1944 (1943) (1945) (1940-1950) Table of Contents
Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp. 1944 Irvin Cobb [1876-1944]
Raymond Chandler The Lady in the Lake Knopf: NY, 1944 See Text
Donald M. Cleland A History of the Santa Monica Schools 1876-1951, Santa Monica Unified School District, February 1952 (Copied for the Santa Monica Library, July 22, 1963). 140 pp., 1944 See Text
Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, Barry M. Heisler Introduction Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1990, 1944 See Text
Frank MacShane (ed.) Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, Columbia University Press: NY, 1981, 501pp., 1981, 1944 See Text
Jeffrey Stanton Santa Monica Pier A History from 1875 to 1990, Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1990, 1944, See Text
Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1947, 1944, 1943, 1940s See Text
Documents
Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp. 1944
"[p. 355] Irvin Cobb [1876-1944] has come recently to the film colony and lives at Santa Monica. Unlike most of the others, he brought his democracy with him, taking an impetuous role in the political campaign against his fellow author, Upton Sinclair. Cobb is a friendly soul and mingles with the life of the colony, no first-class soiree being complete without him."
Raymond Chandler The Lady in the Lake Knopf: NY, 1944
"To the north was the cool blue sweep of the bay out to the point above Malibu. To the south the beach town of Bay City was spread out on a bluff above the coast highway." p. ?
" . . .
"We don't like peepers down here. We don't have one in town." (p. 17)
"Go on -- beat it," he said. "Stay off our reservation, and you won't make any enemies." (p. 18)
- a Bay City detective-lieutenant to Marlowe
" . . .
"A siren whined far off, growing louder with great surges of sound. Tires screamed at a corner, and the siren wail died to a metallic growl, then to silence, and the tires screamed again in front of the house. The Bay City police conserving rubber." (p. 82)
[Laura Martin*: this was during wartime - the book opens with a rubber sidewalk being dug up for the war effort]
" . . .
"People in your line make a lot of trouble," he said.
"Not necessarily," I said.
"He raised his voice. It had been sharp enough before. "I said they made a lot of trouble, and a lot of trouble is what I meant. But get this straight. You're not going to make any in Bay City."
"I didn't answer him. He jabbed a forefinger at me.
"You're from the big town," he said. "You think you're tough and you think you're wise. Don't worry. We can handle you. We're a small place, but we're very compact. We don't have any political tug-of-war down here. We work on the straight line and we work fast. Don't worry about us, mister." (p. 86)
[LM: Captain of the Bay City police to Marlowe (and of course the Bay City cops turn out to be just as crooked as any]
" . . .
"I thought they cleaned this town up," I said. "I thought they had it so that a decent man could walk the streets at night without wearing a bullet proof vest."
"They cleaned it up some," he said. "They wouldn't want it too clean. They might scare away a dirty dollar." (p. 102)
- a Bay City police officer to Marlowe
" . . .
"It was a very nice jail. It was on the twelfth floor of the new city hall. It was a very nice city hall. Bay City was a very nice place. People lived there and thought so. If I lived there, I would probably think so. I would see the nice blue bay and the cliffs and the yacht harbor and the quiet streets of houses, old houses brooding under old trees and new houses with sharp green lawns and wire fences and staked saplings set into the parkway in front of them. I knew a girl who lived on Twenty-fifth Street. It was a nice street. She was a nice girl. She liked Bay City.
"She wouldn't think about the Mexican and Negro slums stretched out on the dismal flats south of the old interurban tracks. Nor of the waterfront dives along the flat shore south of the cliffs, the sweaty little dance halls on the pike, the marijuana joints, the narrow fox faces watching over the tops of newspapers in far too quiet hotel lobbies, nor the pickpockets and grifters and con men and drunk rollers and pimps and queens on the board walk." (p. 103)
Donald M. Cleland A History of the Santa Monica Schools 1876-1951, Santa Monica Unified School District, February 1952 (Copied for the Santa Monica Library, July 22, 1963). 140 pp., 1944
By 1944, it had become evident that additional buildings and equipment were needed to meet the needs of increased enrollments brought about by the upsurge of population during the war. But to the Board of Education it was equally clear that the building needs of the district would have to be met by some means other than current tax funds. Accordingly, the Board requested Percy R. Davis, Superintendent of Schools from 1932 to 1948, and his staff to estimate the needs of the elementary and junior high schools, the high school, and the junior college. [72. Johnson, op. cit., p. 17.] Results of this survey revealed the necessity of raising $3,500,000 for the various schools, and a proposed bond issue in that amount was placed before the voters of the Santa Monica School District. The bond issue carried, and $1,283,000 was earmarked for the purpose of building a new city college. At that time it was proposed that half the bungalows, which were still in use at the old campus [Prospect Hill], be moved to the new site and remodeled. The other half of the needed buildings were to be of new, one-story, frame-and-stucco construction to conform to the architectural style of the remodeled bungalows. [73. Ibid., p. 18.]
Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, Barry M. Heisler Introduction Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1990, 1944
Lorser Feitelson (1898-1978), 1990,
". . . Like Krasnow and Macdonald-Wright*, Feitelson learned to paint at an early age, . . . After seeing the Armory Show in 1913, where the works of Cezanne, Matisse, Gleizes, and DuChamp impressed him . . . Extended stays in Paris between 1919 and 1927 . . . despite his success, Feitelson, like Merrild, Krasnow, and Macdonald-Wright*, felt dissatisfied with the quality of life in Manhattan, and thus ventured to Los Angeles in November 1927."
" . . .
" . . . From 1937 to 1943, he brought art to the public as Southern California supervisor of the Federal Art Project's easel painting, sculpture, and mural division. . . .
" . . . In 1944 he joined the faculty of the Art Center School . . . where he arranged a screening of Oskar Fischinger's films and a Stanton Macdonald-Wright* retrospective. . . .
" . . . In November 1948, . . . one of Feitelson's Federal Art Project murals and one painted by Lundeberg {his wife} under his aegis were accused of being Communist-inspired. . . .
" . . . In 1951, . . . The municipal exhibition in Griffith Park for which he was the juror was attacked by right-wing factions as being Communistic. . . . he . . . castigated Councilman Harold Harby who had denounced the art as "stinkweed stuff." . . . "
Frank MacShane Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, Columbia University Press: NY, 1981, 501pp., 1981, 1944
"Dear Charles Morton, (October 12th, 1944)
" . . . The Big Sleep . . . sold to Warners and Howard Hawks is even now shooting a picture from it with Bogart and a new girl (Lauren Bacall) . . . Bill Faulkner and a girl named Leigh Brackett wrote the script. . . .
"The other day I thought of your suggestion for an article of studied insult about the Bay City (Santa Monica) police. A couple of D.A.'s investigators got a tip about a gambling hell in Ocean Park, a sleazy adjunct to Santa Monica. They went down there and picked up a couple of Santa Monica cops on the way, telling them they were going to kick in a box, but not telling them where it was. The cops went along with the natural reluctance of good cops to enforce the law against a paying customer, and when they found out where the place was, they mumbled brokenly: "We'd ought to talk to Captain Brown about this before we do it, boys, Captain Brown ain't going to like this." The D.A.'s men urged them heartlessly forward into the chip and bone parlor, several alleged gamblers were tossed into the sneezer and the equipment seized for evidence (a truckload of it) was stored in lockers at local police headquarters. When the D.A.'s boys came back next morning to go over it everything had disappeared but a few handfuls of white poker chips. The locks had not been tampered with, and no trace could be found of the truck or the driver. The flatfeet shook their grizzled polls in bewilderment and the investigators went back to town to hand the Jury the story. Nothing will come of it. Nothing ever does. Do you wonder why I love Bay City? Alas, that its gambling ships are no more. The present governor of California (Earl Warren, Governor of California and later Chief Justice of the United States) won his office by disposing of them. Others had tried (or pretended to) for years and years. But there was always the legal argument as to whether the 12-mile limit should be measured from this place or that. Warren solved it very simply, and no doubt quite illegally. He commandeered enough boats and deputies to surround the ships and keep anyone from leaving them or reaching them. Then he just stayed there until they gave up.
"A real clinical study of such a town would be fascinating reading."
"Sincerely, Raymond Chandler"
Jeffrey Stanton Santa Monica Pier A History from 1875 to 1990, Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1990.
Chapter 5: Santa Monica Pier on the Skids (1941-1974)
"The La Monica Auditorium reopened in the spring of 1944 as the Palisades Dance Hall, considering its proximity to their hotels, it was only mildly popular with the visiting troops. Most soldiers preferred either Ocean Park's or Venice's more exciting amusement zones that offered roller coasters, fun houses, theaters, games of skill, and various spinning rides in addition to several dance halls. Santa Monica's Palisades Dance Hall closed several months later with . . . unpaid debts. When new management tried to reopen, the head of the National Musicians Union refused to sanction . . ."
"Both Pacific Mutual Life Insurance's beach erosion lawsuit, better known as the Carpenter case, and Los Angeles Athletic Club's beach accretion lawsuit were retried in April 1944 by the U.S. District Court of Appeals. The court ruled in both cases against the plaintiffs and for the City of Santa Monica." p.101
"The court found that the city was not responsible for either the erosion or sand accretion caused by the construction of the breakwater. It also ruled that the city had a legal right to protect its harbor and the property of others within its boundaries from the action of the ocean. In the Carpenter case it found that all the eroded beach in front of the Del Mar Club had been artificially created from 1875-1921 by man made structures in the Santa Monica Bay and that they belonged to the state and city, not the upland owner. Therefore it was state tidelands that had been damaged. . . .
[The ruling was appealed to the California Supreme Court who refused to hear the appeals.]
Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1947, 1944, 1943, 1940s
[p. 119] Port Chicago, north of San Francisco, was where the black stevedores loaded the U.S. Navy's ammunition.
[p. 119] On the night of Monday, 17 July 1944, shortly after 10 o'clock, Port Chicago exploded, expending the energy equivalent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, killing 320 men and injuring another 390. Workers refused to return to work leading to court martial proceedings. NAACP attorney, Thurgood Marshall, "This is not fifty men on trial for mutiny. This is the Navy on trial for its whole vicious policy towards Negros. Negroes are not afraid of anything anymore than anyone else. Negroes in the Navy don't mind loading ammunition. They just want to know why they are the only ones doing the loading!" It wasnn't until after the war that the military convictions were reversed.
[p. 122] ". . . Mexican-Americans liked the special uniform worn by airborne troops. It reminded them of a zoot suit. By 1944 the hated zoot suit and pachuca style of 1943 had made their way into mainstream feminine fashion. Heavily padded shoulders, sharp lapels, single-button jackets, knee-length pleated skirts, high pompadours, a blotch of lipstick above the upper lip: by 1944 the Andrew Sisters and millions of other young women had adapted a stylized version of the attire. . . . There is no record of the City Council or the LAPD having served a warrant of any kind on the Andrew Sisters.
Chapter 3 1943 Swing Shift
[p. 127] . . . By 1944 the entire population of unmarried men betwen the ages of twenty and thirty -four working in the defense industry dropped to 1.7 million. At the same time, there were more than 4.1 million single females in the same age range and employment category.