June bride

 

June 30, 1957
Milwaukee

Mary and Leeland met while taking summer courses at Harvard and are so in love that they want to get married.

But while Leeland loves Mary, his parents hate her. She "shot holes through our heart," Leeland's mother says.

In fact, Leeland's family hates Mary and her parents so much that they have brought a $500,000 lawsuit against them for alienating Leeland from the Catholic faith. Mary's family, you see, are Lutherans.

Arnold J. Werner, a Milwaukee industrialist, and his wife presented Mary in a June wedding. The 165 guests at St. Matthew's Lutheran Church did not include Leeland Cummings Sr. and his wife, who said they wouldn't recognize the marriage "under any circumstances."

The Cummings family of Wyncote, Pa., accused the Werners of luring Leeland away from his religion by paying his Harvard tuition and offering him a job. Leeland denied all the accusations and said his father was trying to extort money from the Werners. Eventually, all litigation was dropped after the Werners filed a countersuit.

A rocky start to a storybook romance?

Sadly, no.

A year later, according to Time magazine, Mary filed for divorce, saying that in the month they lived together Leeland threatened her, quit his job at her father's business and said that if she didn't support him, he would find someone who did.

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Child beater

 

June 29, 1957
Los Angeles

Here's a formula for disaster: Take an unemployed 19-year-old who was booted out of the Marines after going AWOL and slashed his wrists when he was caught. Hook him up with a 21-year-old girlfriend who's working a double shift as a waitress  in a cafe. Throw in her 2-year-old daughter and put them all in a trailer at 7025 Chanslor Ave. in Bell.

The ex-Marine's name is Girard Joseph McNulty, who said: "The way we had to live like animals just seemed to get me down. Half the time we didn't know what to do about rent or for food or anything else and it just hit me all at once."

His girlfriend was Laura Irene Donnelly and she had known McNulty about two years. They had arrived from Colorado about a month earlier.

The youngster is identified as Joyce Ellen Meyer in one story and Joyce Donnelly in another.

"I don't really know why I hit her but when I hit her she just hit the wall with her head and then I heard her crying and rushed her to the hospital," McNulty said. Joyce was hospitalized with a black eye, bruises on her abdomen and cheek, and a possible concussion.

McNulty was arrested on charges of felony child beating and arraigned, but The Times never pursued the story. He died in Texas in 1992, according to the Social Security Death Index. No further information is available about Laura Donnelly or her daughter Joyce.

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Matt Weinstock

June 28, 1957

Rehabilitation can come in curious ways. Let a man who occasionally checks in here tell his story of self-appraisal and reinstatement in society.

One day he picked up a book, "Blood on the Boards," by William Campbell Gault, and read:

"Slopping through life with no discipline, no goal! And they find themselves 40 and empty, and go looking for what they missed in a bottle."

The words hit him, he says, with the impact of a sledge hammer. Nothing had ever made such an impression on him.

He stopped and reread them. He has reread them many times. He has made copies of them.

At the time he asked himself two questions:

"What have I lost that is so important to me?" "What do I want?"

Both answers came within seconds.

"I am now well on my way to achieving what I desire to do," he says, "and recovering what I lost. And I haven't had a drink from that moment to this."

IN THE MAIL Monday an employee at Gibraltar Savings & Loan Association of Beverly Hills came upon an envelope containing $5,000 in $100 bills with no clue to the identity of the sender.

On Wednesday, a customer appeared, claimed the money and directed that it be deposited in a savings account.

He explained he'd been in an all-night poker game and had been filling full houses and inside straights like crazy. At the height of his run of luck he'd stepped outside, stuffed his winnings in an envelope and mailed it to Gibraltar, then returned to the game.

Will all gamblers who wish they'd done the same at one time or another please bow their heads in reverence to the man who did.

MISCELLANY -- Note on the bulletin board at the Valley Elementary District Board of Education office: "I pledge allegiance to the City of Los Angeles and to the smog under which it stands. One city, invisible, with eye drops and cough drops for all."

Cold case file--the Pied Piper

Tyler Marshall's Column One (known at The Times as a "nondupe) on the Pied Piper is one of my favorites. And since the presumed anniversary of the incident is in late June, it seemed like a good time to share the story with a new generation of readers. As it appeared in The Times, June 22, 1984:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Orchestra wives

 

June 28, 1957
Los Angeles

It's a tough life for orchestra wives. Consider the case of Joy Windsor, bandleader Charlie Barnet's 10th wife. In May, Barnet had assured her that his days of touring were over. "I was on the road a lot in the old days," he said. "One-night stands. The way a musician travels on the road is tired, dirty and drunk. Doesn't make for a good marriage."

"The band business has changed now. There's not much road any more.... You don't have those one-night stands."

Maybe the band business had changed, but Barnet hadn't. Windsor's complaints echoed those of his previous wife Betty Reilly, who said Barnet left her for days at a time and refused to tell her where he had been. 

In fact, Barnet had been married so often that even The Times lost count, calling Windsor Barnet's ninth wife in some stories and 10th wife in others.

The wives of Charlie Barnet, with his comments, as listed in 1955:

1. A showgirl--It lasted about eight months.
   
2. A singer--Artie Shaw was the best man. "We had a horrible fight after the ceremony and she went her way and I went mine."
   
3. A showgirl--Her divorce wasn't final, so the marriage was annulled.   
4. A singer--"It lasted a couple of years."
   
5. An actress. "She was my favorite. We were married about six years."
6. "Just a plain li'l ol' gal. It only lasted a week."
7. A singer--"A couple of years."
8. An artist--"My divorce from No. 7 wasn't final, so that one was annulled too." 
    

Among Barnet's wives are:

• Rita Merritt (1947), probably wife No. 5.
  
• Harriet C. Barnet
• Betty Reilly (1953)
• Linda Joyce Johnson (1956)
• Joy Windsor (1957)

Wife No. 5 said in 1955: "Sorry I married him? Not a bit. If I marry again, I'd like to marry a fellow exactly like Charlie. He's a fascinating man and certainly not a bore.  In fact you never knew what was going to happen next. But being a musician he was on the road a lot and we really didn't get a chance to establish a home. It just wasn't conducive to a good marriage."

Bonus fact: In researching Charlie Barnet, I stumbled across the sad story of vocalist Ann Richards, who married bandleader Stan Kenton in 1955. She won the Downbeat poll as the No. 1 band vocalist in 1956, but left her career to be a mother, rejoining the band in 1961. After divorcing Kenton, Richards married William Botts, although she later separated from him. It was Botts who discovered her body in the bedroom of her Hollywood Hills home in 1981. Unable to find work after she ended a 10-year engagement at the Bel-Air Hotel, Richards shot herself in the head, leaving two children, Dana and Lance Kenton. Richards was 46.

(You may recall Lance Kenton was arrested in 1978 in a scheme to kill attorney Paul Morantz, who won a lawsuit against Synanon, by putting a rattlesnake in his mailbox).

Here's some Charlie Barnet.

And some Stan Kenton.

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They said it

June 27, 1957
Los Angeles

"The Lord made distinctions between the races in the beginning of time. This idea of amalgamation of races and one world and all that is of the devil."

J.H. Seal, chairman of the board of trustees, Normandie Avenue Methodist Church, explaining why all the white members of the congregation were leaving to protest the appointment of an African American minister.

Nope, this was not the deep South. This was L.A.

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Sports Arena

 

June 27, 1957
Los Angeles

Here's one plan that was actually built: The Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. Designed by the firm of Welton Becket, the arena was intended to be a 19,000-seat facility built for $5.7 million ($40,842,117.48 USD 2006).

"This is the greatest challenge my office has ever had," said Becket, whose firm designed the Capitol Records Tower, the Theme Building at LAX and the Cinerama Dome. "Although the plans exceed the limits in every case that was given to us, we still would have presented this same plan if we $11,000,000 to work with," he said.

The arena was opened by Vice President Richard Nixon on the Fourth of July, 1959. It hosted the Lakers (1960-1967), Clippers (1984-1999) and USC basketball (1959-2006) and was the site of the 1960 Democratic National Convention.

The arena is featured in the exhibit "Housing the Spectacle."

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Smog alert

 

June 27, 1957
Los Angeles

Everybody knows that Los Angeles suffered terrible smog in the 1950s, but without statistics, all we have are stories and photos of toxic clouds obscuring the landscape.

In fact, for the unfortunate people living in Los Angeles in 1957, what was deemed a Stage 1 alert (0.5 parts per million of ozone) would be a Stage 3 alert today. (In a Stage 2 or Stage 3 alert today, all non-emergency driving is discouraged and schoolchildren are banned from outdoor activities).

Now for the really ghastly facts: In 1957, a Stage 2 alert was 1 ppm and a Stage 3 alert was 1.5 ppm. The Mirror notes that  no Stage 2 or 3 alerts had ever been issued, but that in a Stage 3 alert, the governor was authorized to declare a state of emergency.

One of the most polluted days in Los Angeles history was Sept. 13, 1955, when the city reached 0.9 ppm of ozone in Vernon and 0.85 ppm downtown.

Dr. Clarence Mills of the University of Cincinnati said: "The Los Angeles situation is so severe and so fraught with health dangers that any pollution control program should be put on compulsory basis." Mills urged that a Stage 1 alert be issued at 0.2 ppm, which is, in fact, the current level. Using that figure, Los Angeles had four Stage 1 alerts in the first six months of 1957.

When someone told Mills that his lower figure would have Los Angeles County at a Stage 1 alert for most of the year, he replied: "That's the way it should be."

The California Air Resources Board link is here.

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In Rome

June 26, 1957
Los Angeles

The late Art Buchwald always struck me as one of the least amusing humor columnists America has ever produced. But as this piece shows, he was a pretty fair writer when he wasn't trying to be funny.

Boxer dies

June 26, 1957
Los Angeles

I'm pleased to present the work of John Hall, a columnist for the Mirror, The Times and the Orange County Register. In this piece, he recalls the late boxer "Mexican" Joe Rivers and his fight with Ad Wolgast. (Note that Wolgast is in the International Boxing Hall of Fame and Rivers isn't.)