South Bay History

The grand opening of the Rolling Hills Theatre in Torrance on the night of Oct. 2, 1963 was a gala event for the city.

The new single-screen movie theater was a showplace, drawing customers to the Rolling Hills Plaza shopping center at the corner of Crenshaw Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway, which had opened two years earlier.

The romantic comedy “A Ticklish Affair” screened at the theater’s debut, which featured personal appearances by the film’s stars, Shirley Jones and Gig Young.
In addition, Troy Donahue and Suzanne Pleshette, stars of “Rome Adventure,” also appeared, along with Helen Greco and musician and bandleader Spike Jones.

Other movies shown during the theater’s first month of operation included the thriller “Shock Corridor,” “Diamond Head” starring Charlton Heston and Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine in “Irma La Douce.”

The theater, owned by the small Sterling Theatres chain, was an immediate success, and became known for its attempts to present family-oriented fare, with many special matinees and Saturday programs for children.

Sadly, the Rolling HIlls Theatre also would become known as the site of one of the most horrifying crimes in South Bay history.

Sometime after the theater closed on the night of Sunday, Feb. 11, 1973 at 11:45 p.m., a robber bound four theater employees, ushers George Cernik, 19, and Guy Brown, 29, projectionist Clyde Felts, 49, and assistant manager Lynda Rose Freeman, 31.

The robber stole $2,000 from the theater’s safe, then systematically cut the throats of the four employees, and also shot Felts in the shoulder.

Torrance police officers Gil Kranke and Tom Jarvis were let in by a custodian who arrived after the killings had taken place, and discovered the bodies in the manager’s office at about 6:30 a.m. Monday morning, February 12, 1973. A veteran officer described the murder scene as the most gruesome he had ever seen.

An immediate search for those responsible began, with a reward that rose to $45,000 offered for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrators.

At first, police believed that three men were responsible for the crime, and drawings and descriptions of the suspects were circulated. Several suspects were interviewed and cleared of involvement.

On March 27, 1973, Jack Sweeten, 52, the assistant manager of the TG&Y store at 4675 Torrance Boulevard in Torrance in the shopping center at Anza Avenue and Torrance, was killed during a robbery.

A few days later, on April 2, Torrance police arrested John Roy Maheu, 29, on outstanding misdemeanor traffic warrants. Maheu was an unemployed petty criminal with a long rap sheet who was known to police after his many arrests in the city.

On the morning of April 3, Maheu was found unconscious in his cell and taken to Little Company of Mary Hospital, where he was pronounced dead due to an overdose of barbiturates.

Further investigation revealed that Maheu was responsible for both the Rolling Hills Theatre and the TG&Y killings. He never had to be held accountable for the crimes.

The theater continued to operate, starting up low-cost special programs for senior citizens, free “ladies’ matinees” and family-friendly screenings of Disney films and other wholesome fare.

In May 1975, Sterling, now renamed SRO, the Sterling Recreation  Organization, remodeled the theater, turning it into a twinplex showing second-run films. The larger of the two showed “The Longest Yard” and “Bang the Drum Slowly,” while the smaller one played “Blazing Saddles” and “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

A major remodeling of the shopping center ultimately led to the demise of the Rolling Hills Theatre in the 1980s. During planning for the upgrade by developer Norm LaCaze, SRO was given the opportunity to build a new multiplex planned for an area just north of the old theater, but declined.

The theater closed for good after the Sunday, Sept. 9, 1984 showing of “The Jungle Book.”

AMC ended up building the Rolling Hills 6 multiplex at Rolling Hills Plaza, which opened on Friday, May 16, 1986.

That six-theater complex eventually was greatly expanded into the shopping center’s current theater complex, the AMC Rolling Hills 20, which opened on Friday, July 25, 1997 to massive crowds and a jammed parking lot.

A succession of businesses have been housed in the still-standing Rolling Hills Theatre building, which retains its distinctive trapezoid-shaped roof after many remodelings. A Bev-Mo is among those tenants currently occupying the building.

Sources:

Daily Breeze files.

Torrance Herald files.

Clarence Saunders, the innovative founder of the Piggly Wiggly grocery store chain, never really explained the inspiration for his chain’s name. When asked why he chose it, he answered, “So people will ask that very question.”

These days, the company with the silly name is known mostly for its role in Southern popular life and culture, since most of its stores operate in the South.

But when Saunders opened his first Piggly Wiggly at 79 Jefferson Street in Memphis, Tenn., in 1916, he filled it with ideas that would revolutionize the grocery story and lead to the development of the modern supermarket.

These concepts included goods stacked in self-service aisles, shopping baskets, elaborate displays and checkout stands in the front of the stores, prices marked on each individual item and refrigerator cases for produce, all things we consider normal today. In 1916, they were considered unusual; shoppers at that time generally presented their lists to shopkeepers, who would then retrieve items for shoppers from the shelves.

Saunders’ chain took off like a rocket. By 1922, the chain had grown to 1,200 stores in 29 states. It had become such a desirable business property that Wall Street investors staged a raid on the company in 1923. Saunders battled them and lost. He eventually had to file for bankruptcy and give up all his interest in the chain.

Saunders continued to innovate with new chains, including the “Clarence Saunders Sole Owner of My Name Stores” in 1928, the Keedoozle automated stores in 1948, and Foodelectric in the early 1950s, a concept on which he was still perfecting when he died on Oct. 14, 1953.

Though Saunders lost control of Piggly Wiggly in 1923, the company continued to expand at a rapid pace throughout out the U.S., not just in the South.

Franchise rights were sold for various area of the country. In Southern California, A.B. De Nault and L.H. Ellis acquired the rights to the name in 1918, starting up the Piggly Wiggly Western States Company with two stores.

The West Coast chain grew quickly. By the middle of 1927, its 150 stores – 40 of which had opened that year – were bringing in more than $1 million a month in revenue.

By 1928, there were more than 200 Piggly Wiggly outlets in Southern California, including several in the South Bay and Harbor Area.

The downtown Torrance location had opened at 1315 Sartori Street on Saturday, Nov. 13, 1926, “the latest addition to this illustrious family of over 2000” Piggly Wiggly stores nationwide, as the grand opening ad proudly stated.

The Hermosa Beach location, regarded as that city’s first full-service grocery store, opened on Pier Avenue in space leased from the Kerwin Bakery.

Additional locations were at 815 Avalon Boulevard in Wilmington, 912 Palm Avenue in Gardena (opened April 16, 1927) and 188 N. Pacific Avenue in Redondo Beach. (Pacific Avenue was among the streets lost to the King Harbor and Redondo Beach redevelopment of the early 1960s.)

The chain’s success did not escape the notice of prospective buyers. Safeway Stores Inc., which had been acquiring smaller chains during its own rapid growth in 1928, announced in January 1929 that it would acquire the Piggly Wiggly Western States Company.

For the next few years, the stores operated under the cumbersome name of “Safeway and Piggly Wiggly,” but gradually the new owners began switching them over to Safeway Stores.

The Torrance Piggly Wiggly underwent this transformation in October 1934, when the inside of the Sartori Avenue story was gutted and transformed, and its name changed permanently to Safeway. After a brief but successful run, the Piggly Wiggly name began to fade from Southern California’s consciousness.

Today, over 600 Piggly Wiggly stores still operate in 17 states, mostly in the southeastern U.S. The company is owned by C&S Wholesale Grocers Inc.

Sources:

Los Angeles Times files.

New York Times files.

Piggly Wiggly website, http://www.pigglywiggly.com/about-us.

Torrance Herald files.

Contemporary accounts describe the first Factory Frolic held in Torrance in 1938 as the most successful community event staged in the city up until that time, with the largest parade and biggest crowds in city history.

With major industries now well-established in the city – Union Tool and Die, Columbia Steel, the Pacific Electric maintenance facility and dozens of others – city fathers decided Torrance needed a civic event celebrating local industry.

Torrance Herald Publisher Grover C. Whyte took credit for coming up with the name, “Factory Frolic,” to describe the all-new two-day slate of festivities scheduled for Oct. 28-29, 1938.

The city tapped J.E. “Jack” Miller of the Torrance Coordinating Council to head up planning starting in July 1938, three months before the actual event.

Miller came up with a wide-ranging menu of activities. These included a giant community parade, a smaller comedy parade, a bicycle parade for kids, hobby, handicraft and needlework exhibits, a carnival midway, sporting events including a horseshoes tournament and a  Torrance vs. Banning high school football game, dances, and, of course, exhibits and displays touting the city’s burgeoning roster of industries.

The parade was the centerpiece of the Frolic. It started on Carson Street by Torrance High School, then proceeded east to Cabrillo, winding through downtown Torrance streets before passing by the reviewing stand near the old City Hall on Cravens Avenue.

Townspeople were encouraged to dress in a certain simple way for the Frolic: denim overalls and workingmen’s caps for men, and house dresses and aprons for women.

After the fact, the Herald praised the Factory Frolic as “a combination of old-time county fair, homecoming and community jollification by Torrance people for the entertainment of Torrance people.”

The event mushroomed into a massive community event in 1939, and kept on growing bigger. Management of the Frolic was handed to the Torrance Chamber of Commerce in 1940, and they secured stage and screen star Leo Carrillo to be the grand marshal of the parade.

Wartime concerns interrupted the Frolic. Shortly before the U.S. entered World War II, it had been decided to forego the celebration and replace it with the Torrance Flower, Art and Hobby Show at the Civic Auditorium, a much smaller event. The Frolic would be on hiatus for several years.

In 1948, the Factory Frolic idea was revived on an even grander scale. The festival, which had expanded from two to three days in duration by 1940, morphed into a five-day fest for 1948.

The “Miss Industry” beauty pageant was held, with a trip to new York City as its grand prize. More than 70 booths were laid out, along with a large carnival midway, including a Ferris wheel and other rides.

By all accounts, it was the largest and most impressive Frolic yet.

The sky seemed to be the limit, and plans for the 1949 Frolic already were well under way at the time of the July 5, 1949 meeting of the Torrance Chamber.

But, at that session, the group abruptly dropped its sponsorship of the event. “It just didn’t seem feasible this year,” Chamber executive secretary Blaine Walker announced,  somewhat mysteriously.

A summit meeting of Torrance service clubs the following July 21 also shot down the idea of keeping the Frolic going. The Lions and the Optimists were for the endeavor, but the Kiwanis and Rotary voted no, noting that factory representatives now felt the expense wasn’t worth the return, and that most of the profits would be made by the outside amusement company that would operate at the proposed festival.

From then on, the Frolic-king stopped, though the chamber did hold smaller-scale crafts and community fairs in the city under various names during the 1950s.

Sources:

Historic Torrance: A Pictorial History of Torrance, California, by Dennis F. Shanahan and Charles Elliott, Jr., Legends Press, Redondo Beach, Calif., 1984.

Los Angeles Times files.

Torrance Herald files.

San Pedro’s main street may be named after him, but, for some reason, John Tracy Gaffey’s life story isn’t nearly as well known as that of Jared Sidney Torrance or Phineas Banning.

It deserves to be. He was an industrious man with a wide variety of business, political and civic interests whose rise to local prominence closely paralleled San Pedro’s rise as a business and trade center.

Gaffey was born in Galway, Ireland on Nov. 1, 1860. When his oldest brother, William, became wanted for sedition for his beliefs regarding Irish independence, his family felt the need to leave Ireland. They sailed to California in 1865, and settled in the San Jose area.

At the age of 20, Gaffey found his niche nearby in the then-small town of Santa Cruz, becoming a reporter for the Santa Cruz Courier in 1879. He later founded his own small paper, the influential but short-lived Santa Cruz Herald.

After a couple of years, he left newspapering to become a law clerk for the California State Supreme Court.

On a trip to Los Angeles in 1882, he met Dolores and Arcadia Bandini, daughters of Juan Batista Bandini, who was the grandson of pioneer Spanish California settler Jose Bandini.

Gaffey ended up moving to Los Angeles in 1882. In 1887 he was elected to the State Board of Equalization.

That same year, he also married Arcadia Bandini in a private ceremony at St. Vibiana’s Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles. They would remain married until Gaffey’s death in 1935.

Gaffey also became campaign manager for Stephen M. White, who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1892. He later would work closely with White first in the establishment of San Pedro as the harbor for Los Angeles, then late in the consolidation of San Pedro and Wilmington with the City of Los Angeles in 1909, which brought the harbor under control of the city of Los Angeles.

Also in 1892, Arcadia and Dolores Bandini came into some good fortune. It was discovered that they had not received their proper inheritance when their grandfather, Jose Diego Sepulveda, died. The mistake was rectified with the awarding of 340 acres of land in the middle of San Pedro to them, a possession that set the family up for life.

According to historical accounts, Gaffey was a bit of a dreamer and a speculator, trying his hand at investments in mining and oil drilling. His success varied, but the possession of the family land holdings kept him financially solvent through various real estate dealings.

He also held a variety of government posts and began to wield considerable political influence, mostly behind the scenes. In addition to being a member of the State Board of Equalization, he was a Los Angeles City Councilman from 1890 to 1893 and was appointed Collector of Customs for the District of Los Angeles by President Grover Cleveland, serving in that post from 1896-1900.

Around 1904 or 1905, Gaffey decided to move the family from Los Angeles to San Pedro and start a formal real estate business based on the family’s land holdings. He built a rustic wooden ranch house there in 1906, at 1131 West Third Street.

Soon after moving in, the family decided to build a larger, safer stone house on the site, perhaps influenced by fears raised by the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. They moved the wood house to a lot across the street and built a massive three-story stone residence at a then-outrageous cost of $35,000, which the family moved into in 1909.

The house, named Hacienda La Rambla, became a local landmark. It was situated on the Bandini property, atop a small canyon. Gaffey later had a chapel built on the estate where one of his daughters, Margaret, was married in 1914.

In 1907, he formed the Gaffey Investment Company, with offices at 100 Sixth Street. He later moved to 333 West Sixth, where the building, with its plaque memorializing Gaffey,  still stands today.

Gaffey didn’t miss a trick in promoting the sale of subdivided lots from the family’s real estate holdings. After the U.S. Congress selected San Pedro as the future harbor site for Los Angeles in 1897, he held two giant barbecues that drew thousands of people – prospective customers – to celebrate. He also headed the gigantic celebration heralding the arrival of the Great White Fleet off the San Pedro coast in 1908, another boon to local real estate marketing.

Over the next couple of decades, Gaffey continued to be active in local politics as well as various business interests, including the ambitious but failed Pacific Warehouse and Storage Company and investments in Mexican mining operations. In the 1920s, he invested heavily in petroleum stocks, and the family was hit hard by the 1929 stock market crash as a result.

In 1929, he came out in favor of a concept that never came to pass, the unification of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, feeling that the consolidation of the two would strengthen Los Angeles’ hold as the center of West Coast foreign trade.

Gaffey was a tireless worker and a heavy smoker, and the years of hard work began to catch up to him. He contracted pneumonia in 1934, and died on Jan. 1, 1935.

He was buried in Saint Francis Cemetery in Watsonville, Calif.

Even with the effects of the Depression, Gaffey still left an estate worth $236,000 – a tidy sum for 1935 – to his wife, Arcadia. She died at 86 in 1948.

The family continued to live at the Gaffey estate until it was sold to the Podesta family during the 1940s. The Podestas later sold the mansion portion of the property to the Y.M.C.A., which demolished Hacienda La Rambla in 1964 so that its new building could be erected there.

But the original wooden house across the street still stands.

Sources:

“The Gaffey Family of San Pedro,” by John T. Gaffey II, San Pedro Bay Historicial Society Shoreline, Vol. 31, No. 1, June 2004. (This article would not have been possible without this resource.)

Los Angeles Times files.

As the Los Angeles area grew in the early decades of the 20th Century, it became apparent that its water system would never be able to handle the pressure on its pipes necessary to deliver water to all the new areas being developed.

A series of regional reservoirs would be needed to serve as collection and distribution points to area residents. The Metropolitan Water District invested about $1 million in the construction of just such a structure that would serve the South Bay, the Palos Verdes Reservoir. It opened in 1939.

Located in Rolling Hills Estates at the southeast corner of the intersection of Palos Verdes Drive North and Palos Verdes Drive East, the pear-shaped open-air facility is 1500 feet long, 1200 feet wide, and was built to a depth of 75 feet. When first constructed, it could hold 325 million gallons of water; this later was increased to 358.6 million gallons.

It was fed at first by a water line that brought water from the Colorado River to the ever-thirstier, ever-growing Los Angeles area. In the early 1970s, the reservoir also began receiving water from Northern California as part of the Feather River Project.

The reservoir always has been more a of a distribution facility than a mere storage tank, its feeder lines serving much of the southern South Bay and the Harbor Area.

For its first few decades, it also served as an attractive open-water lake to spruce up the views of nearby residents.

But, as an open-air facility, its water was subject to contamination from wildlife in the area, especially birds. Bird droppings, feathers, bits of fish carried by seagulls, all were finding their way into the reservoir’s water and causing its bacteria levels to rise.

At first, MWD personnel used periodic small explosions, typically shotgun blasts and firecrackers, to keep the birds away. In October 1969, complaints from residents about the noisy practice reached the Rolling Hills Estates City Council, which ultimately decided that cleaner water was worth the inconvenience of the occasional noise.

In the mid-1970s, the MWD discovered a noiseless solution. Stringing piano wire around the reservoir discouraged the birds from flying over the water by disrupting their flight patterns.

Unfortunately, analyses of the reservoir’s water in the late 1970s still indicated high levels of bacteria from external sources. Water officials had to begin pumping large amounts of chlorine into the water to counteract the pollutants, an estimated 100,000 pounds of it between 1983 and 1985 alone. In addition, the MWD had to use copper sulfate, a substance with carcinogenic properties, to keep algae from reproducing.

The water quality problems also kept the MWD from using the reservoir’s full capacity. It had to be kept only half full to minimize the amount of time the water was exposed to the elements.

In 1985, the water district proposed a solution which has been used to this day, and which keeps bacterial pollution at minimal levels: a cover.

Residents objected to the loss of their view of the blue reservoir waters when the idea first was proposed in 1982, but the prospect of growing water contamination and the resulting increased need for chemical treatment caused the $6 million project to be approved.

Work on the cover took five months, and was completed in May 1988.

The quarter-inch-thick rubber covering, which rises and falls with the water level, did its job, immediately reducing the bacterial contamination in the water. By keeping light off the water, it also slowed down algae growth caused by sunlight.

The cover does cause one problem, though. Passersby keep wondering why the giant reservoir looks empty, and when water will be put in it.

MWD personnel do perform regular maintenance on the huge bowl, scrubbing its concrete surfaces every few years.

In October 2011, the facility underwent a major upgrade. The 1988 cover was removed and replaced with a new one, and a new lining and drain system was installed in the reservoir.

The Palos Verdes Reservoir is closed to the public.

Sources:

Daily Breeze files.

Los Angeles Times files.

In the early days of the harbor at San Pedro, the channels weren’t deep enough to allow ocean steamships to navigate right up to the two docks in the area, Timms Landing in San Pedro and Banning’s Landing in Wilmington.

The latter was owned by prominent Harbor Area shipping and mercantile magnate Phineas Banning, who had seen the potential of the area as a harbor shortly after arriving there in 1851.

In order to bring goods from the steamers to the shore, it became necessary to use smaller tugboats that could navigate the shallow waters. Banning owned several such utility boats, and in 1861 he bought another one, the Milton Willis.

He renamed her the Ada Hancock after the daughter of his friend Winfield Hancock, a distinguished military general who later would run for president against James Garfield in 1880.

The Ada Hancock made regular runs to ships further out in the harbor. On April 27, 1863, it carried a load of passengers out to the ocean liner The Senator, which would transport some of them to San Francisco.

The remainder of the guests on board went along on the ride to bid the travelers farewell. They included many members of Banning’s family, including his pregnant wife, Rebecca, her mother, Hannah Sanford and Banning’s sons William and Joseph, as well as Phineas himself.

On its second run to The Senator, the Ada Hancock encountered a violent squall which caused the boat to take on water. When the cold sea water hit its  boiler, it exploded, causing one of the deadliest West Coast sea disasters on record as of that time.

26 of the 53 passengers on board the Ada Hancock died. The captains of both the Ada Hancock and The Senator, Joseph Bryant and Thomas Seely,  perished in the blast, as did Wells Fargo messenger William Ritchie, who was accompanying a shipment of $10,000 that was lost in the explosion.

Also killed were Dr. Henry Myles and his fiancee Medora Hereford, who were traveling to San Francisco to be married. Hereford survived the explosion but died from her injuries the following July.

Other casualties included Banning’s company clerk Thomas Workman, two Mormon missionaries on their way to the Sandwich Islands and Rebecca Banning’s brother, William Sanford.

Rebecca’s mother was seriously injured and survived, as were Banning’s sons, William and Joseph, who also survived. Though also injured, Rebecca herself survived, though the baby she was carrying died shortly after birth the following October, probably from injuries suffered during the blast. (Mother and the unnamed child are buried in Wilmington Cemetery.)

As for Banning himself, he was thrown at least a hundred feet by the force of the blast and suffered some injuries, but survived.

The injured were taken to the base hospital at Camp Drum in Wilmington (now known as the Drum Barracks), whose soldiers also immediately were dispatched to help at the scene of the disaster.

Since it was his boat on which the tragedy occurred, Banning was racked by guilt and paid the expenses of many of the victims. In the decades that followed, he became one of the most influential figures in the development of the Harbor Area. He died peacefully on March 8, 1885.

For years afterward, rumors persisted that as much as $125,000 in gold had gone down with the Ada Hancock and lie buried in the harbor. The treasure supposedly was stolen by Louis Schlesinger in concert with Wells Fargo messenger Ritchie, both of who perished on the ship. Persistent and diligent research by Wells Fargo historians has debunked this myth, however.

Sources:

The Beat of the Drum: The History, Events and People of Drum Barracks, Wilmington, California, by Don McDowell, 1993.

“A Gold Coin Treasure in San Pedro Bay? – or – Just Another Tale of Wells Fargo?” by Walt Ostromecki, NLG, The California Numismatist, COIN Week website, May 17, 2011.

Find A Grave website.

Grand Ventures: The Banning Family and the Shaping of Southern California, by Tom Sitton, Huntington Library, 2010.

New York Times files.

“Of History and Fantasy,” by Charles Riggs, Guided By History blog, Wells Fargo & Co., May 30, 2008.

 

The facts of the case seemed simple at first.

Lumber dealer August Lindstrom, a Lomita resident who lived on Pennsylvania Avenue, died on Feb, 9, 1931, ostensibly from a heart attack.

In fact, he already had been buried for several days in a Williams, Ariz., grave when one of his three sons, Chicago meat packer Peter H. Lindstrom, noticed some discrepancies in going over his father’s bookkeeping records.

The authorities were notified, and the elder Lindstrom’s body was exhumed from its new resting place in Williams and ordered shipped to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office for an autopsy, which had not been performed when he died.

Suspicions arose that Lindstrom had been murdered for his money, especially when it came to light that his live-in housekeeper of several years, Mrs. Esther Carlson, 61, had gotten her name added to Lindstrom’s bank account. Carlson had come to work for Lindstrom after the death of her husband in Hemet in 1925.

When the coroner’s autopsy revealed that Lindstrom had died of arsenic poisoning, Carlson immediately was brought in for questioning. A neighbor of Lindstrom’s and friend of Carlson’s, Anna Erickson, 42, also was stricken with arsenic poisoning and was near death in the hospital at the time. She, too, was under suspicion.

Both women allegedly pressured the deputy coroner at the time of Lindstrom’s death – his body was take to Stone & Myers funeral home in Torrance – to issue a death certificate immediately, stating a heart attack to be the cause of death and avoid an autopsy. (Stone & Myers later became Halverson, Stone & Myers.)

Further investigating revealed that Carlson had gotten her name added on as a signer to Lindstrom’s bank account a week before his death, and that she had arranged to withdraw the entire $2,000 amount in the account, a small fortune in the Depression era, the day after Lindstrom died. (Carlson also had gotten her name added to the title on Lindstrom’s Lomita house.)

Erickson began to recover from her poisoning, which she claimed occurred when she drank a cup of coffee in Carlson’s house after Lindstrom’s death. (Carlson denied the charge.)

Erickson also accused Carlson of being behind Lindstrom’s death when interviewed by authorities while recovering at her hospital bed in General Hospital (now known as Los Angeles County USC Medical Center). Carlson threw back charges of her own, and both women were kept in custody for further questioning.

That’s when the case really got interesting.

Among the charges levelled by Erickson at Carlson were that her the death of Carlson’s  husband and another man in Hemet in 1925 occurred under very suspicious circumstances. Erickson repeatedly told authorities that Carlson had told her that she was “sick of taking care of old men.”

On Feb. 24, 1931, both women were charged with murder in the poisoning death of Lindstrom, and were bound over for trial on March 10.

In April, Carlson, who suffered from tuberculosis, became gravely ill while awaiting trial. Authorities continued to grill her as she lay on her deathbed, and she continued to deny all charges against her.

Though Carlson was too ill to stand trial, Erickson had mostly recovered, and the case against her went ahead on April 30. Just as Erickson’s trial was beginning, some startling suspicions held by authorities about Mrs. Esther Carlson became public.

Prosecutors announced they were summoning witnesses from La Porte, Indiana, to verify if the true identity of the woman lying at death’s door in the hospital bed was not Esther Carlson, but notorious serial killer Belle Gunness under an assumed name.

The Norwegian immigrant Gunness had a long history of disposing of her husbands, beginning with the “accidental” hatchet death of her husband, Mads Albert Sorenson, in 1900.

She was exonerated, and collected on his life insurance policies before marrying Peter Gunness in 1902 and repeating the process of marriage followed by the husband’s mysterious death for the next several years. She was blamed for ten such deaths between 1902 and 1908.

In 1908, the law began catching up to her crimes. She responded by torching the Indiana house where she lived with her three children. All three of them were killed. She also placed a decapitated woman’s body inside the burning house, so authorities would think she had died along with her children. Then she disappeared.

Two of the witnesses brought in from Iowa seemed convinced that Carlson was Gunness, but no conclusive proof ever was established, even though photographs of Belle Gunness’ three children were found in Carlson’s possessions, along with bottles of poison.

Before any definitive identification could be made, Esther Carlson died on May 6, 1931, from tuberculosis.

The trial of Anna Erickson continued for another week. The jury returned a not guilty verdict on May 13, 1931, with Erickson collapsing in a faint when she heard the good news, according to news accounts.

August Lindstrom’s estate was reconstituted, including the purloined $2,000, and found to total $5,000. It was distributed to his three sons, Peter, Charles and Amos.

The goings-on at the Lindstrom house in Lomita didn’t deter a state’s witness in the case, J.F. Klein, from purchasing the Pennsylvania Avenue house in July 1931 as his new residence.

Despite the strong circumstantial evidence and the statements of the Indiana witnesses, authorities never could state definitively that Carlson and Gunness were the same person. Gunness ultimately was determined to be responsible for more than 40 deaths during her lifetime.

There were no other suspects in Lindstrom’s killing once Carlson died and Erickson was acquitted. His murderer never was brought to justice.

 

Sources:

Belle Gunneson entry, A Bit of History website. (Find the “Gunness” entry under “G” after clicking on the “Women of History” link.)

“Belle’s Story: The Short Version,” La Porte (Ind.) County Public Library System website.

Bloodletters and Badmen: A Narrative Encyclopedia of American Criminals From the Pilgrims to the Present, by Jay Robert Nash, M. Evans and Company, 1995.

Daily Breeze files.

Los Angeles Times files.

Torrance Herald files.

 

 

 

 

Redondo Beach’s Seaside Lagoon, an enclosed swimming area on the southwest corner of Harbor Drive and Portofino Way in King Harbor, has its origins in the development of the King Harbor area in the early 1960s.

Basing the idea on the city’s immensely popular enclosed salt-water plunge that opened in 1908 and drew thousands of tourists, the city included a warm salt-water swimming lagoon as part of the development plans for King Harbor, opening the project to bids in June 1960.

The R.R. Hensler Co. of Sun Valley won the bidding process, and by March 1961, the pool project was more than half completed. The cost was $166,000, which included the 500-foot pool, a landscaped park area and dressing rooms for bathers.

The water for the lagoon is kept warm by recycled ocean water that has been piped in to cool the turbines of the steam generating power plant nearby. The warm water is then chlorinated before being pumped into Seaside Lagoon, and dechlorinated before being cycling back out into the ocean.

As the project neared completion, the city awarded the operation of the marine park over to a private leaseholder, Attilio Donato. Donato envisioned a Polynesian theme for the pool, naming it Pirate’s Isle when he opened it in the summer of 1963. In addition to operating the swimming area, he had also agreed with the city to build an elaborate restaurant on the site, but progress on its development was slow.

Pirate’s Isle proved to be a popular attraction, but Donato soon became embroiled with the city in a variety of legal disputes, some of which centered on lease deadlines for construction of the restaurant. By 1964, Donato and the city were embroiled in a morass of suits and countersuits.

The legal wrangling continued until December 1965, when a judge ruled that the city had the right to evict Donato from Pirate’s Isle because he had not fulfilled his lease requirements with regard to deadlines for construction requirements. Donato was removed, and the city took control of the property.

In February 1966, the Redondo Beach City Council announced plans to reopen the lagoon as Redondo Beach Marine Park that May, authorizing money for operating expenses and renovations. These included additional picnic areas, a children’s play area and barbecue pits.

Marine Park officially opened to the public on Saturday, April 30, 1966. After several weeks of being open on weekends,  full daily operation began on May 30, 1966. The park, open generally from Memorial Day to Labor Day, proved to be very successful, and the city made plans for continued improvements.

In 1969, Councilman David Hayward made an unusual suggestion for a way to use the lagoon during the off-season. His plan was to stock the lagoon with fish and open it to anglers on weekends. The council shelved the idea when a preliminary study showed that it would cost $30,000 a year, and only bring in $4,000 a year in revenue.

In 1975, the city decided that the name “Marine Park” wasn’t very descriptive of the lagoon. A contest was held to rename the facility, with the park’s lifeguards serving as judges of the 744 entries received from the school and the community.

Jim Perry, a fourth-grader at Lincoln School, won a season pass and a $25 savings bond with his suggestion, “SeaSide Lagoon.” Other non-winning suggestions included Happy Time Park, Salt Water Wonderland and Oceana Lagoon Park.

The city had to spend $2 million in improvements to the facility after it closed in 1997. Most of the money went to repair structural damage caused by the 1994 Northridge earthquake, including cracked pipes, faulty pumps and damaged diving towers. FEMA paid for the majority of the earthquake-related repairs.

Unfortunately, the work could not be completed in time for the lagoon to be used the following summer. Seaside Lagoon ended up being closed for all of 1998.

When it reopened on Memorial Day Weekend in 1999, the refurbished park included new white sands, play equipment, shade structures and palapas that gave it the feeling of a tropical retreat. The result was a 75 percent increase in attendance for the 1999 season, bringing in the biggest crowds in Seaside Lagoon’s history.

A few years later, water quality issues began to plague the popular facility, despite the introduction of a new filtration system. Elevated bacteria counts in the water flowing out to the ocean increased in 2005, and had become a serious problem by 2006. Fines from water regulators began to pile up, $150,000 worth of them between 2002 and 2008.

The ongoing problems didn’t faze filmmaker Tom Kearney and ice skating coach Scott Williams, who in 2007 convinced the city to allow them to install a 50-by-80 foot temporary ice rink on the sands of Seaside Lagoon. “Seaside Ice,” as it was called, was considered to be the closest ice rink ever built by an ocean when it opened for the first time in November 2008. The Los Angeles Kings made a special visit to the facility in December 2008.

The pair operated Seaside Ice for two seasons before running into financial difficulties that kept them from continuing the rink.

Water quality issues continued to plague Seaside Lagoon, but a Facebook campaign by residents and support from City Council members led to the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board relaxing some of its testing standards in May 2010, allowing the facility to continue operating.

In 2012, another major upgrade occurred at the park with the opening of a brand-new $1.2 million main building, which included new restrooms and changing areas. The new building was part of a city waterfront renovation project that began in December 2011.
In addition to upgrading its appearance, the investment in improvements signaled the city’s continuing support for Seaside Lagoon.

Redondo Beach’s annual Lobster Festival has been held at Seaside Lagoon for many years, usually in the fall. The lagoon itself usually opens for daily business beginning in late May and running thorough Labor Day.

The post-World War II Atomic Age spawned one of the more frenzied fads of the fad-crazy 1950s: prospecting for uranium.

The scarce, naturally occurring metal was discovered by German chemist Martin Klaproth in 1789, and Henri Becquerel identified uranium’s radioactive nature in Paris in 1896.

The Enrico Fermi-led team of scientists working in the U.S. discovered nuclear fission in the late 1930s, and staged the first nuclear chain reaction in Chicago on Nov. 2, 1942, which led to the eventual deployment of atomic bombs in 1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, ending World War II in the Pacific.

The ensuing buildup in Cold War tensions led to an arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and government demand for uranium increased.

The Atomic Energy Commission was created in 1946 to oversee the use of nuclear power in both its military and civilian applications.

In 1948, the AEC became the only legal purchaser of uranium mined in the U.S., and announced that it would purchase it from private mining companies.

This opened the door for the uranium boom. The race was on to locate uranium and submit it to the government for purchase, and the news soon reached those interested in making a quick killing off of uranium: miners, prospectors, rock hounds and weekend dabblers.

Geiger counters and all other kinds equipment for uranium hunting began hitting the marketplace as thousands of prospectors began heading out to possible uranium sites in the West.

It quickly got crazy out there, with rumors of those hitting it rich spread like

wildfire.

Some of them even were true. Charlie Steen invested $1,000 to mine an area near Moab, Utah, where he made a uranium strike on July 6, 1952 that ended up being worth millions.

When word got out of uranium discoveries in California, in the Kern River Canyon area of Kern County in mid-March 1954, the local rush was on.

Newspaper accounts of the day relate gun toting, claim jumping, careless dynamiting, cattle stampeding and general disorder and lawlessness in the area.

According to the Torrance Press, Walt Phillips of Torrance was among the thousands who headed out to Bakersfield. He reported finding surface uranium ore in the Tehachapi Mountains with a concentration of .052 percent. The AEC was accepting ore with a .10 percent level, so Phillips and his unnamed partner, the land owner, felt optimistic that richer ore lie further beneath ground.

The government at the time was paying $3,000 a ton for .10 percent ore, and $7,000 a ton for .20 percent concentrations.

Phillips, a former gold prospector, had been looking for uranium for less than a year at the time of the strike.

The Torrance Herald also ran a photo of Torrance residents Gregory Jenkins and Tom Webb hard at work prospecting in Bakersfield in March 1955, shortly after the government released new maps of the area.

In February 1955, two Harbor City men, Sim Bramlette and Roy Johnson, reported finding uranium in the Mojave Desert area. They reported it had a .38 concentration. The pair, who both worked at the Central Market in Lomita, formed a partnership with two other men to form the Big Four Mining and Milling Corporation.

They planned to use placer mining, where water is used to wash ore out of the soil, after discovering an underground river nearby.

The media was quick to react to the cultural phenomenon. “The Jack Benny Show” did an episode on it during the craze’s first flush, 1949:

A couple of exploitation movies hit screens in 1956, “Uranium Boom,” with Dennis Morgan and William Talman ( before he played Hamilton Burger on “Perry Mason”), and “Dig That Uranium,” with the Bowery Boys.

Local amateur rockhound groups such as the American Prospectors Club were still carting geiger counters out to the desert and other remote areas in 1958 in search of uranium ore.

By 1960, though, the U.S. Government had stockpiled enough uranium to meet its needs, and it no longer supported purchasing the metal through private parties, effectively killing off the boom among amateur fortune-hunters.

The overall market for uranium fell off in the late 1970s and 1980s when prices for lower-grade American ore declined and demand fell due to a variety of factors including higher-grade foreign ore, anti-nuclear sentiment and lower demand.

Rockabilly singer Warren Smith may have summed it up best when he sang about the craze in this little ditty recorded in 1958, which remained unreleased until the 1970s:

Sources:

Los Angeles Times files.

Torrance Express files.

Torrance Herald files.

“The Uranium Rush – 1949,” National Radiation Instrument Catalog website, http://national-radiation-instrument-catalog.com/new_page_14.htm.

 

Further reading:

Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World, By Tom Zoellner, Penguin Books, 2010.

Further listening:

Deluxe version:

Atomic Platters: Cold War Music from the Golden Age of Homeland Security, Various artists, Bear Family Records, 2005.

Economy version:

Like an Atom Bomb: Apocalyptic Songs from the Cold War Era, Various artists, Buzzola Records, 2004.

Big Joe Turner’s original 1954 version of “Shake, Rattle and Roll” endures as one of early rock ‘n’ roll’s most primal moments.

But it’s only part of his story, which begins with his birth as Joseph Vernon Turner Jr. in Kansas City, Mo., on May 3, 1911, and ends in a cemetery in Harbor Gateway.

In between, Turner lived an amazing life. He dropped out of school at 14 to sing in the nightclubs of Kansas City’s then-thriving music scene. His booming voice and fortuitous pairing with piano player Pete Johnson brought him eventually to Carnegie Hall in New York City to play the “Spirituals to Swing” concert for talent scout John Hammond in 1938.

The high-profile concert got Turner recognition, and he formed a band with Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis which began to appear regularly in the Cafe Society nightclub in New York City. His first record, “Roll Em Pete,” came out on the Vocalion label in 1939, and it’s a rocking boogie-woogie piano tour de force.

Throughout the 1940s, Turner continued to play music that mixed elements of boogie woogie, jazz, and jump blues. He was versatile, playing with a wide variety of musicians in different musical settings, and recording for several small labels.

His popularity continued to grow, and in April 1951, he played with Count Basie’s orchestra at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. That show led to his signing with Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records, a move which brought him popular stardom.

His records for Atlantic pioneered and presaged the rock ‘n’ roll explosion that lie right around the corner. “Chains of Love,” “Honey Hush,” and many others proved increasingly popular with record buyers, and Atlantic’s publicity department began promoting him as “The Boss of the Blues.”

In April 1954, he recorded “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” and Bill Haley & the Comets took a sanitized version to the top of the pop charts a year later. Big Joe’s rock ‘n’ roll legacy was secure.

After several more big hits (“Flip, Flop and Fly,” “Corrine, Corrina”), Turner returned to performing blues and jazz music in small clubs, something he would continue to do for the rest of his career.

By the 1970s, he was performing at blues festivals even though he had been slowed by diabetes. He settled in South Los Angeles with his wife, Patricia. In 1983, he was voted into the Blues Hall of Fame, and also released an album, “Blues Train,” recorded with blues

revivalists Roomful of Blues.

Despite having to perform in a chair onstage, Turner continued to play club shows, drawing rave reviews for a 1982 Club Lingerie peformance in Hollywood where he was backed by members of The Blasters and saxophone legend Lee Allen.

He played frequently at Concerts By The Sea in Redondo Beach, the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, and other area clubs. In June 1985, he even played a Father’s Day gig at the Ms. Whis Cocktail Lounge in Long Beach.

Unfortunately, a gig in September 1985 at the Tramps nightclub in New York City would be his last.

Big Joe Turner died of heart failure on Nov. 24, 1985, after being admitted to Daniel Freeman Hospital in Inglewood. He had suffered a stroke two weeks earlier.

The Los Angeles musical community gathered at the Angeles Crenshaw Chapel on Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles on Saturday, Nov. 30, 1985 to pay tribute to him at his funeral. Guests included Ertegun, Dave and Phil Alvin of the Blasters, blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon, members of the Coasters and hundreds of other fans and admirers.

Unfortunately, Turner died penniless. He was buried in an unmarked grave at Roosevelt Memorial Cemetery in Harbor Gateway.

That remained the case for several years. In 1991, though, Akio Yamanaka, editor of the Japanese blues magazine Juke, made a pilgrimage to the cemetery to visit Turner’s grave and was shocked to find no marker or notation of any kind at the spot.

His discovery helped launch the Joe Turner Fund, whose original goal was to raise enough money to have Turner’s body moved to Inglewood Park Cemetery, where more elaborate headstones were allowed. (Roosevelt only permits flat grave markers.)

A benefit was held at the Music Machine club in West Los Angeles starring the Alvin brothers from the Blasters, Top Jimmy, Long Beach’s Bernie Pearl Blues Band and Rosie Flores, among others.

Through that show and other fundraising efforts, enough money was raised to have a special grave marker installed at Roosevelt that includes on it Turner, his wife and his sister. (The original plans to move the graves to Inglewood never came to fruition.)

Still, it’s not a bad place of rest for the larger-than-life Turner, this peaceful spot in an out-of-the-way cemetery at the base of a stately old tree. After all the beautiful noise he made during his long and productive life, he now has quiet.

Sources:

Daily Breeze files.

Los Angeles Times files.