Feb. 20, 1958

 

A map from 1912 shows the plans for the Arroyo Seco Parkway. Note the Silver Lake Parkway, which was not built. The Arroyo Seco Parkway was actually proposed even earlier, as part of Charles Mulford Robinsons' "City Beautiful" project of 1906-7. (He also advocated realigning Spring Street and putting City Hall there ... and he proposed planting jacarandas along the city's streets).

Los Angeles Times file photo This photograph of the Arroyo Seco Road, dated 1921, shows a pleasant country lane between Pasadena and downtown Los Angeles.

Photograph by the Los Angeles Times Construction on the river channel next to the Pasadena Freeway, July 1, 1935.

Photograph by the Los Angeles Times Construction is nearly finished, Oct. 17, 1940.

Los Angeles Times file photo. Rose Queen Sally Stanton, Gov. Culbert Olson and Highway Patrol Chief E. Raymond Cato at the ribbon cutting of the Arroyo Seco Parkway (Pasadena Freeway), Dec. 30, 1940. This is in the general location east of Fair Oaks Avenue in South Pasadena where the sinkhole opened July 16, 2008.

Photograph by the Los Angeles Times And in a matter of months (Feb. 4, 1941) after the opening, the southbound Arroyo Seco Parkway (Pasadena Freeway) is backed up at the Figueroa Tunnels. If you ever wondered what a 67-year-old traffic jam looks like, this is your answer.

Photograph by the Los Angeles Times Emergency turnouts are added to the Pasadena Freeway in 1950 to ease congestion and prevent accidents.

Photograph by Gil Cooper / Los Angeles Times Workers install center dividers on the Pasadena Freeway, June 15, 1961. If you have ever seen the beating that these guardrails take from accidents, you can imagine what it was like when there was nothing but perhaps a little landscaping to keep cars from plunging into oncoming traffic. Email me

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Photograph by the Los Angeles Times
If you drive the Pasadena Freeway regularly, you will recognize immediately that it no longer looks anything like this. Yes, the ramps are entirely different. (And the Golden State Freeway hadn't been built when this picture was taken). But my point for now is the hillside in Elysian Park, which kept dropping mud and boulders on the southbound lanes, as occurred in February 1958.
Photograph by Frank Q. Brown / Los Angeles Times
Here's a picture of the freeway after cleanup allowed some lanes to be reopened. In 1958, the southbound Pasadena Freeway carried 120,000 cars a day, the Mirror said. The Mirror also noted that another mudslide took out a bridge in 1937.

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Model homes

Feb. 20, 1938
Los Angeles

Adjusted for inflation, the price on the first home ($18,750) is $268,116.31 USD 2007. Zillow lists it at $1.7 million. The last home ($28,800) is $411,826.66 USD 2007. Zillow lists it at $3.6 million. I guess this would be an appropriate time to mention deed restrictions. At this time, people of color were barred from owning or renting homes in many neighborhoods of the city. The legal battles over these restrictive covenants gathered momentum after World War II.

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Raymond bombing

Feb. 20, 1938
Los Angeles

 

Yes, the AP actually wrote the above story and The Times actually published it. Below, one of the most backward sentences I have read in a long while: "Not guilty will be the plea of Earle Kynette, suspended acting captain of the police intelligence unit, indicted Friday on charges of attempted assassination in the bombing of Harry Raymond, private detective."   This reminds me of Wolcott Gibb's satire of Time magazine's writing: "Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind. Where it will end, knows God." Prisoners give Kynette and his co-defendants a warm welcome at the jail ... And heavy snow isolates residents of Lake Tahoe.

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Feb. 20, 1908

At top, notice that the buggy dealer was not too far from the auto painting shop. Above, czarist agents in Los Angeles? How cool is that? Reminds me of the Mexican revolutionaries who were arrested in 1907. (Note the arrest of socialists in the same clipping).  Below, a malicious valentine triggers a nasty dispute in the city's French colony ... Orpheum executives deny rumors that a new theater will be built at 5th and Main ... And a rare gold coin takes the sting out of being arrested for going 70 mph.

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Matt Weinstock

Feb. 19, 1958

Popular music can be a fragile commodity. good tunes die at birth if they don't have popular appeal, whatever that is. Bad ones make the top 80 without a hitch if the right guy with a guitar sings them and the disc jockeys play them every 20 minutes, in itself a suspicious procedure.

Consider then the plight of Jerry Leshey of CBS-TV. He wrote a song, "The Sands of Time." Teddy Wilson recorded a haunting, moody interpretation of it. Johnny Desmond also made a record, as yet unreleased. And tomorrow the tune will be heard as background music on "Climax!"

But last Friday, Peter Potter served up Johnny Desmond's platter of it on "Juke Box Jury" and the panel sentenced it to be a "miss." The consensus, voiced by panelist Steve Allen, was, "It's too good to be a hit."

NEXT DAY, Jerry was brooding around the house, wondering if the verdict would send his beloved brainchild to an inglorious death.

 

Fred Hancock, a painter who was knocking out a small wall in the dining room, noticed Jerry's dispirited manner and asked what was the trouble.

"Juke Box Jury" said my song was too good to be a hit," moaned Jerry. "What do you do about that?"

Fred puffed on his cigar, asked, "Why don't you worsen it up a little bit?"

YOU'D BE surprised how many people believe the big freeze, the excessive rains and other phenomena are the results of atomic explosions upsetting the balance of nature. As one gal in a beauty parlor put it, "We better stop monkeying around with things we don't know anything about."

Me, I'm going to consult my friendly witchdoctor.

ONLY IN L.A.--A couple of weeks ago the city desk got a flash that a man was pinned under a streetcar at 7th and Broadway. Photog Delmar Watson and reporter Jack Tobin rushed there but found no streetcar, only a truck with a flat tire.

They asked the driver, who was working on the tire, what about the man supposed to be trapped. "Oh that's the fellow over there," he said, pointing. "The jack wouldn't work so he got under and tried to lift the truck with his feet. I made him stop after the first try. I was afraid my insurance wouldn't cover it if he got hurt."

The husky young man came over and said, "The reason I couldn't lift it was that I couldn't get leverage. I usually lift elephants."

The newsmen gave him a disdainful look that said, "That's all, brother!" and departed, pictureless and storyless.

And then Saturday night, on Art Linkletter's "People Are Funny," there was the guy. Elephant lifter Mark Evans, performing.

I DON'T HAVE NO papers left, said Alfonso Cardenas, an A-11 at Belmont High, as he finished a pile he'd been folding for Frances Hov, journalism teacher.

"You'll never get into college if you talk like that," she said.

Alfonso nodded, then said, "I'm in a spot. If I talk like you want me to, the kids wouldn't understand me. If I talk my way the teachers glare at me."

Come to think of it, you don't hear anyone say, "It is I," any more.

FROM A Hollywood paper: "Police said the men, Bart James Blackburn, 22, and Ronnie David Rhonemus, 20, who sawed their way out of the jail Tuesday with a third man, were driving a white 1957 Thunderbird." To which Gil Krause murmurs, "A sharp character, no doubt."

AT RANDOM -- The news story about the L.A. Dodgers opening spring training in Vero Beach, Fla., Thursday reminded James K. Hyde of the old one about the restaurant owner going out to lunch ... Since being momentarily blinded by the car ahead the other night, Herb Stinson has a new safety slogan, "Please dim your taillights" ... An obituary, in another paper, had an ironic typo. Stated a deceased gentleman would "live" in state at a certain funeral parlor ... Death of Joe Frisco reminded Tom Mannix of the time Joe stuttered to a friend, "I got a doctor who's curing me of betting on the horses." The friend said he never heard of such a thing and asked where the doc was. "Oh, about six furlongs from here," said Joe.

       

Paul Coates

Feb. 19, 1958

May 14, 1954--Three workers were critically burned in a foundry explosion at 1651 S. Compton Ave., Compton, late today.

The men, whose bodies were turned into flaming torches when a pot of molten magnesium exploded, were rushed to Georgia Street Receiving Hospital. Doctors offered little hope that any of the trio would live.

Witnesses reported that one of the victims, Cipriano Torres, 31, ran from the foundry room, stripped off his flaming shirt and ran back into the rain of liquid fire to rescue his foreman....

As doctors predicted, two of the three victims died within 10 days after the explosion.

But the third--with more than 70% of his body burned--defied all laws of fatality. He lived.

His name is Cipriano Torres. He was, on May 14, 1954, the man who ran back into the spewing, burning liquid metal to carry his boss out of the foundry.

I visited Cipirano Torres yesterday--to see how he was getting along. I met his wife, Mildred, and his four children, Christine, 11; James, 9; Linda, 8; and Robert, 7.

The kids had just come from school, but they looked more like they had just dressed up for church. Even 7-year-old Robert, who was preoccupied outside chasing his sisters with a dead mouse, looked immaculate.

I was surprised, because I had heard through a church organization that things weren't too well with the Torres family.

As I talked with Torres, I learned that 29 months passed after the accident before he left the hospital to rejoin his family. The first seven of those months were a blank nightmare.

In the past year and a half, he said, he's been back in the hospital seven or eight times for additional operations and grafts.

"But I'm improving all the time," he told me. "I can drive the car a little now." With his good right arm, he pointed to the small patch of lawn in front of the house. "I cut the lawn...."

Torres' wife got a word in here. "To cut that little patch, it took him five hours and had him aching all over."

"But," she added, with unhidden pride, "he insisted on doing it."

There was some talk then about the kids, about friends who had done so much, about the Rev. Arthur Herries of the Vermont Avenue Presbyterian Church, who supplied the faith, and about matters more general.

Torres told me that he had done foundry work for eight years before the accident. "It paid well," he said. "As a matter of fact, we had just started looking for a home when the accident happened."

Then I asked him the rather personal question about his current financial status.

He confirmed what I had heard before. His compensation benefits of $35 a week were cut off a week before last Christmas, when he was "officially" released from hospital care.

"About last August, I reached a point where I could start doing a few things," he said. "So I took over in the house and my wife went to work. She'd cook the meals before going. All I'd have to do was serve them."

She was laid off once last fall and again six weeks ago.

"Do you have any income now?" I said.

Torres said that as a veteran, he received a small monthly pension from the government for nonservice-connected disability. he was also drawing $20 a week against a final insurance settlement for his disability.

"But with a little luck, I'll be working again pretty soon," he told me. "Pensions don't buy the kind of things I want my kids to have."

He's already been out, looking ...

"But when I take a physical exam, they look at me like I was nuts."

Mrs. Torres broke into one of her frequent smiles about then. "They said he wouldn't live," she said. "But he did. They said he wouldn't walk. He's walking. Now the say he can't work, but I don't believe them."

Then a more sober thought changed her expression.

"One day at the hospital," she told me, "about a year after the accident, one of the insurance representatives came up to me and told me, 'Frankly, Mrs. Torres, your husband would be a lot better off dead.'

"So I told him, 'As far as you're concerned, mister, maybe yes. But as far as he's concerned, and as far as I'm concerned, and as far as our children are concerned, no, mister. No, never."

And this is the hero and his family today.    

Fidel!

May 24, 1959

Mass transit

Photograph by Bruce H. Cox / Los Angeles Times

I went down into the archives last night and pulled the original photo of Ralph P. Merritt, head of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and our 1958 rapid transit plan. The map is labeled "Mass Rapid Transit Projection for Los Angeles Metropolitan Area."

I made a large scan of the map so everyone can try to read it. The original isn't terribly clear (after all, this photo was only a graphic element and never meant to be used as a map) so I'll interpret the labeling:

This map is broken down into "Major Radial Service" and "Major Circumferal Service." In other words, the entire transportation plan is seen as a wheel with spokes radiating from a central hub, which is--as you might expect for 1958--downtown Los Angeles. The circumferal route describes the rim of the wheel and the radial routes constitute the spokes. This design, by the way, is how the origin and growth of the city's streetcar system was described in 1923: Spokes of a wheel radiating from downtown Los Angeles. The only difference then was that the "wheel" had no rim.

The radial routes are:

1. Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley

2. Pasadena, Pomona, San Bernardino and Riverside

3. Fullerton, Santa Ana and Whittier

4. Long Beach and San Pedro

5. Santa Monica

The circumferal routes are:

A. Airport, Coliseum and Beach Cities

B. Burbank and Glendale

C. Lakewood and Santa Ana

D. Santa Ana and San Bernardino

E. Downtown Los Angeles / Central Transit System

F. Fullerton and Santa Ana

Comments, insights? Let me know. Surely there must be some transportation experts who'd like to venture an opinion.

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Feb. 19, 1958

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Raymond bombing

Feb. 19, 1938
Los Angeles

Antisemitism in Austria ... Earle Kynette is indicted in the Harry Raymond bombing ... Unrest in the Mideast ... On the jump, two men are executed at San Quentin in a double hanging.

 

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Feb. 19, 1908

Plans for a rail route from the city limits at Sunset Boulevard to Griffith Park (remember, this is 1908) ... A tourist is robbed ... A domestic is hit by a streetcar ... A "training school" in San Fernando is to get 10 boys and two girls ... And a patient at County Hospital has a curious sleeping malady ...

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Mystery photo

Photograph by Fred Tschantre / Los Angeles Times

OK, who's the blond with Mickey Cohen? (Hint: No, it's not Walter O'Malley).

• Elizabeth Montgomery? An intriguing guess--Elizabeth Montgomery and Mickey Cohen. But no.

• Lili St. Cyr? Good guess, but Lili would be a bit older than this woman.

• Tempest Storm? Right church, wrong pew. So to speak.

• Liz Renay? Interesting guess. But no.

• Candy Barr? (R.J. Smith, Los Angeles Magazine, who was 30 minutes ahead of Chris Morales).

Absolutely right! At the Hall of Justice, Sgt. Eugene Gabriel listens as Mickey Cohen expresses outrage over the April 30, 1959, arrest of Candy Barr at the Largo Club on the Sunset Strip. Cohen, who had a ringside seat for Barr's act, was incensed when deputies arrested her after a Texas bail bondsman canceled her bond in a narcotics case. Cohen later told newsmen that he hoped to marry Barr after his divorce to LaVonne Cohen was final, The Times said.

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