Paul Coates

Feb. 27, 1958

This is a story that never ends.

It started two years ago when a man in his early 20s came into my office. He had a problem: Heroin. He'd had it for three or four years.

He wanted to do something about it, he told me. Maybe he just wanted to talk about it--but at least to him that was something.

We talked, I remember. He told me about his wife and two kids. In return, I offered what encouragement, what stimulation I could. I think I mentioned a hospital or two.

And he left.

I never heard from him again--until, that is, last Monday. This time he phoned me. He said it was pretty important that I come to see him at his home. It was a story for me.

I said I'd try, and he told me it was very important. So I said I would.

And the following afternoon, I did. That was Tuesday.

His wife answered the door. She was blond and didn't look old enough to be the mother of the two girls--ages maybe 6 and 4--at her side. She invited me in.

It's OK," she called to her husband. He appeared from another room.

Switching a glass of orange juice from his right hand to his left, he shook hands with me.

"I didn't think you'd come," he said.

His wife ushered the two children out of the room and he and I sat down and talked.

He filled me in on the last couple of years.

"I took your advice," he said. "I went to Fort Worth. To the hospital."

He let me wait a minute before he continued.

"But--well. I got impatient. I split. I cut out."

The reason? He was worried about his wife and kids. He came back to town and started working. He was all right.

For a year he was, anyway. Then he fell back with the same bad crowd and the same bad habit.

As we talked, my friend cast repeated glances at the window. Twice, in the period of half an hour, he asked me to step to the back of the house.

Both times, his wife went to the door and said no, her husband wasn't home.

"Those hypes," he growled. "They never quit. They come by like it's a parde.

"Hypes," he said, disdainfully.

Then he explained. He said he'd kicked it this time, on his own. This, he told me, was the eighth day.

He waved a fresh glass of orange juice at me. "Today's the first day I've been able to keep it down."

I asked him if that was why he'd called me, why he wanted me to come over.

"That's part of it," he said. "The other part's the reason why I kicked." He led me to a bedroom and showed me a baby, maybe 3, 4 weeks old.

"A boy this time," he said. "He needs a man for a father."

We talked for a while longer and I asked about the men who had come to the door. "How come you didn't talk to them?"

"Not yet," he told me. "Maybe in two months, a month. Then I'll walk right by them on the street and I won't bat an eye."

I was invited for dinner, but I said I had to leave. I wished them both a lot of luck. I told them to keep in touch.

And I figured, I suppose, that maybe I'd hear from them in a couple more years.

But I was wrong.

My friend phoned again yesterday. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm real sorry. I goofed."

"What happened?" I asked.

"I answered the door."

[Note: The Daily Mirror mourns the passing of Vivian Sheehan, speech therapist who worked with Paul Coates after his 1966 stroke].

       

William F. Buckley, RIP

May 6, 1962

Aug. 19, 1963

Dec. 2, 1963




  Jan. 1, 1965

June 19, 1967

Jan. 8, 1969

 

Dec. 12, 1969

 

Feb. 27, 1958

A wayward blimp ... A "short, swarthy man" and his partner menace a Pasadena matron (and no, The Times never followed up on this story) ... Nixon knows what to do if something happens to Ike ...

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Raymond bombing

Feb. 27, 1938
Los Angeles

It's Sunday in Los Angeles, time for the funnies, like "Smokey Stover," one of the most eccentric American comic strips.  Above, Crenshaw Boulevard and Vernon Avenue. Today, we would probably call this area Leimert Park ...  Below, an event that reminds me of the Raymond Chandler line about "standing out like spats at the Iowa Picnic" ... and Earle Kynette remains in jail in the Harry Raymond bombing. On the jump, meter readers in Chinatown.

Feb. 27, 1908

An interesting slice of life in Los Angeles a century ago: If you have ever seen old pictures of downtown you know the significance of the story about removing excess utility poles. The streetscapes in the old days were a tangle of overhead wires ... The toxic effect of fake jewelry ... A doctor uses fright in an attempt to awaken Beulah Hawkins, the unfortunate comatose woman at county hospital ... An actor getting off a streetcar at 4th and Hill falls over a pile of dirt and is hit by another streetcar. But the show goes on ... More than $1 million in scrip, used "in lieu of cash during the dull days" is incinerated.

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Matt Weinstock

Feb. 26, 1958

After a hard day at the office, two fellows named Bob and Mike like to drop into a Hill Street dive for a cooling draught, to brood, to contemplate the infinite or merely to read THE evening paper, which they prop up conveniently against the beer taps.

But several times lately they've found their favorite stools occupied by sturdy customers who, they instantly decided, it would be unwise to try to evict.

So Bob, who has access to such things, had two place cards printed stating these stools were reserved in their names.

BARKEEPS Joe, Johnny, Luigi and Ray have cooperated in this little enthusiasm. When Bob and Mike enter, they roust the peasantry from these reserved stools.

However, the genial prop. of the joint, Uncle Abe, has confided that while he is not averse to their project, he has a certain apprehension about the implications. Of course, he puts it another way.

He points out that his trade represents a specialized economic niche in Hill Street cafe society and he doesn't want the customers to get the idea that the Rainbow has become a kind of Romanoff's Downtown.

Next thing, he fears, the unshaven horde to which he caters may demand vintage muscatel.

For the moment, however, Bob and Mike are sitting pretty.

ONE OF THE delights of bored Civic Center workers is encountering young couples who get lost while seeking the marriage license bureau in the Hall of Records. They are uniformly shy and embarrassed.

One such bewildered couple came into an office in City Hall, the wrong building, and a girl employee heard the bride-to-be whisper to the young man, "Go ahead, ask her."

He came up to the counter and said, "That girl behind me wants to know where to get a marriage license."

FOR RESOLUTE action in the face of adversity, the Henpecked Husbands Society, an underground organization, has nominated an Irwindale man for president.

This man's phone bill for December and January totaled $94, the result of his wife's chit-chatting with old friends back East.

Did he sigh and pay up? Did he start a futile argument? No. He firmly ordered the phone yanked out. That was three weeks ago and it's still out. A fanfare, please.

SEMANTIC NOTE -- Dr. H.W. Magoun, anatomy prof at UCLA Medical School, has received a distinguished achievement award from the journal Modern Medicine, states a press release, "for studies in neurological science leading to the appreciation of the clinical importance of basic advances."

And this, obviously, is not something that happens every day.

ONLY IN BEL-AIR -- A householder asked his neighbor if he could park his 1958 Cadillac in the neighbor's garage for a while. A landscape man was coming over to give an estimate on some work, he explained, and he didn't want the fellow to think he was "that rich."

MISCELLANY -- Every time Don Messick passes the sign on Riverside Drive between Glendale and Burbank stating "Litter Laws Strictly Enforced" he gets the feeling it has something to do with restricting the dog population ... Vivian, 7, a second-grader, came home from school and proudly advised her father she'd learned all about the "terrified" forest ... Post-flood meditation by Bill Eberline: A fortune awaits the person who devises cork hubcaps for small foreign cars--to ride out the deep water. With oars, of course ... An exhibitor at the Hi-Fi Show at the Biltmore defines a dedicated audio fan as one who insists on reproduction of low notes he can't hear but only feels and of high notes he can't hear but only hopes are there.

       

Paul Coates

Feb. 26, 1958

The ghouls never die. Not in L.A., they don't.

They fade away, lay low, sometimes. But always they come back--with new schemes as fantastic as they are sadistic.

They dedicate their lives to devising profitable little plots to salt the open wounds of individuals hit by gross tragedy. They specialize in operations which permit them to turn a fast buck and get their unnatural kicks at the same time.

In the past, I've mentioned a few of their abnormal games.

A couple of Christmases ago, there was the flourishing group which dealt in names taken from local obituary columns.

They visited the dead parties' next of kin to "deliver" a Bible which--they told the grieving relative--had been ordered by the deceased.

With solemn irreverence, they explained:

"He ordered it for you. He even asked that your name be engraved on it. In gold."

The ghoul would then open the book and show the victim his or her name. In gold.

"I'm sorry," he would continue, "but it hasn't been paid for yet. Of course, if you don't want it, if you don't want to abide by your loved one's final wish--"

It would almost be sacrilege to say no, even if the price was exorbitant. Which it usually was.

This pleasant little game is revived periodically.

And so are some others.

There's the professional "blesser," who searches out homes where there is serious illness. She blesses the clothing, the curtains, the bed, the silverware--and, of course, the money.

And too frequently, after she's left, the victims open the handkerchief or holy cloth in which she blessed the money and valuables only to find that some of them left with her.

There are the witchdoctors and the cancer quacks who accept your money in exchange for voodoo and sugar pills. And watch you die slowly and painfully.

And then there are those who "contact" you after you're dead, and pass along spirit messages to your kin advising them to invest in phantom gold mines.

These people are ghouls.

But yesterday a man in our town went all of them one better.

With no hope of profit, no plausible chance for personal gain, he elected to telephone Mrs. Mary Bowman that he and his "partner" had Tommy and that the boy was alive and well.

Since the boy's disappearance in the foothills above Pasadena, the Bowmans have never given up the hope that their son is living and will someday be returned.

So naturally the child's mother was willing to listen to anything, to anybody.

The caller instructed her to stand outside and wait.

She did. It was raining, but she stood there for quite a while.

"Maybe it wasn't long," she told me afterward, "but just thinking that maybe, possibly, Tommy would come back to us made it seem like hours."

Finally, she gave up the vigil, stepped back into the house and called the police.

Unwillingly, she admitted to herself that Tommy was no closer to home this week than he was last week or the week before. She simply had been the victim of an evil hoax.

It's hard for me to believe that anyone could have a mind so degenerated, so deranged that he could get his pleasures by heaping additional torture into the already tortured life of Mrs. Bowman.

But there is somebody like that.

He's sick, I suppose.

But that kind of sickness turns my stomach inside-out.

       

An urge to kill

Feb. 26, 1958
Stanford

Thomas was handsome, clean-cut, 19-year-old sophomore on the tennis team at Stanford, where his father had gone to college and was a prominent alumnus.

He lived at 248 Edlee Ave., across the street from Mr. and Mrs. John E. Bonn and their only child, Deena, 17. She was an attractive young woman and the faculty at the Cubberly School in Palo Alto described her as "one of the finest young ladies we've had here."

But despite the wholesome face he presented to the world, Thomas was deeply troubled by the dark and unexplainable urge to kill, a desire that became stronger every day.

And so he planned the killing carefully: He would find a girl and lure her into his new 1957 convertible. Once in the car, he would kill her, take her into the Stanford foothills and rape her, then hide her body.

For a while, he thought he would use an icepick. Then he decided a gun would be better, so Thomas went to a Palo Alto sporting goods store and bought a .22 rifle. Finally, he packed a suitcase with items he would need while hiding in the Santa Cruz Mountains: heavy clothes, eating utensils and a Bible.

The good-looking, clean-cut tennis star cruised in his convertible, looking for a victim, but without success.

About 10 p.m., he called Deena, the attractive young woman across the street. She had a steady boyfriend, but she and Thomas had dated one time, relatives said. Thomas told Deena he was going out of town and wondered if she would drive him to the railroad station in his car and then bring it back home.

Thomas had her drive and en route to the railroad station, he asked Deena to stop at the ROTC Armory, explaining that he needed to return a rifle. He took the .22 from the back seat and shot her in the head.

Getting behind the wheel, Thomas drove up into the foothills, but apparently changed his mind about rape and came back to Palo Alto. About midnight, Thomas Wallace Cordry III walked into the Palo Alto police station and as if he had been in a minor traffic accident, said: "I want to report a killing. I shot a girl and she's out in the car."

In interviews with detectives, he never offered a clear explanation. "I had an urge to do it," he said with icy calmness. "I've had the same urge before. I guess this is really a sex problem." He refused to see his parents or the attorney they hired, saying: "I have no explanation for them."

Deena's father said: "I do not want revenge." He hoped to visit Thomas to assure him that he "holds no bitterness," The Times said.

On Aug. 27, 1958, Thomas Wallace Cordry III pleaded guilty to first-degree murder with a mandatory life sentence. His name never again appeared in The Times.

In later years, the Cubberly School sponsored a Deena Bonn night, but by the 1960s, it had apparently fallen out of favor as time erased the memory of who she was.

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Raymond bombing

Feb. 26, 1938
Los Angeles

Above, now playing at the Mason Opera House. Below, Harry Raymond's wife identifies Police Capt. Earle Kynette as a prowler she saw near their garage before the bombing that nearly killer her husband ... Charges of accepting money in return for influencing legislation? ... Dark times in Austria ... On the jump, the rest of the Kynette saga.

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Japan attacks L.A.?

Feb. 26, 1942
Los Angeles

Above, suspicious Japanese Americans are rounded up after the great battle of Los Angeles. Yes, it was a false alarm that left parts of the city peppered with unexploded ordnance. A special thanks to my colleague on the business copy desk, Bob Bayer, for pointing out the anniversary.

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Matt Weinstock

Feb. 25, 1958

Everyone, it seems, is trying to write television scripts, but Al Blake hadn't given it a thought until a friend called him one day and said, "Al, I'm in an awful fix. I've got a job as a writer and I don't know what to do."

Al, whose only claim to writing fame was his unpublished book titled "How to Become a Successful Thief," dealing with crime and punishment, of which he has a firsthand knowledge, offered to help.

The friend gave him the rundown, and Al batted out a script, which the friend submitted and which was accepted. Under his friend's goading, Al ghosted four more which were also accepted.

THEN ONE DAY the friend said, "Al, I've got some news for you. You just quit. That is, I quit. I got another job. But I told them you'd been writing the scripts and recommended you."

To Al's surprise the producer called him and he continued writing them for more than a year.

That's all over now but it gave Al a foothold in the business. He now writes for "Preliminary Hearing" on Sunday, Channel 9.

A MIMEOGRAPHED interoffice letter from the big boss at Rocketdyne, subject: "Letter of Congratulations," went out to all employees. It began, "The historic launching of the first American satellite by our Redstone engine reemphasizes the vital role our division is playing in the nation's security and progress...."

Remarked one horse-playing employee: "What have we got to crow about? We only got show. The Russians still have win and place."

VIA DOVE, sent out by a flood-marooned wife in Rolling Hills, comes a dramatic tale of the elements.

During last week's storm, it came time for her very shaggy collie dog to go outside. The pooch was reluctant but she finally shooed him out the door. Whereupon a gust of wind from the howling gale struck him broadside, where his wind resistance was greatest, and knocked him down, with great loss of dignity.

A LADY GARDENER named Hilda has lost another bout with a very smart gopher--but with a strange denouement. It had eluded her traps and the water cure so she placed poisoned wheat in its burrow. Old gopher wouldn't go for it but she had a wonderful crop of wheat growing out of the burrow.

THEN THERE'S the green-thumbed lady named Carol who found  a bag of strange-looking stuff in the garage. She took a sample of it to a nursery and was told it looked like bone meal. So she worked a lot of it in among her rosebushes and they're doing better than ever before.

But a few days ago her handyman was building a planter and after fussing around in the garage asked what had happened to the bag of fire clay he'd left in the garage.

You can't beat that Laurel Canyon soil, insists Carol.

AT RANDOM -- Merle Zee would have us believe that on the first day of the recent bus strike a driver of Irish descent put a sign on his bus, "Flaherty will get you nowhere" ... Sam Dodd of Glendale has had tiny tabs printed stating "I object to this kind of advertising. Please don't send me any more" --which he puts on junk mail with prepaid return postcards ... A TV pitchman said that his firm was overstocked with fine used cars because new car sales "have been skyrocketing upward." If they ever started redundancying downward he'd really be in trouble ... There were so many boat trailers on the highway to and from Palm Springs Sunday that Harold Mallon wondered if he ought to get a mariner's license ... When his companion declined his offer to buy a drink, a man in a downtown bar remarked, "The trouble with you is you're vitamin happy!"     

Paul Coates

Feb. 25, 1958

The biggest hero is often the last heralded.

He acts with such quiet, automatic efficiency that he destroys the drama of his own actions. He remains anonymous, unknown and unthanked for his service.

Today I have a nominee to join the ranks of such men. His name is Bill Squires. He's a mechanic by trade and he lives in a section of Carbon Canyon, near Pomona, known as Sleepy Hollow.

He was involved in a headline story over the weekend. He was, in fact, its hero.

But he performed his heroics so well, so quietly, so efficiently that not one article about the incident mentioned his name.

Although he didn't know it at the time, Bill became involved with the story at 6 p.m. Friday, when he stopped off at a neighborhood cafe on his way home from job-hunting.

The cafe--ordinarily jammed on Fridays--was without a customer.

Bill joked with the owner about it. "What have you been feeding them?" he asked.

The owner laughed, grimly. "Haven't you heard?"

Bill hadn't.

"There's a maniac on the loose," the owner continued. "Killed a policeman and ran off into the woods. Supposed to be around here someplace. The police have warned everybody to stay inside."

Although it didn't particularly worry Bill, he decided to get along home to his wife and five kids. When he reached there, a few minutes later, he mentioned the incident.

Then it was dropped, forgotten.

Shortly after dark, the Squires family retired. Garey, the oldest boy at 9, went to his bedroom on the upper level of the hillside house. The others retired to their rooms downstairs.

At about 11:30, Lucille, Bill's wife, heard someone walking around upstairs. She called out, but Garey didn't answer. Her husband awakened, and he called too. Still no answer.

So he moved quietly up the stairs, with his wife following him. The Squires' living room, with an outside entrance and kitchen, are also on the upper level.

Bill checked the bedroom. Garey was asleep. Then he walked into the living room and by the dim light of the night, he saw a figure lying on the couch.

"Hello there," Bill spoke.

"Hi," was the reply.

 

Bill flipped on the light. The figure was that of a man, bearded and slightly wild-eyed. The man was smoking. His wet shoes and socks and pants lay on the floor, and he was covered by some clothing belonging to Bill's children.

Bill asked, "What's the matter? Are you lost?

The man grunted. "I'm just tired."

Are you hungry?" said Bill. "You want some coffee?"

The man said yes. So while Mrs. Squires went into the kitchen, Bill remained. He figured this was the dangerous fugitive whom 150 police were tracking the hills to find. He knew the man was armed, but he couldn't see the gun. So he made conversation--easy, friendly conversation.

The Squires had no phone. So when Mrs. Squires returned with the coffee, Bill made a decision.

"How would you like a beer, mister,?" he asked.

The man grunted yes.

Bill explained that he didn't have one in the house, but that there was a store about a block away. He'd go down and bring back a couple bottles, he said.

It was tough to decide who should go, Bill admitted later. But his wife was expecting a child within a few weeks and he didn't want her running down the hill to the store.

Bill left when he decided the intruder would be content for a few minutes. The round trip--to get the beer and notify police and return--took about three minutes.

He poured his guest's bottle into a plastic mug, gave it to him and then continued with the idle conversation. The man wasn't much of a talker, but he did mention that he'd picked cotton in Texas and Mississippi.

The 10 minutes it took the police to arrive seemed like hours, but when they came they moved in fast. And before Lester Dean Bonds, the deranged killer of an Ontario policeman, knew what was going on, he found himself handcuffed and on the way to jail.

[Note: California death records say Lester Dean Bonds died April 13, 1986, in Alameda County at the age of 73.]