputable employer and passed clients’ information to lover. La Doux said she worked at a department store in Oakland and a dentist’s office in Los Angeles, turning over names to Rogers, who forged the checks.

“She had been an honest woman, she said, until Rogers’ oily tongue and smooth ways captivated her and she became his mistress and then a thief,” The Times says.

He Paid $40

Restaurant owner Frank Flood stood over his wife, Annie, as she lay on the floor of their quarters at a Spring Street rooming house and said it would be worth the $25 fine just so he could beat her up.

In testifying against him, “She recited a story of shocking cruelty, saying that she had been mistreated, scorned and finally beaten by the man who promised to love, cherish and protect her,” The Times says.

Flood did not dispute any of the charges, refused to cross-examine her (a husband’s right in those days) and pleaded guilty to battery. “He admitted that he struck her and confessed to having assaulted her with his fist as she lay on the floor,” The Times says.

He paid $40 ($837.08 USD 2005).

Flood skipped town in September 1907. “He made the acquaintance of a fast sot and spent plenty of money, too much, in fact, for a man of his means. Late suppers at swell cafes cost Flood much cash. Then he became possessed of a desire to take long journeys in touring cars. He paid his bills with other people’s money, the new restaurant manager says, by levying on the cash drawer of the restaurant, which is owned by a company,” The Times says.

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Where Children Played

Dec.12, 1907
Los Angeles

In the gritty, industrial heart of the 8th Ward at Holly Street and St. John, officials are planning a large recreation facility “as an oasis in the wilderness,” The Times says. The building, designed by the firm of Hunt, Eager and Burns, will offer an alternative to “those who have no pleasure grounds but the streets and the saloons,” The Times says, noting: “Happy people are nearly always good people.”

The center was to include a gymnasium, baths, bowling alleys, clubrooms, a stage, a regulation running track and organized athletics “to counter the influences of pool rooms [and] saloons,” The Times says.

The city’s habit of renaming streets makes it difficult to locate the center precisely. As best as I can tell, it was at 1546 St. John, a street that has disappeared but would be the northern continuation of Magdalena past Leroy. The facility survived at least into the late 1920s, according to news accounts.

Bonus fact: Hunt, Eager and Burns also designed the Los Angeles Country Club in 1910.

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Who Are Those Guys?

Nov. 27, 1907
Los Angeles

A shadowy, global conspiracy of anarchists is being described in the trial of revolutionaries Ricardo Flores Magon, Antonio Villareal and Librado Rivera in federal court. The fourth defendant, L. Gutierrez De Lara, was charged separately with committing larceny in Sonora, Mexico.

“The first positive evidence of a gigantic conspiracy to overthrow a friendly government was legally introduced,” The Times said. “Although there has been intimation of the danger[ous] character of the three men under arrest, and a partial expose of their cowardly plans to [overthrow] the presidents of this country and of Mexico, the far-reaching character of the junta has hardly been realized, even by government officials.”

Investigators seized letters by the men showing that the “anarchists of this country and of Europe are hand in glove with the leaders of the Mexican junta and that extreme socialists and rabid labor [officials?] have lent their aid to a greater or lesser degree.”

“Arms, bombs and poison were the weapons to be used in invading Mexico.... The wily leaders expected to inflame their ignorant followers to acts of rapine and violence such as characterized the French revolution. For the furtherance of this infamous plot, thousands of dollars has been raised and expended by the leaders,” The Times said.

Shown above, the Arizona lawmen who helped capture the revolutionaries: from left, Capt. F.H. Rynning, Undersheriff A.A. Hopkins, Lt. Billy Old and U.S. Inspector C.T. Connell.

One of the key witnesses in the trial will be A.T. Samuels of the Furlong Secret Service Bureau, who worked undercover selling ads for the revolutionists’ newspaper in St. Louis.

The Times notes that the defense attorneys staged another fundraiser at Simpson Auditorium, collecting $75 “from the socialists, anarchists and poor peons.” The event was “a poor repetition of the mass meeting of a few days ago. The same dreary anarchistic sentiments were uttered; the same Mexican hymns dolefully butchered by the cholo band and the identical [sentiments?] regarding tyranny were enunciated.”

After several speeches, defense attorney A.R. Holston “devoted most of his harangue to an attack upon The Times. He was very much surprised, he said, that this paper had called the former meeting [anarchistic] in character when it had been praised by the Citizen (Labor-Union), by the Common Sense (Socialist) and by the Express.

Bonus facts: Job Harriman was one of the defense attorneys for the McNamaras in the 1910 bombing of The Times and in 1914 founded a Socialist colony named Llano del Rio in the Antelope Valley, just beyond Pearblossom on the road between Palmdale and Victorville. He died in that hotbed of radicalism, Sierra Madre, in 1925 and was buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale.

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The Melancholy Prizefighter

Sept. 25, 1907
Los Angeles

Meet Joe Gans, a boxer whose name once echoed among fans of the ring now buried in the dusts of sporting history. Gans may well have been one of the finest fighters whoever lived—among sportswriters, he inspired long and lofty stories about his artistry in dispensing with an undistinguished opponent. But Gans puzzled the men who tried to capture him in words; not a braggart, nor a thug. He was thoughtful and at heart, mournful, they said.

Gans was training at Lucky Baldwin’s ranch in Arcadia for a match with Jimmy Burns at the Pavilion—20 rounds.

“Gans’ face during the maddest of the fighting was curiously unangered,” The Times’ Harry Carr said of the easy victory over Burns. “No clenched teeth; no frenzy of battle; not much tension; merely the puzzled, wrinkled look of the expert coming to the critical part of the operation. He wasn’t any more angry than a good matador should be while he waits, sword in hand, for the bull just to turn his head into the proper position.”

An anonymous Times writer did his best to render a complex portrait of Gans as he trained in Arcadia, but the story is handicapped by an extremely small palette restricted by the limited vision of the era: “He is not in the least like a prizefighter. As a general thing a prizefighter is an excessively offensive person whether he be a Jimmy Britt and attempt an intellectual pose or a roughneck like Tommy Burns and affect a valet and cane.

“Gans is a meek, humble mulatto with the saddest face the writer has ever seen. It is a puzzling and remarkable face. Someone has written that Gans has the face of an Egyptian or an Arab and not that of a Negro—and it is true.”



“No one could look into the eyes of the picture printed at the top of this group and not be impressed. They are not the eyes of an ignorant Negro and the face does not have that peculiar flitting appearance of momentous emotions written only slate-deep that characterizes so many of his race.

“The tragedy and pathos of his race and not its merriment are written in the deep eyes of Gans. His puzzled look is not the fretful peevishness of stupidity; it is the look of one who sees and wonders why.

“It is as if he were asking why it should be his destiny to beat men’s faces with padded gloves.

“The man who discovered that his face is not a Negro face may also have suggested that it is not a pugnacious face. It is the face of a general or a war eagle; not of a brawler. Gans fights because he knows how to destroy, not because he is a fighter.”

“The writer of this sketch has seen Gans in an hour of great triumph—the day after the Goldfield fight, when the sporting world was chasing him round the mining camp to wring his hand. He was no different. He was just as melancholy and his eyes were just as sad.

“There is no intention here of trying to make out this Negro prizefighter a paragon of virtue. He is said to be a desperate gambler. He says himself that he has gambled away nearly all the money he has ever made.”

The Times said: “Down in the bottom of his heart, Gans hates prizefighting. He may not know it, but he does. This in spite of the fact that he is, without doubt, the greatest expert the world has ever known in the use of the human fist.”

A year after his fight in Los Angeles, Gans apparently contracted tuberculosis and died in 1910.

Lmharnisch.com

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When Knighthood Was in Flower

Los Angeles theatergoers are transfixed by the new production of “When Knighthood Was in Flower,” Paul Kester’s adaptation of Charles Major’s 1898 novel, forming a mile-long line to buy tickets at Morosco’s Burbank Theater at Main and 6th St.

One reason was the return of Blanche Hall, a longtime member of the Burbank’s stock company, after a stint on the New York stage.

Hall was a veteran of Oliver Morosco’s stock company, which maintained a grueling schedule of a new production about every two weeks of now-forgotten plays like “Our Boarding House,” “The Little Church Around the Corner” and “The Imperial Highway” along with the Shakespearean standard “The Merchant of Venice” and Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.”

Such demanding schedules prompted actor Richard Mansfield to observe in 1905 during a stop at the Van Nuys Hotel: “The stock actor is a white slave. He toils without rest and without artistic reward. He is unjust to himself and to his public. His work is training, it is true, but the training is bitter—bitter!”

Actor William Desmond recalled one opening-night disaster at the Burbank in which Hall forgot her lines during the Act III, Scene 2 “casket scene” in “The Merchant of Venice.”

Desmond finally adlibbed: “Fair Portia, has naught to say?”

To which she replied: “Naught.”

Desmond said he laughed so hard that they had to draw the curtain.

Hall retired after 85 weeks for a trip to New York, where she received glowing notices in the newspapers. On opening night of her return to Los Angeles in “When Knighthood Was in Flower,” she received loads of flowers and made a short speech after six curtain calls.

In 1910, during a tour of Oakland, she was stricken with appendicitis and rushed home to Los Angeles for treatment. Later that year, she had a successful Eastern tour with her niece Evelyn Hall, who performed under the stage name Dolly Varden.

Hall remained a fixture of the stage in the ensuing years and by 1915 was performing at the Little Theater at Figueroa and Pico, along with actor Tyrone Power Sr.

Blanche Hall Morrison died Sept. 9, 1931, survived by a sister, brother and niece. She had been married for 10 years to actor Louis A. Morrison, who abandoned her to go on the road. The last time she heard from him was when he returned her watch with the words “this is the last link.”

As for the Burbank Theater, it was turned into a burlesque house before being demolished in 1974.

Bright Young Faces

“Who was the first man?” asked the teacher of an American boy.

“Washington,” was the reply. He was reminded of Adam and observed: “Yes, if you count foreigners.”

Henrietta B. Freeman paid a call on a schoolroom somewhere in Los Angeles in March 1907. She didn’t say where, nor did she give the teacher’s name, just that the teacher was a woman.

All Freeman says about the classroom is that there was a blackboard. For visual aids, the teacher had picture cards: a boy fishing, riding a bicycle and rolling a hoop; a girl washing her doll’s clothes in a tub, using a bar of soap.

There’s little more information about the students, except that there were 30 of them, ranging in age from 7 to 14. A few of them are identified: Onya, Ivan, Josefina and Leah. A Russian girl wears a handkerchief over her flaxen braids. The one thing in common is that none of them speaks English.

It was time for the music hour when Freeman arrived, so the teacher began singing a tune to her students: “Loo, loo, loo.”

“Instantly, every child in the room began to imitate the teacher, and within an astonishingly short time the hum of voices, at first discordant and out of time and tune, rose rhythmically and evenly and within three minutes every child had caught the air and was “loo-loo-looing” away with all his might,” Freeman says.

The teacher wrote the numbers 1 through 8 on the blackboard to represent the scale and in 10 minutes, Freeman says, the students knew that 8 meant the highest note and that 4 meant “fa.”

Next, the teacher began singing words to the song. Holding up a pencil, she sang: “Put away your pencil.” Then, as she demonstrated, she sang “Hands up. Hands down. I have two eyes. I have two ears. I have one chin.”

The language hour was next. The teacher put the picture cards on a rail below the blackboard and asked each student to pick his or her favorite and then talk about it. What was the boy or girl in the picture doing? What are the colors? “One little Spanish lass managed to lip out ‘girl has one soap,’ before the lesson was over,” Freeman says.

Freeman apparently made quite an impression on the youngsters during her visit. When they were told that she worked for The Times, one boy asked if she drew the pictures of Buster Brown.

It’s always interesting to see a woman’s byline in the newspapers of this era and especially so in Freeman’s case. She frequently wrote as Sydney Ford and it was under this pen name that she filed stories for The Times, which sent her on an 11-month trip around the world in 1910.

Forty years later, at the age of 90, she told The Times: “ ‘Miss Freeman,’ she declared with emphasis on the Miss. ‘And don’t you call me an old maid--I never made the mistake of getting married--I’m just a bachelor girl.’ ”

Her key to longevity, she said, was: “Don’t worry. Live cheerfully. Have your friends. Trust in God and say your prayers. And when it’s time--just go.”

Because of printing problems, many of Freeman’s stories about her around-the-world tour are illegible. Fortunately, they were gathered in a 1912 book “Journeying Around the World.”

Lmharnisch.com

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Panoramas of Los Angeles

My little ode to my favorite city, covering a roughly 20-year period centered on 1907 with the idea of giving a general introduction to Los Angeles from the 1890s to the eve of World War I. (The Times bombing and the air meet at Dominguez Hills were in 1910, for example). The Skunks of Los Feliz actually discovered this sometime back but I didn't want to tip my hand by saying anything. Fortunately, I received some very flattering comments. Although the music sounds very contemporary, I chose it because it was written in 1907.

Here's a high resolution version, but it only works with the newest versions of Windows (sorry folks with Win 98SE) and doesn't play well with Mac OS X.