1927 murder again

   So, I’m still working on the murder of the Arcadia policeman in July of 1927 .  I’m finding out some new details , details of interest to me . But then , I’m an ex-history teacher . And I’ve jumped into the soup and can’t help paddling around . Every small piece of carrot or historical  potato or unexpected peppercorn that floats by is of interest . But , often , only to me . Little bits of discovered information lead to others . I found the Pasadena Library , built in 1926 by the way , to be a great resource . It’s got easy-to-access  micro-film collections and viewing machines . I’ve been reading 1927 local newspaper stories . I found the story of a guy in nearby Sierra Madre who was arrested for having a still and a large amount of liquor in his house . Prohibition was still in full effect . He claimed that he rented the house out and that  he slept on a porch and that he had no idea that a still was in the house  or that any booze was anywhere around . He had no idea what his renter was up to , he told the cops . I don’t suppose that that silly excuse worked for him . Maybe he was drunk at the time of the arrest .

 

So I went over to Sierra Madre to investigate . Okay , so I’m eighty-seven years late . So what . Maybe the 1927 house would still be there . I drove up there on Lima Av. and  found the address . Actually , there was a sign there at the curb with three consecutive numbers written on it . The property behind the address sign was covered with a canopy of huge trees and hidden behind a blind of bushes . I wandered along a shady gravel driveway , looking for a house , making some noise so that I wouldn’t startle any moonshiners  . I spotted  a battered house , but not from 1927 . Next to it was a woodshop , the door open , plywood set up on the saw , fresh sawdust clumps on the floor  . There was a broken down car beyond the shop , and beyond that another beat-up house . Maybe it was a shed or a garage . No one seemed to be around . Or they were hiding , watching . You should understand that when I’d driven up the street looking for this address I was passing through  a well-groomed , upper middle class neighborhood . Houses sell in Sierra Madre for , maybe ,  $ 800,000  and up . There might be a few further up in the canyon for less , or one or two for a little less  closer to  town . I passed handsome houses built during the last few decades , trimmed and cared-for , a handful of them  survivors  from the 1920s .  But now , instantly , on that gravel path , it was as if I had left the city . I found myself in a little forsaken corner of  woods . 1927 ?  I could see how it would have been an ideal spot in 1927 for a still . It still ( pardon the pun) would be .

 

Anyhow……….

The murdered policeman had been a soldier stationed in Arcadia at Ross Field ,  known locally as the Balloon School . The former Army land is now a county park . From 1918 until 1930  or so , the Army   trained observation balloon crewmen there  . I read a 1927 news story about six officers who went up in a balloon at 0400 one morning , but by 0600 their balloon had stalled over Sierra Madre . They were stuck up there for six hours and finally decided  to cut the balloon open  to release the gas so that they could fall to earth . They managed to get to the ground safely . By that time hundreds of people were there ( it happened in the middle of town ) to watch .

 

I’d given up on getting the policeman’s military records . I’d already received an initial letter from the government archive office that stated : Not Enough Information .  I had one more bit to offer and I re-submitted the request . When was that ? Six months ago ? Seven ? I am aware , for one thing , that they don’t like sharing their information with non-relatives . It’s a privacy thing and that makes sense .  But  today another letter arrived . The Government hadn’t forgotten me . Vast quantities of military records had burned up in the 1970s . I was warned already  by fellow researchers to expect a letter saying that everything had burned up and so  I was out of luck .  ” Just re-submit the form ,” my friends said .  The letter today says that for $25 I can get a final pay form because those were  housed somewhere that didn’t burn up . They sent a sample pay form . It’s got certain information of interest to me ,  so I’ll fork over the 25 . The Government needs the money ,  after all , for IRS bonuses and the like , and to give more tax breaks to the billionaires  . I resubmitted my request , this time with a personal check enclosed .

 

I hope the archives sends me something before THE BIG ONE comes and sweeps California into the sea , or at least before my little public lecture at the museum on the murder .  They’ve got until November . I’m sure they’re listening .

more metro

Those guys are still working on bringing the Gold Line east far enough for Dan to walk to the station .

I like one aspect of the planning . Some planner somewhere had some sense . One of the new rail bridges has a concrete railing like the old concrete railings . I like that —- a symbolic time-link to honor the past . The right railing for a rail line needs no railing . I think Abraham Lincoln said that .

 

 

There was a line about what ,  1889  ? , that came to Arcadia along the same right-of-way . It died out some time in the late 1950s out this way but the tracks remained in the streets and also along some other stretches of the route .

New:

Old : 

They’ve recently torn out the old track and installed new track , or they will soon .  What’s that say  about how much things change and they remain the same ?

The new Arcadia station for the metro will sit on the same ground of an older station . The old station  was shipped off east to some rest home for old buildings ; no one wants to visit it anymore ; they’ve forgotten about it , to tell the truth .  There will be a parking structure next to the station  this time around . That’s progress . I think Herbert Hoover said that .

neighborhood changes

I took a little walk around the neighborhood today .

I don’t live in the better part of Arcadia , I remembered , if by better you might mean , mainly ,  bigger .  There was a house under construction on the corner of Highland Oaks and Sycamore .  It’s the kind of house that Ada used to ask , ” How many families do you think live there ?”  about . But , they were all single family places , many of them strewn about on the hillsides as if they are insolent sentinels watching  the commonplace society below .  This one was built as a single family joint , too .   It will have a pool out back when someone  gets around to gunite-ing it . Probably has a microwave in the kitchen .

Big deal !   — Ada and I have a microwave , too .

A man named Hal Slemons owned much of the land north of Foothill in the 1920s  and 30s . His brother raised chickens on part of it .  Hal owned the nearby Orange Inn stretched along Foothill , with its orange-shaped juice stand .  The Orange Inn , still owned by Slemons , evolved into the palm frond- thatched place  called the Wigwam . It was ready to cash in on Route 66 traffic .  The remnant of these old days is nearby Wigwam Avenue . Eventually Slemmons retired to …………………….wait for it …………………………Orange County .  Yeah .   On the site of the old Wigwam is a McDonalds . No longer are there any citrus-shaped structures .   

Slemons built himself a house on his property in 1925 . The house is still there . It out-shines every other house in the area , most of them large and on large lots , all of them built decades after the Slemons house . The new one under construction is a block away . The 1925 house wins that beauty contest too .

I saw a 1927 picture of the new subdivision , laid out that year , around the Slemons house .  There are wide streets , a center island , street lamps .  But what happened ? Nothing seems to have progressed beyond the street lamps and the wide curbed street . All the houses in the neighborhood except the Slemons place look like they were not built until the 60s or 70s . None of them .

I suspect what happened was the Great Depression . Best laid plans of mice and men , and all that . The buy-in prices were too high after 1929 . 

The City of Arcadia wanted to zone a cemetery nearby in the early 1930s , next to the Santa Anita wash , but local protests quashed  that idea . Slemons tried to sell several acres to Arcadia for use as a park , but his asking price of $30,000 was just too high for the city’s budget . I’ll guess that the huge  house under construction may cost some proud buyer a hundred times that amount .

Times change .

plstr

I’ve been investigating the 1927 murder of the Arcadia policeman which occurred about two blocks from here . I found him listed as “plstr” in the old city directory from 1925 . I thought “plstr” meant ” plasterer”. The old directories listed occupations .

It seemed reasonable to assume that “plstr” meant plasterer . There was a civilian friend of his in the police car when the murder occurred . When I found that the friend was a house painter I thought that I was on to something .

But , of course , he wasn’t a plasterer in 1925 . He had been a policeman for six years . Somehow  ” plstr” means , obviously , policeman . I have to ask a few more questions .

What I am  finding is that some  guy knows a fact or two about the murder ; that woman can tell me a bit ;  the police department has this information ; the museum has a record of that ; the courts’  archive has this ;  the building department can tell me that ; but nobody has collected all the information together , sorted it ,  pasted it all together yet .

I’m trying to find what buildings were on the street in 1927 . The three boys convicted of the crime were planning to rob ” a barbeque place ” nearby .  The Arcadia Building Department had all of their files digitalized , but , evidently , not all of them survived the transfer from paper . If there was a building on the corner where the murder took place there is no record of it in the city file any more .

I think , guessing , that the plan was to rob Slemon’s Orange Wigwam , a thatched snack -shop business about two blocks down the street . There is a McDonald’s there now .  I’ll find a photograph , eventually , of the area . Insurance companies keep good records of things like that , I hear .  I suspect that that stretch of Foothill Blvd ( White Oak Blvd. , in 1927 )  , at the city limit , was pretty bare at the time .

I know that my house wasn’t there in 1927 . None of them on my block were .  ” It was all chicken farms ,” my former neighbor , Rex, told me .  I should have listened to my old neighbor more carefully . Rex was right . Arcadia exported 5000 eggs a day  in 1926 . The 1928 city directory lists 153 poultry breeders  .

I’m reading a new Bill Bryson book : ” One Summer , America 1927 ” .  I’m going back there for awhile . It was the time of Calvin Coolidge , Charles Lindberg , Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig , Al Capone , and Clara Bow , of flappers and flivvers .  Ronald Reagan was working at his local hometown pool as a lifeguard . Inventors were developing television . Talkies were beginning with films such as The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson .

For the last  few days that July , before the murder , Arcadia had been having a heat wave . The temperature on the 18th had been over 90 .  At about midnight the cooler night air must have been a pleasant relief . The two men might have been talking about baseball or the weather as they drove slowly past a row of Spanish style houses on  Laurel Ave. , vacant land across the street , as they  turned left onto  North View heading toward White Oak , patrolling  the eastern edge of  the sleepy little community  .

There was a  car parked on the west side of  North View with three nervous young men sitting inside .  What’s up ? The policeman stopped his car , stepped out , and walked over to check .

alley walk again

I haven’t been walking the local alleys recently . I decided to get back to it yesterday , so I hit the road . I mean I hit the alley .

There are plenty of places I wouldn’t walk alleys . You know , the places that are dirty and dangerous . I’m not engaged in any social science research requiring me to take risks . I’m not interested in interacting with derelicts , druggies , robbers , thugs , hookers , or wandering hooligans as I stroll along  . The  worst I’ve encountered in Arcadia are madly active  clucking squirrels and an occasional skittering raccoon , their long sharp nails scratching along concrete curbs in hasty retreat . Well , two or three times  lost bears , also , come down from the nearby hills . They  are most likely  looking for a hot tub ( local bears love hot tubs ! ) or dog food  hors d’oeuvres . The bears are usually wise enough , or fastidious enough , though , to stay out of the alleys  and to stick to the roads .

One day I’ll , no doubt , come upon a day-dreaming bear  climbing out of one of the alley dumpsters as I pass . That will be a whole new ballgame . Let’s see ……..with a grizzly ( none in CA since the 1800s ) you just curl up , play dead , and pray . But with a black bear you make yourself as big as possible , hold your arms up , back away slowly . Make noise ; but try not to be annoying .  And , I guess , pray .  Oh yeah , and try NOT  to place yourself between the momma bear and her cubs . Oh , and bears , according to Forest Service  signs , don’t like dogs ; so , sorry , if you’re walking a dog……………..

I noticed , in a few spots along our alleys , someone has planted flowers . For me and other alley walkers ? How nice !   Usually ,  the alley  plantings are desperate and lonely hobo plants , able to get by without much care or affection , with food and drink  coming only intermittently .  Some of them show it , clearly barely surviving ,  and others  maintain a respectability  front ; they  manage to hide any outward  effects of destitution or dereliction .

Generally , the Arcadia alleys , so far , are still navigable .  Trash barrels and dumpsters still line up every day , waiting for their weekly visit from the grumbling trash truck . Everything seems in order in this alley world . No mess ; no stress . Sure , there’s a little neglect evident here and there . Let’s mark that down as a bonus , a functional trade off , the price of some extra privacy and independence , an  acceptable cost of being left in peace .

7 pictures from the Arboretum in Arcadia

waiting for metro

I’ve been patiently waiting for the Gold Line Metro to push far enough east so that I can walk over to the station . As it is , I could walk to the Sierra Madre Villa  Station , currently the closest one , if I had all the  morning to get there . I could , of course , walk several blocks from my house and catch a bus to the nearest station , too .

A few years ago I was on my way to see a friend in Connecticut , flying in to Hartford , and I decided to do it all on public transportation . This is Los Angeles territory , though , where public transportation is the deadbeat crazy  relative , is  at best a civic afterthought .

I went out early one morning , walked the half block down to Foothill Boulevard . Step one was to catch the bus along Foothill .  I walked to the corner to the bus stop . No bench . Hadn’t there been a concrete bus bench there ?  I looked up and down foothill  —- no benches . I walked across the street and asked the all-night gas station guy about the bus . How often do they come ?  He said there ain’t been no bus  on Foothill now for almost a month . Foothill Boulevard is a major street on this side of town , spreading up along the foothills .  No bus ?

I had to make an LAX  flight at a certain time .  This was gonna mess up my plan bigtime .  Ada wasn’t home or I would have asked her for a ride to the metro station .   So I called my friend Willie . Willie knew my public transport plan . He’d understand my predicament .  I’d picked Willie up at LAX several times ; waited hours once while his flight was diverted to San Francisco and then until it  finally  decided to come  back to L.A .  We had each others’ backs , so to speak , I guess , when it came to trying to get out of the city or trying to get back in . Like friend assurance  insurance , travel disaster personal indemnity .

.

So , I’m waiting for the metro tracks to be laid and the station to be built . So far Metro has built a Gold Line bridge over the 210 freeway . I’m not sure what the design of the bridge is supposed to represent . There are two large concrete forms that look a little like stylized pineapples . Pineapples in Arcadia ?   Oranges or lemons would be okay . Grapes ?  Even bananas or pomegranites or persimmons might fit somehow .  But  , pineapples ?

Those things must not , I think , be pineapples . Who would do that ? Maybe baskets ? Native American baskets ?   No , can’t be . Too pineapple- shaped .  Maybe , for some odd reason , hand grenades ?  I’ll have to ask someone who knows . My imagination ain’t able to stretch big enough to figure that one out yet .

The bridge was once on Lucky Baldwin land . He grew just about everything on his ranch there , I think , except pineapples .  The land was also ,  for a couple of decades ,   an Army observation balloon school . Baldwin was a horse lover , too , a racetrack builder , a horse breeder .  The Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia was also , for a few years during WWII  , an Army ordinance base  . Grenades !  I’m looking for clues to explain the two concrete structures at each end of the new Metro bridge .

It doesn’t matter . No one asked me before they built  the things , after all .  They look like they’ll be around for awhile , whatever they are supposed to be . Time will attach it’s own meanings to them .

Meanwhile , I watch the spot where the station is going to be built .  It’s an empty lot. There was an earlier station there eighty years ago or so . There were tracks there two years ago , also , tracks  abandoned for fifty years or more . They were waiting patiently and quietly  , all that time , those spans of  old steel track ,  only to be gouged out eventually , and disposed of  , I guess . Maybe they went to a train museum , instead  . Maybe a sculptor will concrete them vertically into the ground at odd angles and call it art .

I think that the new track will look pretty much the same as the old track . Higher up . More shiney . More concrete beneath . The people who will ride it will be pretty much the same , too , I suppose  ,  but with  electronic devices  and the feeling of being , oh ,  so much more civilized , cultured ,  sophisticated , and smart .