Deal Me a Card, HAL

April 7, 1957
Los Angeles

By Larry Harnisch

In a gathering for newsmen, Caltech staged a demonstration of its "electronic brains." Charles Ray showed off the Royal Precision Electronic Computer LGP-30, a 740-pound "desk computer" with 113 vacuum tubes and 1,350 diodes.

Reporters also saw the enormous direct electric analogy computer, which was being used to simulate a DC-8 jetliner.  

But the star of the show, as displayed by Joel Franklin, was a ElectroData Datatron 205, which, like the LGP-30, had been programmed to play games, in this case, blackjack.

After running through the calculations for a nuclear reactor, Datatron asked: "How many suckers--I mean players?" "The machine dealt four hands by marking the names of the cards down on its typewriter," The Times said. To help the humans determine whether they should ask for another card to fill out their 21, Datatron politely--and without being asked--told them their chances of drawing a card and not going over 21."

Like the serious student who becomes a handsome movie star by removing his horn-rim glasses, the Datatron computers found real fame not by their work in the Boston Navy Yard or a drab insurance office in Minnesota, but on TV and in films.

The Bat Computer? A Datatron. "Lost in Space?" A Datatron. "Angry Red Planet?" "Fantastic Voyage?" "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes?" All the Datatron. And don't even ask about "Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine."

Vincent Price, as Dr. Goldfoot, with tape drives from the Datatron, later renamed the Burroughs 205.

One of the Datatron's latest screen appearances? Some of the tape drives turned up in "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me."

Read about Caltech's Computer Center here.
Here's the manual, in case you have a B205 in the garage.
And here's the handbook.
Thanks to Burroughs 205 website for some of this information.
ps. I dropped a note to Joel Franklin at Caltech to see if he'd like to share some recollections of the Datatron. I'll let you know what he has to say.
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Silk-Stocking Slayer

April 6, 1957
Los Angeles

By Larry Harnisch

Ruth Newgarden Goldsmith, 52, a New York fashion designer, had been dead about 12 hours when she was found after 3:30 p.m. by two maids in a $25-a week room at the Hollywood Algiers Hotel, 445 N. Rossmore Ave. on the edge of the Wilshire Country Club.

Goldsmith, a widow who gave her address as 15 Christopher St., New York, N.Y., had checked into the Algiers a month earlier. According to police, she made frequent business trips to Los Angeles, selling belts out of her hotel room. Her hands were tied with a silk stocking and she apparently suffocated on a washcloth forced into her mouth and held in place with another silk stocking.

The Hotel Algiers, formerly the Casablanca and the Country Club Hotel

There were traces of cold cream on her face, leading authorities to believe she was getting ready for bed when she was killed. Her light green negligee was "disarranged," but there were no outward signs of a "criminal attack," The Times' delicate term for a brutal crime. The only sign of a struggle was shoe prints on the rumpled bed, Detective James Close said.

Investigators found that her wallet was empty and although acquaintances at the hotel said she had expensive-looking jewelry, nothing was found in a search of her room. Her bank books showed that she sometimes withdrew as much as $2,000 ($14,330.57 USD 2006). Police said she had frequent business callers and kept a display of belts in her room.

Marine Pvt. Brad Arnold and his father, Charles, who had a room a few doors down, said Goldsmith was a quiet woman of excellent character.  In an interview, Charles Arnold said Goldsmith was trusting and "took everyone at face value. If someone came to her door she would have let them in." He added, "She had no enemies and lived very quietly. She usually went to the movies by herself."

Her only apparent survivor was a son named Walter, described as a Korean war veteran who was studying law at New York University.

The Internet can tell us a few more things about Goldsmith. She was born Dec. 28, 1904, her father's last name was Newgarden and her mother's maiden name was Schwartzenberg. The New York Times appears to list an engagement announcement of Walter George Goldsmith and Ruth Newgarden, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Albert Newgarden, 151 W. 86th St., on Oct. 4 and Oct. 11, 1925. The New York Times also shows a company called Coordinated Accessories of 15 Christopher dealing in belts and accessories declaring bankruptcy in May 1957 under the name Benjamin Weintraub.

A little more digging shows that Albert Newgarden had a brother George J. Newgarden, whose obituary appeared in the New York Times on June 5, 1931. According to World War I draft records, a man named Walter George Goldsmith lived in Essex, N.J., but it's unclear if was her husband.

All right, armchair sleuths, there's a real unsolved case from the archives with everything available from the initial reports in The Times and the Mirror.

Maybe it's just me, but something doesn't add up here. We have a quiet, well-behaved woman of excellent character who goes to movies by herself and yet has an extraordinary number of business clients who visit her hotel room ostensibly to buy her custom-designed belts. I would suspect something else, but according to the bankruptcy filing, there was a belt company at the address she gave.

One curious note: In 1950, a judge ruling in a case brought over alterations done without the proper permits said the Algiers looked like "a glorified quickie motel."

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Twice Burned

April 5, 1957
Los Angeles

By Larry Harnisch

They were a six-pack of juiceheads, daddy-o. Human-torched by lowlifes that wildfired the imagination of young, L.A. bike-roaming James Ellroy, demon dogging the pulp novel city in type-O scarlet and memory napalm.

   

Six juiceheads: That's how they're cast in our film noir tale about one of the biggest Los Angeles crimes of the 1950s. But it's not that easy. History never is.

At 20 minutes to midnight, four men who had been thrown out of the Club Mecca, 5841 S. Normandie Ave., came back with an old five-gallon paint can full of gasoline. One of them, an ex-convict, threw the gas into the bar like a cleaning lady pouring out her mop bucket; another, a delivery driver for a bindery,  lit a matchbook and tossed it onto the gas-soaked carpet. The small neighborhood bar, 25 feet square packed with 21 people, exploded in flames.

Firefighters found one victim still sitting on a bar stool, so badly burned it was days before he was positively identified. Four other men and one woman died, and the rest survived, one of them with severe burns.  At the time, police called it the biggest mass murder in Los Angeles history.

Detectives found one of the killers, Clyde Bates, 36, and his companion, Oscar Brenhaug, 44, sleeping off a drunk in a blue Plymouth sedan parked in the driveway of Bates’ home at 1623 S. Menlo Ave. Investigators eventually arrested the other two men, Manuel Joseph Hernandez, 18, and Manuel Joseph Chavez, 25.

Of course, they all had alibis. Chavez said he went home from the bar and didn't know anything about the fire until he read about it in the papers. Bates and Brenhaug said they were at another cocktail lounge until it closed at 2 a.m. Hernandez said he couldn't get served because he was underage. Otherwise, he couldn't remember what happened.

Joyce Chapdelaine, 22, a Mecca waitress, said she danced with Bates briefly while Hermina Morales, 28, danced with one of the other killers. The men became abusive and after a brawl with two bar employees and a customer, three of the suspects were thrown out. In the brand of logic known only to drunks, they returned to the bar to insist that a fourth companion also be thrown out and bartender Larry Fenton complied. 

The men went to a Union Oil station at 5720 S. Vermont Ave., filled an old, dirty bucket with gas, then returned to the club. Bates pitched $1.43 worth of high-octane revenge into the bar and Chavez lit the matchbook.

“I was sitting on the third stool near the door,” Joseph James Marriott said, “when I felt something hit my pant leg and run down into my shoes. I thought it was a friend playing a joke—squirting me with a hose.   

“My leg and shoe were saturated. I turned and saw the guy striking the match. It was a book of paper matches and he struck the match two or three times. That’s all I remember—I had troubles of my own after that.”

So who were Ellroy's juiceheads?

•   Gilbert J. Gonzalez, 20, an apprentice cook at the Scandia restaurant in North Hollywood. "He didn't go in for heavy drinking," his sister Helen Brahim said. "He just liked to drop in and chew the fat with a few of his friends."

• Jose Maytorena, 20, a San Pedro market checker whose burned body was found sitting on a bar stool. His father, Angel Luis Vallejo, warned the suspects at the 77th Division station: “All I can say is you guys better not get out on bail.”

• Jacqueline Agnes MacInnes, 21, who had just arrived with Barbara Spinelli, a secretary at a nearby plating company. MacInnes had been babysitting for Morales, her roommate, who went home before the fire started. Spinelli, a divorcee with two young children, had been dating Fenton, the bartender, and was returning his car. MacInnes, who was waiting for her fiancee, Chuck Westbury,  to get off work at another bar, died en route to the hospital; Spinelli survived but was burned on her hands, face and legs.

• Anthony M. “Tony” Smaldino, 27, an assistant pressman, Korean War veteran and former Golden Gloves contender.

•    Phillip E. Crawshaw, 28, described by friends as "a very quiet, a very likable boy."

• Harry Leslie Robinson, 64, who liked to putter in the yard. Robinson and his ex-wife had been divorced for many years and each lived with one of their children. One of them would spend a month with their daughter in Pico Rivera while the other stayed with their son Alfred at 3704 Hillcrest Drive. "He avoided fights," his daughter said. "He was a quiet man who liked to sit around and talk in the bar. It was nice and friendly for him."

  Crawshaw's services were held in Seattle and Robinson was buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery. Gonzalez and Maytorena received Requiem Masses at St. Vincent's Catholic Church and were to be buried next to one another at Calvary Cemetery. MacInnes' Requiem was held at Nativity Catholic Church and she was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery, The Mirror said. After rites at St. Brigid's Catholic Church, about 300 people attended Smaldino's burial at Calvary Cemetery, with several of them surging forward to restrain his mother as she threw herself on his casket.

Now for the lowlifes.

Claiming that he was too drunk to have helped plan the bombing,    Brenhaug turned state’s evidence and the case against him was dismissed for lack of evidence. Hernandez was sentenced to life in prison and vanished from the pages of The Times a few years later.

Bates and Chavez were sentenced to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin, and in 1960, they got into a Death Row brawl with Red Light Bandit Caryl Chessman and convicted killer James Merkouris over watching the Rose Bowl on TV. But in 1966, Gov. Pat Brown commuted their sentences, giving Chavez life in prison and Bates life without the possibility of parole.

In 1972, the state Supreme Court scrapped the death penalty, further reducing Bates' sentence to life in prison. A final Times story says Bates was scheduled to be paroled in March 1977. Chavez had already been freed and was working in Sacramento as a counselor for ex-offenders.

A year after the fire, Spinelli and Fenton were married. In 1959, she and the survivors of several victims won a lawsuit against Union Oil and the men who sold the gasoline to the killers, but it was overturned on appeal. Times reporter Gene Blake, writing a postscript in 1976, noted that he was unable to locate Barbara Fenton, but quoted her reaction to Brown's clemency ruling: "I really feel that they should have been given the death penalty."

Blake also noted that the Club Mecca had been torn down to make a parking lot for a liquor store--a liquor store that was a mile north of Florence and Normandie, the flashpoint of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when most of South-Central was in flames. Today, 5841 S. Normandie Ave. is nothing but a pockmarked concrete slab surrounded by a strong metal fence. The only thing left is a sign. Most of its letters are missing, but it looks as if it once said: "Lee's Liquor. Hamburgers."

There is no happy ending in this story, no stern-voiced narrator intoning the prison terms of the guilty as there was in "Dragnet." Six people died and the killers got out of prison. Memories fade, but as Barbara Fenton said: "I still have a few scars and I'm a little self-conscious about them. The scars will remain the rest of my life."

Woof, daddy-o.
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Sorry It Had to Happen This Way

April 4, 1957

Los Angeles

 

By Larry Harnisch

Sometime in the night, Robert Tunis Palmer, a 27-year-old meatpacker from Marysville, Ohio, sat on the steps of the church at 14^th and Union, finished his can of beer, put the muzzle of a .45 revolver to his forehead and pulled the trigger.

A neighbor who was walking his dog found Palmer at dawn, sprawled next to the Swedish Methodist Episcopal Church, 1575 W. 14^th St. There was a note beside the beer can: “I’m sorry it had to happen this way.”

 

At 5:30 that Thursday morning, Clara Barnes, the landlady at Palmer's apartment house next to the church, discovered a note pinned to the telephone in the hallway: “Please contact Mary at once. I’m sorry it had to happen this way.”   

 

There was another note to Barnes in Palmer’s room. Please send his service discharge papers and birth certificate to his mother back in Ohio. Have his TV set repossessed and give his alarm clock and “other possessions” to Mary. Since he went to the trouble to mention what he wanted done with his TV and alarm clock and said nothing about a car, I assume he didn’t have one.   

 

A .45 is not a delicate weapon, nor does it make a modest sound, but if anybody heard the gunshot, nobody called the police. I wonder if Mary was supposed to get his gun too. I wonder if anyone claimed the body or if he just lay there, waiting.   

 

Most of all I wonder whom he was addressing when he said he was sorry. And what was the “it” that had to happen? His suicide? All the loose ends that had to be tied up now that he was gone?   

 

On a bright, sunny Saturday 50 years later, I drove down to the little corner of Los Angeles to see where Robert Tunis Palmer, 27-year-old meatpacker from Ohio, sprayed his brains all over the concrete.   

14^th Street and Union is a block south of Pico, the heart of Mara Salvatrucha country in one of the poorest areas in Los Angeles. On my way, I got lost in one of the neighborhoods that’s closed off to the outside world—or at least the MS-13s.

 

 

Palmer’s apartment house, 1352 S. Union, is still in business, an off-white two-story building that looks like it’s from the 1920s. Back in the 1940s it was the Del Rio Hotel, DRexel-0342.

 

 

 

What was once the Swedish Methodist Episcopal Church, built in 1923, has become the Iglesia Evangelica Missionera. While I was taking pictures of the steps where Palmer killed himself, I met the minister, Pastor Rodolfo, who was picking up trash along 14^th Street.

 

 

 

Pastor Rodolfo is gentle man, with liquid eyes, a quiet voice and a soft handshake. Could I see inside the church? Of course. The congregation bought the building from the Methodists a few years ago, he says.   

 

He explains the red flag on the altar, with the star and crescent, by saying that the church sponsors a family of Salvadoran missionaries who are serving in Turkey. Because Turkey wants to join the European Union, they are open to Christianity, he says.   

 

When I comment on the beauty of the stained-glass window facing Union, Pastor Rodolfo voices an almost physical pain. He wants to get the window repaired because unbelievers in the neighborhood have thrown rocks through it. He had a phone number for someone who could fix the window but lost it.   

 

I reassure him that my church just had its windows repaired and I’ll find out the number so he can the work done. Please do, he says. When I finally get the information I struggle with calling him. I attend a wealthy church in Pasadena with an annual budget of nearly $5 million. I suspect it might cost more to fix the window than it does to send Iglesia Evangelista’s family of missionaries to Turkey.

 

 

Someone long ago and far wiser than I said suicide is permanent answer to a temporary problem. If Robert Tunis Palmer hadn’t pulled that trigger, he would be 77 now, maybe playing golf or heading to Laughlin in his RV. What was he looking for at the church that night? Sanctuary? Salvation? A place to pray? Or just a good spot to drink a beer and kill himself? And for the moment, I too am sorry it had to happen this way.

ps. I finally called the church with the phone number of Judson Studios, which specializes in repairing stained-glass windows. Pastor Rodolfo was busy so I left the information with someone. Then I wrote out a check, in memory of Robert Tunis Palmer, to Iglesia Evangelica Missionera, 1575 W. 14^th St., Los Angeles, 90015. It seemed like the least I could do.

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Ovation for Ollie

April 3, 1957

   

If you haven’t taken a look at the Civic Center scenery lately—and many longtime residents boast they haven’t been downtown for years—a surprise awaits you.

Except for the public buildings and a few others, it’s hardly there anymore.   

Where remembered buildings used to be, there are now great leveled places. Soon new structures will rise out of the debris. Already the handsome new County Courts Building has taken its place in the revised landscape at the northwest corner of 1^st and Hill.

All this brings us around to a letter George Smedley Smith, who has operated a modern apartment house at 2nd and Grand for 18 years, has written to Councilman Ed Roybal.

Smith, who by the way composes brilliant plays which get published, wrote: “During those long years of observation we have become aesthetically appreciative of the wayward and mystic passes, the eye rollings, knee bends, lamp-post leanings, the vague and occasional (sometimes stratospheric) swishes made by the street cleaners in the manipulations of the tool of their profession.”

He continued, “At the moment we are being kicked out of this location by the county, which has purchased this building. Before putting out the cat and the fire for the last time, we would like to record our appreciation of the contemporary street cleaner at the crown and apex of this old quarter. He has done more to keep the streets of this acropolis tidy in the last year or so than all the efforts of his predecessors lumped together.” 

 

Smith concluded, “Perhaps you would pause in your heavy schedule to point this letter to the proper authority in favor of a conscientious public servant, the contemporary street cleaner of Bunker Hill—Mr. Ottie Phine.” 

 

Let’s go all the way and declare Ottie Street Cleaner of the Week.

Note: The Daily Mirror is pleased to introduce a new generation of readers to Matt Weinstock (1903-1970), the author of "My L.A." and "Muscatel at Noon,"      and a columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News, the Mirror and The Times.