Daily Mirror reader Todd Mecklem sends this Aug. 2, 1909, clipping from the Long Beach Press-Telegram. Unfortunately, The Times didn't find this item newsworthy.
Above, there are people in this world who insist that before the advent of top-40 radio in the 1950s, programming was a formless blob. Note, in fact, that programming was often tightly organized in 15-minute blocks. Below, Officer Donald M. Draper testifies that he rented the LAPD observation post at 2711 E. 7th St. on behalf of Police Capt. Earle Kynette to spy on bombing victim Harry Raymond. Draper takes the 5th Amendment on questions of whether he tapped Raymond's phone ... And look at the labor news: Violence in the strike at the Ford Motor plant ... reinstatement of strikers at Douglas Aircraft and indictments of 11 Los Angeles members of the Teamsters.
Above, a profile of William Alland, who played the reporter tracking down the life of "Citizen Kane" and in his final years worked for the Los Angeles Times poll. Below, A race car plows into a crowd of spectators at the Cuba Gran Premio, killing five people ... President Eisenhower attacks economic pessimists ... The Senate approves raising the ceiling on the federal debt ...
Quote of the day: "The economy of America is a lot stronger than the spirit of those people I see wailing about it and saying it's no good." --President Eisenhower
Above, meet Charles West, who says: "I have never treated my wife very mean, although I slapped her a couple of times when I thought she needed it." Below, mayhem on 3rd Street when a piano mover ties a horse-pulled rig to the rear of his Bekins wagon--and the front team of horses makes a mad dash toward Spring, dragging both wagons down the street ... Distress in Long Beach over the collapse of a bank ... Mrs. J.P. Morgan visits Southern California ... A prisoner receives an inheritance from his mother--but can't get out of jail to collect it. He was charged with breaking into offices in the Bradbury Building and stealing postage stamps ... And the Anti-Cigarette Society asks the Board of Education to encourage students not to smoke.
Suzanne was supposed to have a simple bit of surgery. Didn't everyone
get their tonsils out? The 15-year-old went into St. Mary's Hospital in
Long Beach on May 31, 1956, but during the operation, her heart
stopped. Doctors opened her chest and massaged her heart. But it was
too late. By the time her heart resumed beating, her brain had gone too
long without oxygen and she suffered irreversible damage.
Days passed, and then weeks. The Times wrote about others who had
fallen into comas. There was 12-year-old Herbie Gray of South Pasadena,
who was riding his bicycle and got hit by a truck Nov. 28, 1955, and
Mrs. William Wrigley, who suffered a stroke Dec. 23, 1947, and was kept
alive by what was considered "a medical miracle."
Suzanne's mother said: "She seems to be trying to tell us something."
Her care was extremely costly and her father, Lyle, a furniture
salesman, used up all the family's money. "I have borrowed from everyone we
know," he said. "There is nowhere else to turn."
Suzanne's story touched the hearts of many people in Los Angeles and
across the country. Anonymous benefactors donated money as well as football
tickets for charity raffles. Schoolchildren raised $884 in nickels and
dimes. Her parents brought a $1.5-million lawsuit ($10,747,925.65 USD
2006) against the hospital, the surgeon and the anesthesiologist, but
The Times didn't cover the outcome of the suit.
"People have been wonderful, but there's so far to go to meet the cost
of Suzanne's bills," said her younger brother, Lyle Jr., 11.
"Suzanne seems to be making progress," her father said after she had
been in a coma for three months. "Physically, she appears fairly good.
We think she recognizes us when we enter her room. She breaks out in a
sweat and seems to get excited."
But after six months of hospital care, she was no better and her parents brought her home to 2728 Ostrom Ave.,
Long Beach, to be tended by her mother and father. "At least we can
give her 24-hour care and try to make her comfortable," her mother
said. "We can do no more."
"Our insurance money is used up, our borrowings are gone and donations
from kind people have been used up also," her father said.
"My wife believes that occasionally Suzanne recognizes her for a
moment," he said. "And at times she seems to have some expression in
her face. She doesn't talk, but she will make sounds."
On May 31, 1957, the first anniversary of her operation, The Times offered no hope of her recovery.
The Payette family, which also included another daughter, Sally,
apparently moved to Minnesota. Lyle and Isabelle Payette died in 1986.
Judging by online genealogical records, Suzanne spent 20 years in a
coma before dying in 1976.
Herbie Gray died March 3, 1957, without regaining consciousness. Ada
Wrigley died Dec. 16, 1958, at the Wrigley mansion in Pasadena.
However, The Times also wrote about a "miracle man." His name was
Melvin Eugene Hewitt and in 1951, he was revived after hitting his head
on the sidewalk during a brawl outside an El Monte bar. He was
considered dead on arrival at El Monte Medical Center, but two doctors
cut open his chest and massaged his heart. After six weeks in a coma,
Hewitt regained consciousness, although he suffered brain damage.
In 1957, his mother, Mabel Werrett, told The Times: "He is a religious
man and he speaks with conviction. I place a lot of faith in his
words."
She quoted him: "Someday soon, Mom, I will be completely cured and my mind will be as normal as when I had my accident."
Melvin Eugene Hewitt died Dec. 28, 1987, at the age of 63, 36 years after he was given up for dead.
"It's
like a bad dream," he said. "You keep thinking you'll awaken and find it's a bad
dream."
Edward Simon Wein, given five death sentences under California's "Little
Lindbergh Law" for a series of kidnappings and rapes, said: "I was convicted
before I ever came to trial. The papers said all kinds of bad things about me.
They called me all kinds of bad names, including 'beast.' There was so much
prejudice I was convicted."
The 32-year-old painting contractor was identified by seven women, but he said
they were all wrong. "They were mistaken--honestly, the first time," he said.
"But then they couldn't change their minds."
"A half-hour after I was arrested, a Hollywood detective said they were going to
make a [Caryl] Chessman out of me. The prosecutor in my case is the one who
prosecuted Chessman. I had the same charges pressed against me as Chessman and
the verdict was the same."
Of California's death penalty, Wein said: "I don't think it's human. It's
something more or less out of the Middle Ages."
According to police, Wein, who lived at
418
S. Hamel Road, answered classified ads placed by women. He told them he
would have to check with his wife about whatever was being sold, then pretended
to have lost the stem from his watch. He gained control over his victims when
they stooped down to look for the missing watch stem and threatened to kill them
if they made any noise.
The attacks occurred over 18 months in Alhambra, Hollywood, South-Central,
Burbank and elsewhere in the San Fernando Valley. He was arrested by a private
officer at a Long Beach cocktail party after one of the victims said she
recognized Wein when he stepped on her foot. She said: "I'd never forget what he
looked like."
Wein was prosecuted by Deputy Dist. Atty. J. Miller Leavy, a formidable lawyer
who handled the Chessman, Barbara Graham and L. Ewing Scott cases. When
Wein said he'd never in his life answered a classified ad, Leavy produced
Shirley Tierstein, who identified a check Wein wrote to her for an electric
stove. Tierstein said Wein came into her home at
753
S. Mariposa in Burbank, but fled when her son Kenneth, who
was sick and home from school, called out to her.
The prosecution also introduced partial
fingerprints matching Wein's taken from a glass that he allegedly used to drink
water at one victim's home.
Wein was sentenced to death. His Dec. 5, 1958, execution was upheld by the state
Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his appeal. However, the state
high court granted a delay pending a second appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The mother of one of his victims, who was 14 at the time she was raped, wrote to
The Times in 1959: "What is wrong with the course of justice? ... To think of the
possibility of such a man getting back on the streets again, free to come into
homes again to rape, rob or kill!!"
The U.S. Supreme Court denied his second appeal, which claimed inadequate
counsel. But in June 1959, Gov. Pat Brown agreed to grant Wein a clemency
hearing. Brown reduced Wein's sentence to life in prison "without the
possibility of parole" because the kidnapping was technical--he only moved the
victims within their homes.
"I feel that only where there is kidnapping in the true sense of the word, with
bodily harm, should the death penalty be involved," Brown said.
In 1966, Brown further reduced Wein's sentence, making him eligible for parole
and on Sept. 16, 1974, after 17 years on death row, Edward Simon Wein was a free
man.
Then on Aug. 8, 1975, the strangled body of Dorothy George, 52, was
found in the bathtub of her home at
5935
Abernathy Drive in Westchester after she placed an ad for a recliner on a
supermarket bulletin board. On Sept. 5, a woman living in Palms who had posted items for sale on
a supermarket bulletin board was raped by a man who claimed he had lost the stem
of his watch. He began filling her bathtub with water but fled when a neighbor
slammed a door.
Over lunch a few days later, Venice Division detectives were discussing the
cases with retired investigator Robert S. Wright, who recalled the series of
"watch stem" rapes from 1956. After learning that Wein had been paroled, they
arrested him and charged him with murder.
Several of his earlier victims testified during his 1976 murder trial. A
63-year-old woman said that on Dec. 15, 1955, Wein came to her Crenshaw district
home to look at a fur stole and dining room set that she was selling. He choked
her "so long and so hard it ruptured the blood vessels in my eyes," she said.
A 54-year-old woman testified that on March 12, 1956, Wein locked her 5-year-old
son in a closet at her Encino home before raping her after she advertised a
mattress and box springs for sale.
The testimony of a woman who was a 19-year-old concert pianist when she was
raped May 11, 1956, was read into the record because "her physical and mental
condition is still so fragile that she cannot testify in person," The Times
said.
In June 1976, Edward Simon Wein, the "watch stem rapist," was convicted of rape
and murder and sentenced to prison.
As he said in 1957: "It's like a bad dream. You keep thinking you'll awaken and
find it's a bad dream."
Broadcasting live from the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium, and later in
recordings made at a Hollywood studio, Fuller was on the radio for 43 years,
until his death in 1968, preaching "salvation, personal conversion and the life
hereafter," The Times said.
He was born in downtown Los Angeles, and his father, Henry, ran a furniture
store. The Fullers moved to Redlands, where the family planted the
first Valencia orange in 1886, The Times said. He graduated from Pomona College
in 1910 and turned to religion in the 1920s after working as a manager at a
citrus firm.
Fuller began his broadcasts in 1925 when he was at the Calvary Church in
Placentia, with coast-to-coast transmission beginning in 1949.
The broadcasts featured
Rudy
Atwood, sometimes called the dean of gospel pianists, and the choir, male
quartets and male and female soloists, with listeners' letters read by Fuller's wife, Grace.
"Its appeal is the universal appeal of the Scriptures," Fuller said of the
broadcasts. "I preach a simple yet eternal message of the Gospel."
Fuller said he and Harold John Ockenga got the idea of founding a theological
seminary after his encounters with other ministers across the United States.
"In traveling about the country, I met evangelists who themselves believed
firmly in the Gospel and who were dedicated to their preaching of it. But they
did not have the full understanding of theology and were frequently no match in
theological debate. And, too, they could not meet with business and professional
leaders on an equal footing."
Fuller, who lived at 1180 Oxford Road, San Marino, above, went to his heavenly home on
March 19, 1968. The Old-Fashioned Revival Hour ended in October 1969 after 44
years.
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.
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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.