Jealousy Leads to Murder and Suicide

“Somebody Is Always Taking the Joy Out of Life” by Clare Briggs. Oct. 22, 1919: Mrs. Zola Schmidt was  killed as she slept … while holding a letter from another man. View Larger Map 916 W. 9th, the scene of the crime.

“I am anxious to be married with as little delay as possible…” George S. Crosman, a one-armed man wearing nothing but a Japanese kimono, kills Mrs. Zola Schmidt, who has been estranged from her husband for about a year. Numerous love letters and rose petals are strewn around the apartment, where a canary sang joyously in its cage.  On the Victrola, “Mammy O’ Mine.”

Riot in Times Square Over Wagner Opera!

Oct. 21, 1919: Servicemen and civilians riot in Times Square over a production of Richard Wagner's "Die Meistersinger" staged at the Lexington Theater despite Mayor John Francis Hylan’s ban on German opera!

Tent Revival in El Monte

A.A. Allen stages a tent revival in El Monte, with faith healing.

Oct. 17, 1959: Dear True Love, wait until the Shangri Las release “The Leader of the Pack.”

The Balloonatics

Photograph by Jeff Barnard/Associated Press July 6, 2008: Kent Couch prepares to lift off in a lawn chair from his gas station in Bend, Ore., in a balloon-suspended lawn chair at dawn. About nine hours later, he created a sensation in Cambridge, Idaho, across the Oregon desert about 235 miles away, as he touched down in a field by popping balloons with his Red Ryder BB gun. (He also had a blow gun with steel darts and a parachute, just in case.) It was his third flight, and the farthest. He was inspired by North Hollywood trucker Larry Walters, who flew from San Pedro to Long Beach in 1982.

July 3, 1982: Larry Walters goes up in a lawn chair tied to 42 weather balloons.

April 23, 1983: Larry Walters is fined $1,500. Below, 10 years later, he committed suicide.

Larry Walters; Soared to Fame on Lawn Chair November 24, 1993 By MYRNA OLIVER, TIMES STAFF WRITER Larry Walters, who achieved dubious fame in 1982 when he piloted a lawn chair attached to helium balloons 16,000 feet above Long Beach, has committed suicide at the age of 44. Walters died Oct. 6 after hiking to a remote spot in Angeles National Forest and shooting himself in the heart, his mother, Hazel Dunham, revealed Monday. She said relatives knew of no motive for the suicide. "It was something I had to do," Walters told The Times after his flight from San Pedro to Long Beach on July 2, 1982. "I had this dream for 20 years, and if I hadn't done it, I would have ended up in the funny farm." Walters rigged 42 weather balloons to an aluminum lawn chair, pumped them full of helium and had two friends untether the craft, which he had dubbed "Inspiration I." He took along a large bottle of soda, a parachute and a portable CB radio to alert air traffic to his presence. He also took a camera but later admitted, "I was so amazed by the view I didn't even take one picture." Walters, a North Hollywood truck driver with no pilot or balloon training, spent about two hours aloft and soared up to 16,000 feet -- three miles -- startling at least two airline pilots and causing one to radio the Federal Aviation Administration. Shivering in the high altitude, he used a pellet gun to pop balloons to come back to earth. On the way down, his balloons draped over power lines, blacking out a Long Beach neighborhood for 20 minutes. The stunt earned Walters a $1,500 fine from the FAA, the top prize from the Bonehead Club of Dallas, the altitude record for gas-filled clustered balloons (which could not be officially recorded because he was unlicensed and unsanctioned) and international admiration. He appeared on "The Tonight Show" and was flown to New York to be on "Late Night With David Letterman," which he later described as "the most fun I've ever had." "I didn't think that by fulfilling my goal in life -- my dream -- that I would create such a stir," he later told The Times, "and make people laugh." Walters abandoned his truck-driving job and went on the lecture circuit, remaining sporadically in demand at motivational seminars. But he said he never made much money from his innovative flight and was glad to keep his simple lifestyle. He gave his "aircraft" -- the aluminum lawn chair -- to admiring neighborhood children after he landed, later regretting it. In recent years, Walters hiked the San Gabriel Mountains and did volunteer work for the U.S. Forest Service. "I love the peace and quiet," he told The Times in 1988. "Nature and I get along real well." An Army veteran who served in Vietnam, Walters never married and had no children. He is survived by his mother and two sisters.   Photograph by Lori Shepler / Los Angeles Times Eddie Korbich in the lawn chair and Roger E. DeWitt as Leonardo DaVinci in the musical "The Flight of the Lawnchair Man" in an evening of three one-act musicals called 3hree at the Ahmanson Theater on April 14,2001. A Feat as Unusual as Piloting a Chair * 'Flight of the Lawnchair Man's' creators are both from Iowa, but it took a New York pro to pair them up. April 22, 2001 By DIANE HAITHMAN, Diane Haithman is a Times staff writer Robert Lindsey Nassif, who wrote the music and lyrics for "The Flight of the Lawnchair Man," and Peter Ullian, who wrote the book, had a history with Hal Prince before he tapped them for this musical. Prince paired them up for their first collaboration, "Eliot Ness in Cleveland," performed in 1998 at the Denver Center Theatre Company, and in 2000 at the Cleveland Playhouse. The musical was produced under Prince's auspices and based on Ullian's play "In the Shadow of the Terminal Tower." Musical theater aspirations brought both men to New York, but each has roots in Iowa. Nassif, 41, was born in Cedar Rapids; Ullian, 34, attended the Iowa Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa in nearby Iowa City. They were working independently when Prince suggested that Nassif set Ullian's play to music. "The odds against two guys from Cedar Rapids being put together in New York are astronomical," Nassif observes. "I like to think that means something." Kind of like the odds against more than one person trying to fly by attaching balloons to his lawn chair -- and yet it happened. The story has been variously reported, but according to his Times obituary, North Hollywood truck driver Larry Walters piloted a lawn chair attached to helium weather balloons 1,600 feet into the air on his way from Long Beach to San Pedro in 1982. (Walters committed suicide in 1993 at age 44.) In England, another man attempted a similar feat by tying hundreds of helium balloons, the birthday-party variety, to a piece of furniture and taking off. Both acts of gravity-defiance were spotted by the very surprised pilots of commercial jets. Nassif came up with idea of a musical based on such a flier-fleshed out with the Lawnchair Man meeting the great aviators of the past as he climbs ever higher into the sky. He also added the subplot of a 747 pilot who sees this armchair pilot out his airplane window and suffers an identity crisis. "Different teams work in different ways," Ullian says. "With Rob, I will write a first draft of the book as if it's just a play, without thinking: 'This is where the song goes.' And then Rob will take the play that I wrote, go off by himself, find where the songs are hidden, buried, and sort of excavate them. For instance, when the 747 pilot sees the Lawnchair Man, originally that was written as a scene. But Rob took the basic arc of the scene-the emotion-and replaced it with a song." Though they were used to collaborating, Nassif and Ullian say there's a big difference between working under the auspices of Prince and actually having him direct a show. Each found the experience to be a revelation. "When you work with Hal as a mentor, you go out and work and rehearse, and then bring in what you've done. Here, you are working with Hal one-on-one; there was more of a sense of him as a colleague," says Ullian. "It was more of a hands-on experience, less theoretical and more practical." Some reviewers have called "3hree" old-fashioned-in a nice way. "Hey, They Do Write 'Em Like They Used To," said the New York Times headline for the paper's review of the 2000 production at the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia. But Ullian says Prince never forced his hand on that matter, either. "I think our approach was to write it as the material demanded, and I think what's gratifying about that headline is that I hope, in some way, all three shows have managed to tap into and honor what is great about the musical tradition," Ullian says. "For instance, our show has a lot of musical underscoring [music composed for background] during the dialogue scenes, it's a musical architecture for the whole piece, and I think that's true of the other pieces as well. It's a little different from the tradition of shows like 'Guys and Dolls' that are song-scene-song. "And there are moments when there's a song, then a little bit of a scene during a bridge, the songs and the book are integrated in a way that, while I wouldn't say it's radical, it's a little bit different. But we're not trying to do a sung-through musical like 'Evita' or some of those others, or a rock musical like 'Rent.' In that sense, we have definitely embraced the traditional book musical. "I read a quote from Hal somewhere in which he says that actually a traditional musical is more difficult to write. There is nothing more difficult than writing the book to create a point where the song can come through as logical, where you've 'earned' the song. Earning the song is not an issue when you are singing all the time." Nassif calls Prince the "invisible master hand" when it comes to directing. "He sets you in the right direction; a fine director doesn't tie your hands, he frees you. "I think we really need brave producers, not just corporations," Nassif adds. "Musical theater has become so expensive-some wonderful shows like 'Lion King' can come out of it, but I think we also need brave producers of vision. It is the unique shows, I think, that last. Shows that a committee recognizes as 'produceable' do not necessarily have an enduring life. There has to be a vision."

L.A. in the grips of Gustavo-mania

Gustavo Dudamel throws himself into his conducting during his inaugural performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall as new music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times / October 8, 2009) Through the generosity and kindness of a friend and colleague who gave me his tickets, I was able to hear Gustavo Dudamel last night during his debut week as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The informed scribes of the Los Angeles Times (Mark Swed) and New York Times (Anthony Tommasini) have already made their appraisals and I'm not sure there's much for me to add. The concert was recorded for iTunes, so listeners will soon be able to form their own opinions without the interference of nitpicking commentary. But inasmuch as Dudamel's arrival is a landmark in Los Angeles history, I thought I would offer a few lines by reprising -- if only briefly -- my former incarnation as a music critic. :: Los Angeles is in the grips of Gustavo-mania and with good reason. The charismatic young Venezuelan has already inspired audiences in a way that makes marketing directors' hearts sing. (The woman sitting next to me flew in from Washington, D.C., just to hear him and already has tickets for the orchestra's upcoming tour). We have not yet christened part of Disney Concert Hall "Gustavowood," as a companion to the Dodgers' "Mannywood," but I anticipate it at any time. Quite frankly, I was not expecting much because I had heard recordings of Dudamel with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela (reckless, rushed tempos and ragged playing) and the Israel Philharmonic (mostly remarkable because it was a young man leading the Israel Philharmonic). Last night, I was happily surprised. If you haven't heard the Los Angeles Philharmonic aside from commercial releases, you might wonder how it sounds au naturel. I heard the orchestra many years ago on tour under Zubin Mehta and at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, along with live broadcasts over the years, too long ago to recall the orchestra's sound in great detail, although I do remember (indeed, how could one forget?) Mehta's gymnastics on the podium. More recently I have attended Disney Concert Hall performances thanks to the generosity of various friends who had spare tickets. (Last night's seats were $98 apiece plus tax for the nosebleed section--people in the orchestral world who worry about the crisis in classical music audiences please take note). The often-cited claim that there are no bad seats in Disney Concert Hall appears to be true. There are certainly nothing like the supporting columns I recall (or seem to recall from my childhood) blocking the view in the upper balconies of Orchestra Hall in Chicago, where my parents took me as a youngster, or the miserably pinched, airless view I had one year for Seattle's "Ring Cycle" in the Glynn Ross era.   In previous performances I have been seated to the side of the orchestra (Joshua Bell/Herbert Blomstedt--fairly good acoustics) and behind the trombones/tubas (Yefim Bronfman/Xian Zhang--rather muffled). For Dudamel's concert, I was seated in a more traditional area, the upper reaches at the back of the hall. The first thing that struck me about the orchestra is the high caliber of playing. These days, that's a given, of course. But I think it's worth noting that today, in a top-flight orchestra, all the mechanics of playing are satisfied: The musicians play in tune, they make their entrances, follow their cues and the sections (the horns, the woodwinds, the strings) play cohesively. However obvious and rudimentary these concerns may seem, they are not trivial and any orchestra that can brag of such an achievement is well on the way to greatness. But not necessarily there. What kept coming back to me as I listened to the orchestra was "ah, the horns are doing this ... aha, the oboes are doing that ... here are the trumpets ... here comes the tympani roll... " It was as if I were listening to 100-plus separate voices, or the various tonal blocks -- strings, brass, percussion, etc.-- rather than a symphony orchestra. Maybe my expectations have been led astray by too many years of listening to the tricks of recording engineers mixing the colors like a Photoshop of sound. But if I had to describe the way the orchestra sounds to me, I would say I was more aware of the raw individual colors rather than the completed painting. :: The concert began with "Su," a concerto for sheng and orchestra by Unsuk Chin performed by Wu Wei. More years ago than I care to remember, I attended an utterly disheartening conference of my fellow music critics in San Francisco. Of course, this was before newspapers in all but the largest American cities slashed their budgets by eliminating coverage of classical music and the fine arts in general. Not that I could entirely blame the editors who made the cuts, given the deplorable state of classical music coverage at most papers. With a few exceptions, my fellow music critics were little prima donnas with dubious credentials, artsy pretensions and limited writing skills who fawned over the one or two big guns from the major newspapers who deigned to rub elbows with the rabble. I mention this gathering because at a sparsely attended session on the obscure field of world music, one performer said with absolute seriousness that the day would come when world music would share the stage with Bach, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky.  We provincial rubes thought this was the funniest crackpot idea we had heard in years and wrote it off as "Well, you know, it IS San Francisco. Maybe that kind of thing goes here but not in [fill in the name of your favorite small  town]." My crystal ball was certainly cloudy that day. Since then we have had Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Project, along with a great deal of exotic influences in film scores so that world music has indeed entered the common repertoire. In light of that, I suppose it is no surprise to find a concerto for sheng (an ancient Chinese instrument now fitted with chromatic keys) on the same program with Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 1. In brief, "Su" is a pleasant, nonthreatening modern work of shimmering colors that's interesting to watch in performance mostly because Wu Wei is an enthusiastic, athletic musician who bounces when he plays -- and his bright red scarf and black outfit certainly add visual drama. Tones are produced on the sheng by blowing as well as sucking air through the instrument. The sheng has an amazingly wide range of tonal colors and most reminded me of some old-school "musique concrete" in which tape-recorded sounds were played backward. :: Which brings us to the Mahler. I suppose if you asked 50 people, you would get 50 different ideas of the Symphony No. 1. Like everyone else, I have distilled a sonic ideal of how the work should be. It is uniquely mine, based on dim recollections of a graduate seminar on Mahler, and a quirky blend of Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic in a noisy broadcast from Tanglewood, a dab of an old Bruno Walter LP, some Bernard Haitink and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, some New York Philharmonic under Lorin Maazel, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau bouncing his way through "Songs of a Wayfarer," and maybe  a dash of Leonard Bernstein--but only a dash, because for me a little Bernstein goes a long way.   It's not Dudamel's job to conform to the unarticulated and ever-evolving notion of the Mahler that I carry around in my head because he hasn't any idea what it is and he might well disagree with it. For that matter, I might disagree with it myself in a year or two because it's never complete but always reshaping itself. In that context, how does Dudamel see Mahler? Well, Dudamel is a remarkable, young conductor and a remarkably young conductor. Some folks have made much about his conducting the Mahler from memory, but honestly, it's so well known these days, I'm surprised it's not in karaoke bars, along with the Shostakovich Fifth, which I have nicknamed "The Inescapable." Mehta (who is not one of my favorite conductors by a long shot) used to get a fair amount of press by conducting from memory, but it's nothing special anymore. In general, Dudamel's Mahler First is a rollicking, buoyant work. He took some of the slower passages a bit faster than I like (the third movement's mournful satire on "Frere Jacques" could stand to be a bit more funereal for my money) and the faster passages a bit slower than I care for. What struck me the most was how he seems to save his best for the final movement. Last Saturday's live performance of Ludwig Van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, broadcast from the Hollywood Bowl, was really nothing special until the finale. In the same way, the Mahler was a nice, competent job until the last movement, when the orchestra put some muscle and passion into it. And as I listened to the Mahler, I got to thinking that this is a young man's approach to the work--not necessarily immature, but youthful and inspiring. I won't be around to hear how Dudamel does the Symphony No. 1 when he's in his 80s, as Masur is now. But I would be curious to know what it's like. I would anticipate that rather than being youthful, it will be a reflection on the remembrances of youth. Is Dudamel on the verge of establishing a reputation as one of the prime Mahler interpreters of his generation? No--absolutely not. But he handles it well. In our mania for the superlatives of the "Lake Woebegon " era, where all children are above average, it may seem a crime to call the performance workmanlike, serviceable and competent, but those are not small accomplishments. And in reality, truly spectacular -- and memorably awful --  concerts are few and far between. One or two per season if you're lucky. Most will be in the great middle, where this concert fell toward the high end. :: I'm probably in the minority when I say that for me, the true test of an orchestra isn't necessarily the big, raucous works like Mahler symphonies or Richard Strauss' tone poems, but the delicacy of Mozart. I am extremely curious as to how Dudamel sees the works of our favorite fellow from Salzburg. One other thing worth mentioning. Based on what I have read and observed, Dudamel appears to see himself with a fair amount of humility. During the extended applause and standing ovation at last night's concert, Dudamel threaded his way deep into the orchestra to acknowledge the soloists and generously shared the spotlight. Conductors rather notoriously come in all shapes and sizes. Most of the old-fashioned conductors of the recent past were merciless tyrants. Some of today's laureate stars are famously egotistical and aloof. Young Gustavo Dudamel appears to be a far more humble, outgoing and therefore inspiring fellow and I suspect the Los Angeles Philharmonic's musicians and audiences will flourish under his care.

Welcome Home Champs!

Oct. 9, 1959: Welcome Home Champs! The “Cinderella Boys” made it!

Oct. 9, 1959: A bit of road rage from Frank Sinatra!

The Strange, Terrible Saga of Mario Lanza

Oct. 8, 1959: Columnist Dick Williams on Mario Lanza.

Oct. 8, 1959: “The Best of Everything” starts tomorrow at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

Dodgers Take Series!

Oct. 8, 1959: The Mirror celebrates the Dodgers’ victory! And NBC suspends Charles Van Doren.   USC students protest new regulations imposed after the death of Richard Swanson during a fraternity hazing.

Elvis says of being in the Army: "It was quite a change, of course. But for me, it was a test to prove to other people that you're a man who can take it. I didn't want anybody to think that this is the man who had it easy. I was determined to go to any limits to make this clear. I hope I have."

Tango Craze Invades Pasadena

Jan. 14, 1913: That wicked dance, the “Tango Argentine,” is coming to Pasadena! These poses, among the most modest in the tango,  are demonstrated by Oscar and Suzette, who "brought the sensational dance to America."

Cafe Orchestra Fiddles While Kitchen Burns

Oct. 3, 1909: What the modern woman is wearing. $22.50 is $532.68 USD 2008.

Here’s a bit of theater history: The Orpheum announces that it will no longer have advertising on its curtain, despite the loss in revenue of $500 ( $11,837.43) a month … And the desk sergeant reviews a nightly parade of drunks.