Matching anecdotal evidence with scientific proof of global warming ... Billy the Mime speaks ... Why walk 16 miles of Wilshire Blvd ... Brains On! ... Larry Mantle on The Big Fight
Don't tear out your lawn NOW, and other counterintuitive drought advice
It's Frank McDonough's job as "Botanical Information Consultant" at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden to field questions from residents, and he's getting three to five questions every day about the drought.
His answers may surprise you:
1. "I'm tearing my lawn out, what do I do?"
The answer is, don't tear your lawn out. Don't do anything ... yet. Now is the time to plan. It's too hot to plant most plants. It looks like we're having a really early hot spring. Trying to get a plant established right now you risk losing it. You most definitely have to water more frequently, and with the water restrictions that are on in some cities, that's not possible.
2. Should I use natives?
Natives aren't bad. There's a lot of great selections for natives, but the problem with natives here is that natives tend to be specific to microclimates in and around the area ... for instance, there's ceanothus that only grow on certain sides of hills; there's other plants that rather grow in mountains than flatlands, and vice versa. What it boils down to is, if you were to nativize your yard with the correct plants for that area, you wouldn't have a lot of choices.
Instead, McDonough says, consider plants from South Africa, Australia and the Canary Islands that are drought tolerant and work well in many more microclimates. Many of those are on display at the Arboretum, and have been since the late 1950s.
3. What about drip irrigation?
You have to be very careful with drip irrigation. The technology has been ramping up. It's getting better. But it does have a lot of problems. One of them is that the old-fashioned drip irrigation would rot out within two years from ultraviolet light. And in the old days, if you tried to bury it, the roots would go and block it up.
Instead, try copper-coated drip irrigation lines that keep out the roots.
There's much more in our interview, including a loud interruption by the peacock above, which McDonough says is one of the most prolific breeders of all known peacocks.
And at the end of June, McDonough is giving a walking tour of some of the weirdest plants at the Arboretum.
Your chance to see a B-24 Liberator, like Louis Zamperini's plane from 'Unbroken'
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, you can see and fly in the same plane Louis Zamperini flew in World War II, as depicted in the Oscar-nominated movie "Unbroken."
It's a B-24 Liberator, owned by the Collings Foundation, and it arrives at the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance around noon on Monday.
Here's the kicker: on it will be Louis Zamperini's son and grandson. Imagine ... they'll be on a plane identical to the one Louis was on when it went down over the Pacific.
A B-17 Flying Fortress, B-25 Mitchell and a P-51 Mustang will also be on display, and you can pay to fly on them and the B-24.
The museum is at 3315 Airport Dr., Torrance 90505-3315.
Public ground tours of the planes and flights are all available until noon on Wednesday, May 6. And if you can't make it, look up! Especially look up and wave if you see the B-24 flying to Torrance Monday morning: I'll be on it, and you can hear what it was like for the Zamperini family on next week's Off-Ramp.
VFR!
Song of the Week: 'Puzzle' by Devon Williams
This week's Off-Ramp Song of the Week is "Puzzle" by Los Angeles singer and songwriter Devon Williams. Puzzle is from his latest record, "Gilding the Lily."
Like it?
He's playing live at the Smell in Downtown Los Angeles on Friday, May 8.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRpFcUfGZuY
#ISeeChange - Milton Love, tropical fish, and global warming
Milton Love is Off-Ramp's resident marine biologist. From his post at UC Santa Barbara, he's told us about the love lives of fishes, the ugliest fish in the Pacific, and how the video game Survive! Mola Mola is, on the whole, a good thing.
Today he turns his expertise to our project, #ISeeChange, which tries to help people who are trying to figure out global warming, and if the things they're seeing around them — like the Great California Drought or early-blooming jacarandas — are evidence of climate change.
"This last year," Love says, "the ocean has been relatively warm, and there have been a lot of subtropical and even tropical fishes that we now see in California ... in one case, for the very first time. So, the first impulse is to say, 'There it is! Global warming!'"
"But go back into the historical records," Love says. "In about 1855, the U.S. Army came out and started doing early surveys off California. The icthyologist who was with them caught some tropical fish in Monterey that have never been caught since in California. So is that global warming? Well, probably not. The ocean off California goes through cycles. Sometimes it's warm, sometimes it's cold. So it's very hard to fractionate the warm/cold cycles from something bigger and grander."
This doesn't prove or disprove global warming. It just means that new tropical fish don't prove or disprove it.
#ISeeChange is a national effort to track how climate change is affecting our daily lives.
Notice any bugs in your backyard lately? Wondering why you're seeing coyotes where you don't expect? Seen changes in your favorite tide pool? Snap a picture and tag it @KPCC and #ISeeChange on Twitter or Instagram, let us know through our Public Insight Network, or post your questions on www.iSeeChange.org. Then see what others have found and observed in their environment.
The sub-cult of Billy the Mime, an actual good mime. No, really.
To Steven Banks, mime is an "art form that has been justly ridiculed due to untrained and amateur practitioners performing pretentious and self-indulgent work. There's a good reason to hate mimes. Most of them are awful."
Ouch.
And he's a mime!
Banks, a 60-year-old actor and writer in real life, puts on infrequent shows as Billy the Mime, a mime unlike any other you've seen, and one that changed my impression of the art.
"Well, a lot of people don't get it," he agrees, "and for good reasons. There are so many people who are bad practitioners. They have no technique, or they have great technique but they're not doing anything. They're just smelling flowers and getting trapped in boxes. Which Marcel Marceau did great, but you know, do some new stuff."
Banks performed Monday night at the Upright Citizens Brigade space on Sunset at Western, for which the $5 tickets sold out rapidly.
The hand-lettered title cards he uses tell you it's not a show for kids.
In "The Abortion, 1963," Banks pantomimes a woman getting a coat-hanger abortion. In "Drinks with Bill Cosby," a young woman visits Cosby's hotel room, he drugs and rapes her, then watches one of his TV shows. In "Whitney Houston's Last Bath," we see the singer undressing after a gig, wistfully examining herself in the bathroom mirror, taking drugs to counter what she sees in the mirror, drowning, then flying away to a happier place.
In our interview, Banks seemed to avoid saying why these sketches are so deeply effecting — he says he loves that audience members react to them differently — so I'll say that, for me, his performances strip these tropes down to the pure physicality of the acts depicted. It's one thing to know backroom abortions happen, it's another to see the cruelly casual doctor and the shattered woman. Billy the Mime acting out a reported rape — in a performance with darkly humorous moments — underscores the enormity of the accusations against Cosby. And in the Whitney sketch, a woman who starts as a tabloid character becomes a human being again.
Banks has been performing as Billy the Mime for about 10 years. His most notable moment came when he pantomimed the joke "The Aristocrats" for the documentary about the dirty joke. He says he's been friends with the movie's producers, Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza, for years (he was on his honeymoon in San Francisco 36 years ago when he met Gillette) and they insisted he perform the joke in mime. The first take, Banks says, was ruined because Provenza laughed so hard during filming.
But Billy the Mime doesn't perform much because, as he admits, there's not much of a market for mime.
Remembering the 1992 LA Riots with Off-Ramp
On this date in 1992, the LA Riots started when the Rodney King verdict was announced. In 2012, Off-Ramp aired a special edition looking back at the event on the 20th anniversary.
One of the things I'm most proud of is the time we spent setting the context for the riots, in particular the culpability of the LAPD.
As Joe Domanick reminded us, the riots didn't happen just because the cops were cleared of beating Rodney King, they happened because the department had killed scores of unarmed black and brown men with impunity for years (often with choke holds), and the verdict touched off long-simmering and justifiable anger.
And, Domanick said, they happened because Daryl Gates was derelict and did not prepare the department for the violence everyone else expected would erupt. He sent shifts home (and went to a political fundraiser!) while TV stations brought in extra staff.
We also talk with many Angelinos who remembered the day: a then-6-year old who lived in the neighborhood and now works at KPCC; Wait Wait Don't Tell Me host Peter Sagal, who ran into Gates during the riots; former Mayor James Hahn, who only missed being a casualty because he happened to turn on the radio and hear about what was going down at Florence and Normandie; and many others.
We also put together a slideshow of Gary Leonard's photos from the riots.
Robert Henri’s California at Laguna Art Museum
“Westward Ho! I am now quite convinced that San Diego is one of the most interesting and beautiful places in the world and we shall head that way and will not be convinced otherwise until we have seen the place and have been turned away” -- Robert Henri in a 1914 letter to former student Alice Klauber
Supposing your father had killed a man; you might well expect to grow up on the run: fleeing from town to town, state to state, your family’s identity concealed under a cloud of aliases.
Painter Robert Henri was baptized Robert Cozad in 1865. After a fatal shooting in Nebraska, his family fled and kept moving, every member under a different name, until they dropped anchor in Atlantic City, where Robert "Henri" began to seriously paint at 18.
Probably, the family’s furtive, compulsive travels implanted in Henri — he liked to pronounce it “Hen-Rye” -- his own lifelong urge to stay on the go, even once he’d become one of America’s most treasured artists, famous for his nurturing an entire generation of artists called the “Ashcan School,’’ as well as his own sensual nudes and evocative streetscapes.
(L-R Ashcan School artists Everett Shinn, Robert Henri and John Sloan, c. 1896. Unknown photographer)
Henri worked in France, Spain, Holland, Ireland, New York, New Mexico, Philadelphia and Maine before friends urged him to Southern California just over a century ago. He loved the light and the climate, liked the people too, even in those peak days of Golden State developers’ hype.
Although he visited the state repeatedly, he never managed to settle here, but he did some impressive and singular painting, much of it on display now at the Laguna Art Museum. LAM Executive Director Malcolm Warner suggests that Henri’s California experience strongly influenced his work for the decade that followed.
(Montage of Henri portraits. Credit: LAM)
Certainly, the works here — mostly portraits — show an ethnic diversity never before apparent in Henri’s oeuvre. The people of San Diego’s various barrios were all members of something Henri called the “Great American Race.” His “race” was vastly inclusive: Native Americans, Chinese, blacks, Mexican Americans.
Unlike nearly every white American of his time, Robert Henri saw native-born people of color as inheritors of American civilization. He said: "I am looking at each individual with the eager hope of finding there something of the dignity of life, the humor, the humanity, the kindness … that will rescue the race and the nation.” Because this nation was then a land of Jim Crow laws and anti-Asian laws, his vision seems astounding to us now. In his months in San Diego between 1914 and 1915, he produced about 100 pictures. Those of the local minorities are the highlights of the little Laguna show, curated by Derrick Cartwright.
Although Henri had always delighted in painting children, here his portrayals of the young seem both more serious and more joyful than ever before. Serious, in that he tried to share the feelings of his subjects, and joyful in a sense of discovery of literally the faces of other cultures.
"Art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is not an outside, extra thing. When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. . .Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, the artist opens it, shows there are still more pages possible." -- Robert Henri, "The Art Spirit" (1923)
The Chinese pictures seem the most successful; in them, Henri, who had put in years as a society portraitist, cut loose from such formalism. In his studies “Mukie” and “Jim Lee,” Henri’s long-discarded expressionism returns in wonderful full force with powerful, precisely-broad brush strokes, against abstract, yellow-mottled backgrounds. The other Chinese portraits are also powerful, if more conventional.
As it happened, Henri first visited San Diego just as the city was ramping up to its 1915 Panama California Exhibition commemorating the completion of the Panama Canal. As part of the exhibit, the promoters brought families of Native Americans from New Mexico to live in a specially constructed pueblo as a human exhibit. Henri rendered full-size portraits of two of them, Tom Po Qui and Po Tse.
The first, better known as Ramoncita, was a famous potter, an artist in her own right. The pictures, while gorgeous exercises in color, have less feeling than many of the other works here. It was as if Henri admired the pair more than he was able to understand them.
There are also some very fine and expressive portraits illustrating his California days, and a bit sadly, 10 years after he first arrived here. For on his last trip to California (just four years before his 1919 death), he abandoned the singular humble people of the state and concentrated on the rich and powerful and their wives and children. The ripest, most interesting period of his portrait creativity was over.
But from the show in Laguna, we can fully see what a remarkable period that was.
"Robert Henri’s California: Realism, Race, and Region, 1914-1925" is at the Laguna Art Museum through May 31
Join Tom of 'Tom Explores Los Angeles' for a walk down Wilshire Boulevard
Named in 1895, Wilshire Boulevard is one of Southern California's oldest streets, and we know it all too well: we've visited the Tar Pits, eaten BBQ in Koreatown, people-watched at Palisades Park, been stuck in traffic along the Miracle Mile.
Now, in partnership with Good Magazine, Tom Carroll of YouTube's "Tom Explores Los Angeles" is organizing a walk down Wilshire Boulevard — all 16 miles of it — on Wednesday, May 6.
"I've wanted to walk Wilshire for a long while now," says Carroll. "Just as a way to understand how large Los Angeles is, I guess."
"Originally I wanted to walk Sunset," says Caroll. "But that's 26 miles and a good chunk of which — on the Westside — has absolutely no sidewalks. It's life-threatening to walk all of Sunset!"
But it's for the best: there's plenty of fascinating stuff along Wilshire. For example, Wilshire Boulevard drives right through MacArthur Park in Westlake. Originally Wilshire ended at the park — then known as Westlake Park. It wasn't until 1934 that city officials built a road through MacArthur Park, draining half the lake in the process. You can find photos of the original park here.
Interested in going? There's no need to sign up — just meet at the corner of Wilshire and Grand in Downtown Los Angeles at 9 a.m. on Wednesday, May 6. Carroll says the trip should take 8 hours, and that's at a leisurely pace. Just make sure to bring comfortable shoes and lots of water.
Celebrate Welles' 100th with lunch with Orson and then a 'Touch of Evil'
UPDATE: Wednesday, June 6, 2015, is Welles centennial. To celebrate, the Crest Theater in Westwood is screening his film "Touch of Evil" (1958), in which he stars with Marlene Dietrich, Charlton Heston, Orson Welles, Janet Leigh, and Zsa Zsa Gabor.
It's a dark, weird film with wonderful Wellesian flourishes, like the unedited opening time-bomb shot, which is Welles saying, "Look here, Hollywood. I can still kick your butt."
In the meantime, check out RH Greene's radio documentary masterpiece, War of the Welles, his minute-by-minute examination of Welles' "The War of the Worlds."
Welles and Jaglom became fast friends. They were an odd couple, to say the least. Their backgrounds, personalities, ages (Jaglom was in his late thirties, Welles in his mid-sixties) -- even their films were discrepant. What they did have in common was a fierce desire to go their own way. (Peter Biskind in the introduction to My Lunches with Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles)
Reading My Lunches with Orson is like one of those afternoons when, dining alone, you happen to sit near two people having a conversation you wish you could join.
Starting in 1978, director Henry Jaglom had lunch with Orson Welles every week at Ma Maison, the late great LA eatery, and at Welles' request, taped their conversations for the final two years. Jaglom told his friend, film writer Peter Biskind (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls), about the tapes, and finally, they've been transcribed and edited.
The result is truly Welles as you've never seen him - human - talking about things he knows - film, and life. He's obscene, gentle, funny, right, wrong, poignant, optimistic, and maudlin. He worked with everybody, and seems to have slept with half of them, and isn't shy with his opinions about them. He thought Gary Cooper was an awful actor, but loved watching him act; thought Irene Dunne was the "non-singing Jeanette MacDonald," and couldn't stand Woody Allen movies.
The bittersweet through-line of the transcripts is Jaglom's attempts to get Welles one last directing job. Jaglom brings many of his friends to lunch with Welles -- powerful men in Hollywood who could have made the movie happen -- and while they all say how excited they were to meet the great man, nothing would come of the meetings. Jaglom says, "Orson said to me one day, 'If you knew how many lunches there have been in the last twenty years...' He knew at some bottom level that nobody would help him."
Listen to my entire interview with Biskind and Jaglom, and hear excerpts from the actual tapes made at Ma Maison between 1983 and 1985, when Welles died at 70.
Jaglom and Biskind will be appearing Thursday, July 25, 7:30pm, at Laemmle's Music Hall Theatre, to talk about My Lunches with Orson. It's a Writers Bloc event. Click here to go. Tickets are $20.
Help us date and translate a trove of LA picture postcards
My colleague Gordon Henderson recently bought a packet of picture postcards at the Pasadena City College flea market. It appears that they were originally purchased at Kennedy's Card Shop in Los Angeles.
(Google Street View of the building that would have included 331 W. 5th St, LA 13)
The cards show scenes from across L.A.: An Easter sunrise service at the Hollywood Bowl, downtown's sparkling new Civic Center and Hollywood Boulevard.
Some also have writing on the back.
Scroll through the slideshow above. Can you help us date and translate the cards?
Also, let us know what's changed, what still remains, and any memories or thoughts of the time these postcards capture. The paper bag is a time capsule that you can help us unlock.
(And make sure to check out Loyola Marymount's massive postcard collection online!)
Koreatown's Institute for Art and Olfaction — perfume for the people
The ads are absurd. Filled with glamorous locales, women in mid-orgasm and, back in the 1980s, some of the best (or maybe worst) jingles in commercial history.
Despite the glamorous imagery, almost all of the world's perfumes are created in a decidedly unglamorous setting: a large, antiseptic, industrial chemistry lab. Probably in New Jersey or perhaps Geneva. Alongside scents for detergents, deodorants, snacks, and thousands of household products.
But that system didn't pass the smell test for a Los Angeles woman.
Inside a small Koreatown storefront with a small neon bird in the window, you'll find a dozen people, eyedroppers in hand, carefully combining liquids in glass vials and smelling the results. It's not a meetup for mad chemists. It's a gathering of DIY perfumers. Some are novices who come to experiment for the fun of it. Others are serious students of scent.
They're all welcome at the Institute for Art and Olfaction, the best smelling arts organization in Los Angeles, where a man was busy over little bottles and pipettes.
"What's in it," I ask? "We got some vanilla," he says. "We got some chocolate. We got some cognac, some clove, sandalwood, cedar and bergamot. I'm making it for my girlfriend," but "I don't know whether I should marinate some chicken in it first."
Despite its mystique, the perfume industry is controlled by a half-dozen conglomerates that generally turn up their noses at sharing their trade secrets. Which is precisely why Saskia Wilson-Brown launched the Institute in 2012:
I chose Koreatown intentionally for the Institute because I felt that perfumery needed to be taken away from the sort of metaphorical Beverly Hills milieu that it typically sits in. I think in California, in particular, we've seen a strong scene around independent and artisan perfumery because we haven't had access to this industry. You know, we're sort of the end of the world as far as perfumery is concerned.
At weekly open sessions or monthly meetings of the Smelly Vials Perfume Club, budding perfumers can choose from the Institute's more than 250 scents — not all of which are pleasant.
Saskia pulls out a bottle "that'll knock your socks off."
I take a deep whiff. Hmmm. Smells like a British explorer's library in the 1800s in London.
(Explorer Sir Richard Burton smelled like camels, curry, and opium)
"I could see that," Saskia says. "It's got that sort of dusty, booky, thing. This is cade. Cade is, I believe it's a burnt juniper."
When you have a floral that doesn't have something, for instance, called Indolene in it, your floral's going to smell tinny and fake. Indolene is the smell, for lack of a better description, of flowers rotting. But without that, the flowers are completely pointless. I always say it's like the salt in the cookie. You need a little salt in your chocolate chip cookie. It makes it more interesting. — IAO founder Saskia Wilson-Brown
In addition to hosting smell-o-rific events like an annual awards ceremony, a Valentine's Day mixer where singles were paired up by scent preferences, and a concert in which audience members were blindfolded for an olfactory journey, the organization collaborates with artists who use scent in creative ways.
The institute worked with Zoe Crosher to create 10 custom perfumes for Manifest Destiny, which saw the installation of 10 billboards along the highway between Los Angeles and Tucson.
(Construction workers, Calabasas, 1964. Bob Miller/LAPL Valley Times collection)
Wilson-Brown also collaborated with L.A. artist Bettina Hubby on a unique concept. Our dialogue went like this:
BETTINA: An idea came along when I first met Saskia. I wanted to develop a cologne for construction workers. I knew I wasn't going to really market a cologne that would be on the shelves in every store. I wanted to do a limited run. It was part of a bigger art project about celebrating the construction worker and what they actually do to build the city. So we developed the cologne called "Dig" by interviewing a lot of construction workers about what they'd like to smell like at the end of a hard day.
ELINA: Sweaty, slightly dusty but maybe a little bit musky?
BETTINA: Absolutely not. They want to smell like fresh laundry, rain, lavender, coffee, a little bit of chocolate and musk.
If only we had Smell-O-Vision.
Bobby Short rescues a perfume commercial from silliness
True crime, doomed love, and death doo-wop: 21 years with musician Gabriel Hart
Drug deals, stalkers, and urban decay are the makings of a great gangster movie. They also make good doo-wop and girl group songs.
For over 20 years, Gabriel Hart has been writing songs about the "nightmarish underbelly" of Southern California for punk bands The Starvations and Jail Weddings.
"The last time you had to fight to be a punk" was 1994, says Hart, who formed The Starvations in Laguna Beach at 16. Bad Religion and Green Day had just released the records that would put them on world tours. But Hart says he and his bandmates were on the Laguna Beach Police Department's gang file.
(The Starvations at 924 Gilman in Berkeley, 2001. Courtesy Gabriel Hart)
The "Orange Country Methamphetamine Renaissance" brought teens together in the 90s, according to Hart. The same kids Hart fought at school would get high at The Starvations' practice house. And not even the "nerds" or "dungeons and dragons crowd" were immune to the drug's popularity in the community.
Hart and Starvations' bassist Jean-Paul Garnier moved to L.A. in 1999, and over the next six years released three albums laden with songs about overdoses, funerals and home invasions. Hart says he's tried to let The Starvations' true stories "live under a rock." You can see excerpts of some of their shows on Youtube.
The Starvations' final show in 2005 sold out the El Cid restaurant in Silver Lake, but the band was forced to sweep the venue after the punks smashed hundreds of glasses on the floor to the beat of "Not Me This Time."
Hart reformed the band on different instruments as a short-lived outfit called Fortune's Flesh. Only a brief demo exists, but the band's dramatic, romantic ballads paved the way for Jail Weddings in 2007.
(Jail Weddings in New York City, 2014. Courtesy Gabriel Hart)
Jail Weddings began as a 10-piece "death doo-wop" pop ensemble. Hart had dreamed of starting such a band for years, and felt the time was ripe, as he noticed a "bearded cancer" of neo-psychedelic garage rock taking over Echo Park.
"A lot of these old pop songs are obsessive to a scary degree," says Hart, who found inspiration in The Shangri-La's, Gene Pitney, and Johnnie Ray. Jail Weddings pay tribute to the "psychosis" of vintage love songs, he says. When he hears Little Peggy March's 1963 ballad "I Will Follow Him," Hart says he thinks of a gang of girls running after him, with knives.
Jail Weddings' music video for "Somebody Lonely"
Hart still lives in Echo Park, and says that for all the changes the neighborhood has undergone in the last decade, the area is still dangerous, citing a fatal drive-by shooting in his driveway. But just as L.A. fosters gangsters, it fosters artists.
"I think L.A. — I've always viewed it as an escapist's cradle. It's paradise in a way... it was marketed that way since it first started. People have been coming here for decades to move to a place where they could be whoever they wanted to be, where previously they couldn't... It's always cradled the dispossessed." — Gabriel Hart
Jail Weddings are currently working on their third album, "Blood Moon Blue." You can hear them on Bandcamp and follow them on Facebook.
The Archivist Files: How LA handled the 1918 flu pandemic
The recent outbreak of measles that started at Disneyland and the ongoing debate about vaccination reminded me of a pandemic that scarred Los Angeles almost 100 years ago. The historic evidence is preserved at the L.A. City Archive, inside Box B-1059. It has the details of how L.A. city officials and its citizens coped with the great influenza outbreak of 1918.
The city’s Department of Health released an annual report beginning in the 1870s covering food, sanitation, health inspections in the city jail, even advocating public toilets for the indigent population. Every illness and death was recorded as the city size and population increased over time.
The department was overseen by Dr. Luther M. Powers — the Dr. Jonathan Fielding of his time — and he was the man everyone turned to when the flu hit. Powers said, “This disease was introduced into Los Angeles by an infected training ship after September 15, 1918 and also from infected tourists.”
The Health Department was unprepared for the first patients arriving at the General Receiving Hospital a week later, but soon, two emergency hospitals were staffed and equipped in San Pedro and Mount Washington.
(Unidentified newspaper headline, 1918.)
Local residents complained about the close proximity of the flu to their homes, but there was something in the emergency measures for everybody to hate. On October 10, 1918, the city council passed Ordinance 38522 imposing a quarantine of schools, theaters and other public gatherings. Poolrooms were closed, and public funerals were banned. Factory schedules were staggered to prevent crowding on streetcars.
(Bowling alley and billiard parlor on the Santa Monica Pier, 1917. Credit: LAPL/Security Pacific National Bank Collection)
As you’d expect, business interests pushed back. The Theater Owners Association petitioned the Council to re-open the theaters and require audiences to wear face masks instead. The Health Department tried to find a middle ground. For instance, the quarantine meant cafés couldn’t have live music. But could they play phonographs? Were music teachers allowed to give private lessons when the schools were closed? One official said, “We sought at all times to avoid discrimination and to enforce the ban with as little discomfort and financial loss as possible.”
A drop in flu cases in early December allowed a conditional rescission of the quarantine, but it was reinstated within days when a new surge of infections filled the hospitals again. It was up to the police and badge wielding health inspectors to protect the public. They were the ones who inspected both streetcars and taxi cabs before and after their disinfection.
The inspectors monitored passengers in the railway station and separated people who appeared to be sick into quarantine. They also ran errands in over a hundred neighborhoods because residents couldn’t do it themselves. They were the unlucky ones who were under quarantine in their own homes – unable to enter or leave for any reason.
In total, 29 people were taken to court over violations such as leaving their homes during the quarantine or failure to report an illness. A $25 fine and up to 30 days in jail was possible.
The statistics in the quarantine report sum up the epidemic and the damage it did. Between October 1918 and July 1919, over 13,000 buildings were locked down, confining over 50,000 Angelenos. The average casualty of the flu was a married white male between 20 and 45. The total number of flu-related deaths was 3,482, out of a reported total of over 57,000 reported cases — a number Dr. Powers believed to be greatly underreported.
Flu was the cause in about 20 percent of all deaths throughout Los Angeles, but the worst was over by April 1919.
There are always little tidbits of irony in research like this. One was that the statistics of deaths during 1918-1919 did not have a single measles death. Another was the reported death of an LAPD officer recently returned from France and WWI who died of the flu while on quarantine detail.
It is estimated that influenza killed nearly 50 million people around the world within about two years. This was in a much slower time of ships and trains before air travel made the world smaller. So, do us all a favor. Get the damn flu shot so we don't have to relive this history lesson.
LA City Archivist Michael Holland's stories from the city archive are a regular feature of KPCC's Off-Ramp. They first appeared in longer form in the city employee newspaper "Alive!"