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.
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.
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."
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:
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:
A showgirl--It lasted about eight months.
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."
A showgirl--Her divorce wasn't final, so the marriage was annulled.
A singer--"It lasted a couple of years."
An actress. "She was my favorite. We were married about six years."
"Just a plain li'l ol' gal. It only lasted a week."
A singer--"A couple of years."
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).
"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.
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.
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 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.
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.)
The lawyer drove up to the cabin in Tick Canyon, north of
Saugus, in his Cadillac. He should have been home in Beverly Hills by
now, but he phoned his wife, Mary, that he was having dinner with a
client.
He parked the Cadillac next to the cabin and left his jaunty straw
"boater" hat in the back seat. Maybe he sat in one of the chairs next to the pool for a while--perhaps all night. Then he put his glasses under the chair, took off his coat, with $109 in loose
bills in the pocket, and laid it on the chair, along with his white
shirt and tie, and a folder containing his identification cards.
Then he tied one end of a rope around his neck, threaded
the other end through two concrete blocks and jumped into the deep end
of the pool. That's where he was found by 17-year-old Bob Nelson, a
neighbor who had been hired to do some chores around the cabin.
Sammy "S.S." Hahn, 68, a Russian immigrant, is an obscure figure today,
but at the time of his death, he was a well-known attorney who handled
some of the most famous clients in Los Angeles, including Aimee Semple
McPherson and murderess Louise Peete, one of only three women to be
executed in California. A graduate of USC's law school, Hahn was
originally known for his defense work in high-profile criminal cases
but later specialized in divorces.
He earned his nickname, "The Corporal," during a sharp courtroom
exchange with Col. William H. Neblett, who protested when Hahn
continually referred to him as "Mr. Neblett" instead of "Col. Neblett."
"Your honor, Hahn said, "if my opponent insists on his military rank,
so shall I. Henceforth, I respectfully request that I be addressed as
Cpl. Hahn."
Hahn's apparent suicide puzzled his many friends and devastated his
wife, Mary, whom he married in September 1954. Hahn's wife of 36 years,
Teresa, had died in May 1954. Some people speculated that Hahn's death
was not a suicide, especially because he left no note, but medical
examiner Dr. Gerald K. Ridge found that his death was an uncomplicated
case of asphyxiation.
Mourners attending his funeral at Forest Lawn in Glendale, conducted by
Rabbi Samson Levey, included attorney Jerry Giesler and Judges
Thurmond Clark, Henry Draeger, Larry Doyle and Mark Brandler.
Pallbearers were members of American Legion Post 253 of Beverly Hills.
I remember well the Paul Coates program on TV,
Channel 11, when it was owned by The Times. Never understood anything he was
talking about when he was on, but I remember the stark blackness of the set
behind him.
I was born on a rainy February morning in 1950 in
old Methodist Hospital downtown, on the 50th anniversary of Adlai Stevenson's
birth, also in LA. Throughout the '50s, 60s and 70s, lived in Hermosa Beach,
Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, Torrance (I walked to kindergarten and 1st grade
on a dirt road bordered by tall eucalyptus and pastureland where we kids would
slip thru the barbed wire fence to taunt the bulls hanging with the cows---yes,
Torrance, CA 1955-57), Buena Park, La Sierra, Riverside, West Covina, Upland,
Palm Springs, Panorama City, Simi Valley, Westwood (UCLA, History, 1972), then
lit out for literally greener pastures in the late '70s to New England, Mass, NH
and Vt, where I live now. I visit L.A. occasionally, see no difference in the
traffic flow (I always knew what time of day to take certain roads to zip thru
traffic) and much less smog today---and the place looks cleaner, shinier
even, and always try to coincide my trips with a game or two at Dodger
Stadium.
What prompted me to write is your story on the
dismantlement of the backyard incinerators. I remember very clearly this first
step in smog reduction. As a 7 yr old in '57 i paid little attention to smog,
other than how it stung and made my eyes water, and remember the haste with
which my dad went from getting a notice some official was coming to inspect the
fact the incinerator in the backyard would be no more. This would be in Buena
Park, where from the summer of '57 to '61 i enjoyed, no, deeply fondly loved the
best 4 years of my childhood, as my friends and I would play with the horney
toads which populated the looong-gone orange groves a couple of blocks away, and
every Saturday morning I would walk to Knott's Berry Farm, when entrance was
free and it was a quiet, wonderfully smelling place, of eucalyptus (again) and
boysenberry, to stroll around in the ersatz-but-real Huck Finn environment, and
jump the tracks and dodge the old steam train as it would chug by.
Anyway, I remember my dad burning stuff, paper and
dry tree limbs, in the little cement incinerator for the last time before the
official came to verify the thing was laid flat, the four sides of the object
left lying where it stayed for years, and the talk that this would reduce the
smog. It did, but little did we know the magnitude of the problem from
cars.
Nothing exciting, really, just another fond
little memory you piqued from my childhood. ~ Craig Hill / Montpelier
Vt
Aha! EBay has another envelope addressed to A. Victor Segno of the Segno Success Club, 701 N. Belmont.
Segno, author of such books as "The Law of Mentalism," "How to Be Happy Though Married" and "How to Have Beautiful Hair," was a mentalist with a simple scam: For a $1 a month, he would send out a mental "success wave" twice a day. And it was quite successful--for him. In a few years, he was able to build an elaborate center in Echo Park (now demolished, apparently).
The Power of Thought by A. Victor Segno
"I hold it true that thoughts are things Endowed with bodies, breath and wings, And that we send them forth to fill The world with good results--or ill.
That which we call our secret thought, Speeds to the earth's remotest spot, And leaves its blessings or its woes, Like tracks behind it as it goes."
"We awaken in another Just the thoughts our minds contain. If we're kind, we win their kindness, If we hate, they hate again.
We pass on to brother mortals The vibrations of the soul, And the knowing ones receive them, As they search from pole to pole."
"We build our futures thought by thought, Or good or bad, and know it not-- Yet so the universe is wrought.
Thought is another name for Fate, Choose, then, thy destiny and wait-- For love brings love and hate brings hate."
--The Law of Mentalism, A. Victor Segno, Los Angeles, Calif., 1902
A 50-foot tower of flames fed by 7,000 gallons of pressurized liquid
propane being transferred from a truck to a storage tank was snuffed by
a 28-year-old man who said it was no big deal.
Gerald D. Potter, a heating fuel executive living at 14847 Lassen, may
have saved a block of businesses at Sepulveda and Oxnard boulevards, as
well as untold lives, but he said: "It would have burned out after
a while anyway."
Potter heard news reports of the blaze on the radio and drove to the
American Butane Co. storage yard, 5919 Sepulveda Blvd. As firefighters
provided a protective cover of spray, Potter turned a total of 10
valves on the tanker truck and in the storage yard to quench the
flames.
The only reported injury was second-degree burns suffered by firefighter Paul B. Ruddick of Engine Co. 39 when he shut off another valve.
Note: The original estimate of 15,000 gallons of propane was later reduced to 7,000 gallons.
SUBJECT'S NAME: Delbert Wilson Miller. SUBJECT'S DESCRIPTION: Age, 60.
Height, 5 feet, 10 inches. Weight, 155 pounds. Bald, rim of gray hair.
Glass right eye. Tattoo: "IRMA-DELL" upper right arm. Tattoo of
swastika on left forearm.
Any person with information as to subject's whereabouts is requested to
contact Sgt. Ketcherside, Missing Persons Section, Los Angeles Police
Department.
Large cities have swallowed up persons before.
But never has a metropolis done a job more thoroughly than it did with Delbert Miller.
Fact and circumstance make his disappearance a near impossibility.
Yet, he's gone.
And no one, in six months of thorough search, has even a hint as to where or why.
Miller is a blind man. He never left his room at the St. Regis Apartments, 237 S. Flower St., without a friend to guide him.
Yet, on Jan. 17, he walked out alone. And vanished.
I talked last week with Miller's daughter-in-law, Mrs. LaJune Miller of 2963 Partridge Ave.
She told me many things about the missing subject: his habits, his disposition, his dependency on others.
Which might offer a clue as to his whereabouts. I don't know.
Miller, his daughter-in-law told me, was an independent sort of man.
But age had mellowed his quick temper. And blindness had limited his
activities.
"My husband and I tried several times to get him to live with us," she
said. "But he'd always go back to Flower St. That's where all his old
cronies were."
Sometimes, she said, he'd stay with them for a month or so, but always,
with a firm, "I'm just in your road here," he'd return downtown.
And have dinner with his son and daughter once or twice a week.
Mrs. Miller and her husband carefully traced the final known movements of the missing man. So did the police.
It was learned that he left his room on the morning of Jan. 17 to shop at Grand Central Market with a friend.
The friend later reported that he returned as far as the Third Street
tunnel with Miller. Then Miller said he could find his way alone and
they parted.
But Miller reached his room. He put his groceries on the table, stepped out, locked the door, and was never again seen.
The rotting groceries and meat were found a few days later.
"It was like he was planning on coming right back," said Mrs. Miller.
She and her husband spent the next six weeks in the neighborhood.
"We'd drive over in the early evening. Sometimes we'd knock on doors,
asking questions. Sometimes we'd approach strangers on the street.
They'd look at us like we were crackpots.
"And sometimes, around midnight, we'd drive home and no sooner would we get there than my husband would say to me:
" 'Let's go back. Maybe he'll be there.'
"And we'd go back and look and wait some more--until 2 or 3 in the morning."
Meanwhile, the police continued a thorough investigation.
They checked relatives, hospitals, hotels, mental hygiene clinics, the
FBI. They, too, quizzed neighbors. They distributed circulars and
placed his fingerprints on FBI file.
Mrs. Miller found one possible clue--but so far it's done no good.
"The landlady told me," she said, "that a stranger came asking for my father-in-law just three days before he disappeared.
"He was a tall, slender gentleman, well dressed and in his 40s."
I asked her about the swastika tattoo on Miller's arm.
"Oh, he was so ashamed of it. He'd had it for years--long before
Hitler--and he used to talk quite often about having it removed.
"Just because of it, he'd always wear long-sleeved shirts."
Before we finished our conversation Mrs. Miller admitted, hesitantly,
that in desperation she had gone to a fortuneteller for help.
"I don't believe in them, but I had no place else to go."
"What," I asked, "did the fortuneteller say?"
"That we'd hear from him very soon," she answered.
Police Capt. Walter R. Koenig was out walking his dog in the 5500 block of Green Oak Drive, where it dead ends in the Hollywood Hills, when he found Baby Boy Doe.
He was 1 to 3 months old, and someone had wrapped him in blankets and
put him in a cardboard box. An animal discovered Baby Boy Doe and
dragged him out. "Police said the baby's legs are missing and one
appears to have been cleanly severed with a sharp instrument," the
Mirror said. He had been dead three or four days.
Koenig told investigators he had seen a young couple in the area a week
earlier. When he questioned them about what they were doing, the man
asked for directions and they left, Koenig said.
Rest in peace, Baby Boy Doe.
Koenig joined the LAPD in 1938, a watershed year in Los Angles
politics because it marked the recall of Mayor Frank Shaw and the
reform administration of Fletcher Bowron.
In 1964, he became the police chief in
Torrance. In 1969, shortly before reaching retirement age, Koenig accepted a teaching job at Georgia State
University.
In an extremely rare honor for a police officer, the American Civil
Liberties Union paid tribute to Koenig with its Courage of Conviction
award. "As chief of police, Koenig, while enforcing the law firmly and
fairly, always displayed an awareness of the rights of the individual
as embodied in the Constitution," the ACLU said.
Larry Harnisch. The leading Black Dahlia expert and a collaborator in the 1947project, Harnisch has been a copy editor at The Times since 1988. He has appeared on many TV shows discussing the Dahlia case, notably "James Ellroy's Feast of Death."
Join him for a spin through old Los Angeles in the Mirror's radio car. Keep your eyes open for Mickey Cohen and Tempest Storm. It's quite a ride.
The reporter's badge belonged to Sid Hughes (1908-1958), legendary reporter who worked at nearly every newspaper in Los Angeles.
Keith Thursby. Keith has been an editor at The Times in news, sports and design since 1986. The Rams moved to St. Louis on his first day as assistant sports editor of the paper's Orange County edition. He grew up in Norwalk and lives in Irvine.
Larry Harnisch. The leading Black Dahlia expert and a collaborator in the 1947project, Harnisch has been a copy editor at The Times since 1988. He has appeared on many TV shows discussing the Dahlia case, notably "James Ellroy's Feast of Death."
Join him for a spin through old Los Angeles in the Mirror's radio car. Keep your eyes open for Mickey Cohen and Tempest Storm. It's quite a ride.
The reporter's badge belonged to Sid Hughes (1908-1958), legendary reporter who worked at nearly every newspaper in Los Angeles.
Keith Thursby. Keith has been an editor at The Times in news, sports and design since 1986. The Rams moved to St. Louis on his first day as assistant sports editor of the paper's Orange County edition. He grew up in Norwalk and lives in Irvine.