Found on EBay -- Duesenberg

What appears to be an authentic Deusenberg 8 radiator emblem has been listed on EBay. Bidding starts at $49.99.

Matt Weinstock -- March 31, 1959

Drinking Men A kindly barkeep named Al, who minds bottles in a downtown snake pit, shut off the juice the other day to an old friend named Mike. In so doing, he deplored Mike's disheveled condition and the evils of drink and said a few nice things about sobriety. Mike listened impatiently, breaking in, as chided drunks do, with "yeh, yeh, yeh." Then Al made a mistake. Carried away with his own eloquence, he said he was not a drinking man. "Aren't you forgetting something?" Mike Asked. Al couldn't think what it was, but Mike did. He recalled the time years before when Al had come home drunk and passed out and his wife had undressed him, put him to bed and hidden his clothes. AWAKENING hours later, suffering horribly, Al had discovered he was locked in the room, his clothes were gone and his wife was at work. Desperate, he got into one of her dresses, put on one of her hats and climbed out the window. He made it, shoeless, to a Temple Street bar where he gulped a quick restorative and procured a bottle, amid nasty comments from patrons, including Mike, about his lack of foundation garments. "That was a long time ago," Al said. "You can't shame me." And he remained resolute in his refusal to pour one. :: REMEMBER the item here about the gal who got a jaywalking ticket and wondered if they'd take away her pedestrian privileges if she received five in a year? Well, she got another one and is worried. However, the way Frank E. Marlow hears it, they won't revoke your right to walk, they just take away your shoes. :: NEIGHBORLY The news from Tibet Gives us reason once more to Be glad Russia and China Aren't what we're next door to --RICHARD ARMOUR :: POSSIBLY there's some atavistic (where else can you get words like that for a dime?) meaning in it, Sparks Stringer doesn't know. All he knows is thatSibu, his long-legged acrobatic Burmese cat, disapproves of giklo , the mathematical equation for Einstein's unified field theory, which he has framed and hanging on his wall. For no apparent reason,Sibu keeps jumping at it and has brought it down three times, once breaking the glass. :: FURTHER EVIDENCE that things may be unraveling before our very eyes comes from Tom Kennedy, a pressman. On his lunch break he was soaking up the sunshine with some fellow workers near the 2nd Street entrance to this building when an elderly gentleman in a wrinkled suit stopped and asked if he might have a section of the paper Tom had been reading. When Tom gave it to him he wrapped it around a book and said, "I wouldn't want to be caught carrying a book. Someone might accuse me of being an intellectual. It's a high crime these days, you know." :: AT RANDOM -- There was a nice gesture at 7th and Olive on Good Friday. A bus pulled up behind a stalled car and not only the driver but several passengers got out and pushed ... And the Biltmore Coffee Shop menu Saturday listed "Fried San Fernando Easter Rabbit with Country Gravy, $2" ... Bob Boethals, writing in Westward, reveals that Charles Schulz, 36, creator of "Peanuts," now appearing in 380 papers, once flunked all his high school courses ... It's incidental, by the way that Charles Brown, the key character, is also the name of a Hit Parade tune ... GordonMacker , Santa Monica Independent columnist, a candidate for City Council there ... Sudden irrelevant thought: Do you suppose someone will write a song sometime with the title "I Disapprove of  You"?

Paul Coates -- Confidential File, March 31, 1959

Confidential File Deep in the Heart of You Know Where Mention Texas to me and I get misty-eyed. Call me a sentimental slob if you must, but the word stirs images of Davy Crockett and the Alamo, and rawboned giants carving out an empire, and tall blonds inNeiman -Marcus furs. And Texas Rangers. And Texas justice. Swift and sure, but always just. The good guy always wins. The bad guy always ends up choking on a mouthful of dust. But perhaps I've just been brainwashed. Or maybe Texas ain't Texas any more. The plain facts are that stalwart lawmen astride noble steeds don't patrol the range these days. They've given way in part, at least, to money-hungry minions who prey on motoring tourists. And before I'm invited to be guest of honor at a necktie party, let me explain that this isn't my conclusion. It belongs to James F. Hamilton, a Los Angeles graphic arts executive and member of the motoring public. And his experience with modern Texas "justice" deserves exposure, if only as a warning to others who consider traveling by car through the Lone Star state. Mr. Hamilton told me his story yesterday. He and his wife had just returned from a trip through Central America in what he calls his "camping vehicle," a converted Army truck. People south of the border, he assured me, had greeted him and Mrs. Hamilton with open arms. "They were very hospitable," he said. "But despite that fact, we were congratulating ourselves on being back in our own country -- saying it right out loud -- when it happened." "When what happened?" I prompted. "It was right outside El Paso," he continued. "This guy with a siren on his car, a deputy sheriff, pulled me over. He told me my California license plates had expired. "I admitted the charge and explained that I sent a check to Sacramento for the plates before we left on the trip. But I told him I was in the wrong and I'd accept a ticket gladly. "He said that wouldn't do. That I would have to appear before a judge, who, conveniently, was located less than 200 feet away." Mr. Hamilton was ordered to back his vehicle a short distance to reach a dilapidated shack, a Texas "court." Once inside, Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton waited while the judge was summoned. He turned out to be a fragrant old-timer, disheveled and unshaven. A real Roy Bean. The victim was apprised again of his offense, then notified that the court had decided to be lenient. The fine would be $1. Getting the Business However, added the justice of the peace, court costs would amount to $19.50. Mr. Hamilton sputtered, but, at his wife's insistence, pulled out a $20 Travelers check. "I don't have the 50 cents," he explained. "Oh, that's all right," the deputy interjected. "I'll just make it up out of my own pocket." The story isn't new. Until the very recent past, such kangaroo courts were a common threat to the motoring public. They've been stamped out in many parts of the country. Fortunately, California is one of those parts. But, apparently, they still exist in Texas. Which is kind of sad. I'd much rather remember the Alamo.

In the Theaters -- March 31, 1986

Trouble Was His Business -- Raymond Chandler

A historic passion * Author Judith Freeman researched Raymond Chandler's marriage. November 7, 2007 By Graham Fuller, Special to The Times Twenty years ago, Judith Freeman became "obsessed," as she puts it, with Raymond Chandler, whose novels featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe still make up the most iconic literary portrait of Los Angeles. When, in 2003, Freeman began writing "The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved," she found herself on a quest leading in many different directions. The author of a short-story collection and four novels, Freeman was raised in Utah. She had moved to Los Angeles in the late '70s and was living in one of Chandler's old neighborhoods when she began reading his letters. She became captivated by Chandler's wife Cissy. A fey, ethereally beautiful sophisticate with a past as a nude model in New York, Cissy was living with her second husband on South Vendome when she and Chandler met around 1913. Their affair began after he'd returned from the Great War, and they married in 1924. At the time, Chandler was 35 and thought his bride was 43. Only gradually did he learn she was 18 years his senior. It was the absence of information in Chandler's letters and Frank McShane's 1976 biography that made Cissy an enigma in Freeman's eyes and prompted her decision to "possibly bring her to life." As she tried to fathom the nature of the Chandlers' 30-year marriage -- which incorporated elements of courtly love and withstood his alcoholism, philandering, and her long decline into invalidism -- she was confronted with the couple's itinerant lifestyle. They changed addresses over 30 times in Los Angeles and Southern California. They lived downtown and in Hollywood, in Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, San Bernardino, Monrovia, Idyllwild and Cathedral City, in the mountains and the desert, sometimes changing residences twice a year. They were as restless as an alley cat on a velvet cushion. Why they couldn't stay put is a mystery that might have baffled Marlowe, at least temporarily. Without donning a trench coat, Freeman had a crack at solving it. "I think Ray was constantly searching," she said, "but they also liked this idea of mobility, the fact that you could get a new car and go to Big Bear for the summers, to the desert for the winters, and if, you didn't like it, to Santa Monica or Arcadia, Brentwood or Silver Lake. This possibility was introduced not just by the automobile, but by their sense of general detachment from any kind of past family." Asked if she feels there was a neurotic element in the Chandlers' nomadism, Freeman said "there is something deeply unsettled about it. In A.A. meetings they use the term 'going geographic' of an alcoholic personality to describe that idea of constantly moving, running, probably trying to escape and find at the same time." "I don't know if Chandler was running from something," said David Thomson, who wrote a monograph on Howard Hawks' film of Chandler's "The Big Sleep." "Maybe he was a kind of hotel writer -- a little like Nabokov -- in that he never had much need to be 'at home.' He had a hero who seems to live in a very plain room and waits to be invited out by fate. I think of him as someone who found his dream and so inhabited it as much as he could." The Chandlers nearly parted in 1932 when Ray's persistent drunkenness and workplace affairs cost him his executive job at Dabney Oil. "This was the major disruption in his life," said Alain Silver, the co-author of "Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles." "His peripatetic lifestyle became more urgent. The simplest reason he was constantly moving was that the rent would go up. By the time he could support himself and Cissy with his writing, the moving had become a habit. It maintained the displacement he'd known as a youth." He and his mother had been abandoned by his father when he was 7. The marriage was threatened again when Chandler was lured to Hollywood in 1943 to write "Double Indemnity" with Billy Wilder. But over the long course, Freeman said, husband and wife sustained each other. Freeman says Chandler was "very conscious" of his knightly code. "I think it was forcibly instilled in him at Dulwich College in England. Then Cissy gave him the wonderfully strange nickname of Gallibeoth" -- redolent of Galahad-- "when they were still having an affair. This was a persona he adopted and that she completely embraced and reaffirmed, 12 years before he wrote his first short story. She became the enabler of his vision of the private eye who functions as a rescuer of humanity." Freeman asserts that Cissy provided Chandler with a haven from the corruption, vice and brutality he considered endemic to Los Angeles -- and which fueled his finest writing. "They created this little island of civility within this wacky crackpot capital of the world, as Chandler called it. I think he must have been seduced by the city at first, but by the time he got through the studio system he was sick of it. "There was a kind of banal quality to life that he detested, a lowbrow feeling, and he wanted to get out, and they did. But then, of course, he began to hate the place he found himself in, La Jolla, because of its Cadillac-and-chauffeur atmosphere. Like every other place he had run to, it wasn't going to be the answer to anything, and he began to regret that he ever left L.A." Freeman visited all of the Chandlers' homes that were still standing. Particularly moving are her descriptions of Ray's study and Cissy's bedroom in their ocean-side house in La Jolla, where they lived from 1946 to 1954, when Cissy died. It was there he wrote "The Long Goodbye," in which Marlowe's isolation, echoing Chandler's, becomes palpable. He rejects the humdrum existence of his hometown, Santa Rosa, and the decadence of the gated community in "Idle Valley." "I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city," he says. "A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness." Freeman's passion for her material can be off-putting for some. Ben Tarnoff in the San Francisco Chronicle writes that she "spends too much time reflecting on her own encounter with the material to offer a vivid portrait of the Chandlers' life together." But Richard Rayner, writing in The Times, sees her quest as more poignant, making the book "ache with emotion and loneliness -- her loneliness and Chandler's, the loneliness of following a trail, of a marriage, of writing itself." Chandler died of pneumonia, brought on by his drinking, in La Jolla in 1959. A wanderer to the end, he spent his last years seemingly looking for another Cissy to protect -- and to protect him. "Their marriage gave him meaning and kept him together," Freeman said. "He romanticized it as almost perfect. But I do think they were happy." Note: To mark the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler's death, the Daily Mirror is revisiting some of The Times' stories about his life and influence. We invite the Daily Mirror's readers to share their thoughts.

Christine Jorgensen Tries to Marry, March 31, 1959

Christine Jorgensen and Howard J. Knox attempted to get married, but could not obtain a license.

The Times headline writers had fun with this: Ex-GI becomes GI-RL. Har har har. And the same day, an ad for the upcoming release of "Some Like It Hot."

The Los Angeles City Council approves the Bunker Hill project. I wonder how lawmakers would react if they knew how many people today view their actions as a terrible mistake. Of course, at the time, Bunker Hill was seen as a ramshackle collection of decaying mansions and old buildings that were falling into the street.

"Nancy" gets topical with rock 'n' roll. A new agreement on the Rose Bowl game. Officials were especially eager to include Stanford.

Nuestro Pueblo, March 31, 1939

Found on EBay -- L.A. Streetcars

This lot of books about streetcars has been listed on EBay and includes several on the Pacific Electric Railway and one on pre-Huntington cars. The books are listed as best offer or Buy It Now for $150.

Matt Weinstock -- March 30, 1959

Back on Canopus ... Another election is only a week away and the air is heavy with confusion, obscurantism and apathy -- mostly apathy. The confusion belongs to the voters. Many of them are recent arrivals who don't understand our dual government -- city and county. For that matter, many people who have lived here all their lives don't understand it either but in another way. They don't understand why they should pay for duplicating functions. New and old alike wonder why we go to the expense and bother of such an election as this one. Couldn't it be included in some other one, they ask. The obscurantism -- political double-talk -- belongs both to the incumbents and aspirants bent on knocking the incumbents out of the box. As an example, one councilmanic candidate states in his literature that if elected he plans to become a veritable tiger in solving the smog, tax and transportation problems. It so happens that the council, although it absorbs much of the blame, has nothing to do with any of these three. The smog and tax matters are county problems. The MTA or bus mess is a weird creation of the state Legislature. And so it goes. Bert Leson Taylor, the Chicago Tribune columnist of another day, said it best: When quacks with pills political would dope us, When politics absorbs the livelong day, I like to think about the star Canopus, So far, so far away. :: A HOLLYWOOD bartender named Joe, born in South San Francisco of Portuguese descent, tells it on himself. During WWII he was in naval intelligence, assigned to counterspy duty in Portugal. For six months he went out on the boats with fishermen, never speaking English, always Portuguese, gathering information on the Germans, who were in cahoots with Franco of Spain. He thought he was doing fine and had escaped detection until one night in a Lisbon bar he got to talking with two men he knew to be German agents. One said casually, "How's everything in South San Francisco, Joe?" :: WHILE IN New York recently, Marc Lawrence, noted for his sinister movie gangster roles, was invited to come up and see how the bulls and bears were doing in the Stock Exchange on Wall Street. He was standing on the floor of the famous place in the midst of the orderly confusion, watching the buying and selling by the passing of slips of paper, when someone handed him a piece of paper. On it was written, "Drop the gun, Louie." :: ONLY IN L.A. -- A stranger, about 45, came into Izzy Moidel's law office and said he'd like to know how much a divorce would cost. He told how much money he made and detailed his property holdings, which were considerable. In turn, the workings of the divorce court were explained to him and he was given an estimate of what a judge normally would award his wife. He got up, put a $100 bill on the desk and started out. "What about the divorce?" Moidel asked. "Oh, I guess I'll marry the girl and take a chance," he said. Turned out he was a cautious bachelor contemplating matrimony and wanted to know the worst first. :: ONLY IN MALIBU -- A man who for several years has been driving cars with automatic shifts recently acquired a foreign job with a gear-shift lever and he's entranced with it. "It gives me something to do while I'm driving," is the way he puts it. :: MISCELLANY -- Milt Forrest calls them radioactive divorces. After all, they're the result of fallout ... After deep desperate deliberation, Jack Perkins has figured out a simple solution to the awful freeway traffic. Just make them toll roads ... Roberta Morgan has put her hex on the TV villains who give a long commercial spiel, then add, "And now a word from next week's sponsor" ... Day after Easter note: Well, what'll it be for dinner -- creamed eggs, deviled eggs or egg salad?

Paul Coates -- Confidential File, March 30, 1959

Confidential File Operas Recalled ... the Sudsy Kind You really want to know what's bothering me? Or are you just asking to be nice? What's bothering me is this gnawing feeling that I'm not in the swim any more. I've lost touch with the little folksy things in life. That's what comes, I suppose, of trying to be an egghead and subscribing to the Saturday Review of Literature instead of the Saturday Evening Post. For instance, it occurred to me that I haven't even listened to a radio soap opera since Ma Perkins was a girl. It occurred to me, as a matter of fact, while I was accidentally listening to a soap opera on my car radio the other day. I'm aware, now, that it takes a certain amount of orientation before you are fully able to comprehend the subtleties in this type of melodrama. Apparently it's far more intricate than a Greek tragedy. Once, I had the necessary orientation. There was a time, shortly after the era of the crystal set, when I dug each and every little nuance of Just Plain Bill' s dialogue. Just Plain Bill would murmur to his daughter Nancy things like: "Nancy, honey, don't you be upset because that promising young country prosecutor, Mark Shoreham, with whom you are in love, is planning to indict me for the murder of the elderly widow Blake, whom I befriended, and therefore she left a mite of property in my name. There's nothing for you to worry about, Nancy, honey. I'm not worried." Plain Bill Easy to Dig But in those days I could tell by the way he said it that Plain Bill was damn well worried. He was just covering up for Nancy. I could also determine, by the merest inflection in her voice, that Myrt was really mad at Marge for carrying on with that saxophone player and was just not saying anything about it. But my talent as a listener has diminished to the vanishing point. I realized that when I tuned in on soap opera the other day. Of course, it should be said in my behalf that I tuned in late. And even if you come in at the beginning it's difficult to unravel the story of the tangled lives involved. At any rate, the male lead had a deep, syrupy voice that had to be Don Ameche. He was talking, but mostly listening, to the feminine lead, whose name, I think, was Melinda. Things, he was telling her, would improve. Things, she was telling him, better improve. Is He Really Hiding Melinda? "I'm sick of this 'backstreet' life," was the way she put it. "Sick of it. Are you ashamed of me? Do you have to hide me from people?" "Darling," he whispered in that persuasive voice he once used to tell Mr. Watson to come here, "you know I'm not ashamed of you. You know I don't LIKE to hide you from people. I'd LIKE to shout it from the rooftops." "Don't do me any favors," she said, in effect. "Don't shout it from rooftops. Just tell Cara about us." Well, it doesn't take a bomb to fall on me. I figured that neat, little mathematical design out in a hurry. Wife, husband and girlfriend. Melinda Struts Stuff in Kitchen After the commercial, the plot thickened to the consistency of glue. Melinda went to Don Ameche's house while Cara was away for the evening. She wanted to prove to him that she could whip him up a dinner just like any housewife. And she had to clean up the dishes and get out before Cara came home. I mean, how would it look? As if that situation weren't bad enough, I got the impression through further snatches of dialogue that Don Ameche wasn't really married to Cara. Of course, it was just an impression. I don't know it for a fact. However, rather than get involved in that parlay, I switched the dial to Al Jarvis. I don't understand him either. But, at least, he keeps his nose clean.