Lewis MacAdams - turning 70 this month - takes us up the LA River; James Ellroy takes us back to Dec. 1941 and the start of the Japanese internment; Marc Haefele takes us to the San Francisco of the 50s & 60s.
There will be Texas beer and BBQ: LA River hero Lewis MacAdams is turning 70
Lewis MacAdams takes Off-Ramp's John Rabe on a tour of the L.A. River as MacAdams nears his 70th birthday and a huge celebration of his accomplishments as founder of FoLAR, Friends of the Los Angeles River. MacAdams "wanted to crawl under a rock," but instead agreed to a huge fundraiser party on October 12 -- the FoLAR Fandango -- IF they agreed to bring in Texas BBQ and Shiner Bock from his West Texas homeland.
In the 1970s, when Lewis MacAdams came to Los Angeles, the L.A. River was a flood control channel and a punchline. But he founded “Friends of the Los Angeles River,” which helped the river make a Hollywood-worthy comeback. Now, as MacAdams turns 70, we tour the river and see how far we’ve come.
The poet and journalist remembers his first encounter with the river over thirty years ago, and the immediate connection he felt to it.
“I was walking to the bus stop and I saw the L.A. River for the first time, and for some reason that I’ve never really known, I had this realization that I was going to be involved with the L.A. River for the rest of my life,” says MacAdams. “I see trains going by, I see the 5 freeway, I see slimy – no water almost – but just slimy, street runoff slobber. The insight I think I had was that it was the darkest period and it was bound to change, and I started to ride that change.”
Soon after, MacAdams and a friend "asked the river if [they] could speak for it in the human realm and it didn't say no." That was enough of an answer for MacAdams. He founded FoLAR and began what he calls a “40 year art work” to bring the river back to life.
MacAdams’ first meeting with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works – scheduled shortly after he stood in the path of a bulldozer clearing trees in the river – quickly turned into a yelling match.
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“This guy from Public Works would refer to the river as a 'flood control channel’ and every time I would interrupt him and say ‘river.’ And it didn’t take long until the two of us were screaming at each other,” says MacAdams. “I knew that it was a seminal argument.”
Since then, FoLAR has spent nearly three decades tirelessly cleaning the river and advocating for its restoration.
(MacAdams and KPCC's Brian Watt clean up the river. John Rabe)
But MacAdams says that it never felt like work to him.
“I’ve always thought of it as being fun, and also as being a certain kind of joke on ourselves that we have to build ourselves a better river, but we do,” says MacAdams. “This is a post-modern river… where humans have to work with nature, not against nature. And L.A. River is kind of the poster child globally for screwed up rivers. I would also say it’s the poster child for restoring rivers too.”
One of the biggest challenges MacAdams and FoLAR have faced is getting Angelenos to think about the L.A. River as an actual river and not just a slab of concrete. With the U.S. Army Corps' recent endorsement of a $1 billion river restoration project, it seems like Los Angeles is finally listening.
“I think that if we’ve accomplished anything these past 30 years, one of them is that we’ve created this new mind that sees the river as a river and not as flood control,” says MacAdams. “Now as you can see, people moving with strollers, people walking their dogs, the river has reentered people’s consciousness and they didn’t even realize it.”
'Perfidia' — novelist James Ellroy's monumental retelling of the Japanese internment
Off-Ramp host John Rabe meets "L.A. Confidential" novelist James Ellroy in a jail cell to talk about his new novel, "Perfidia," set in L.A. in the three weeks around the attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of the internment of Japanese-Americans. Ellroy will be at Vroman's in Pasadena Thursday, Sept. 25 at 6:45pm.
"... and (a main character in "Perfidia") is in a world of s---. And it's an Ellroy novel. Everyone's in a world of s---." - James Ellroy to KPCC's John Rabe
It's early December, 1941, and Los Angeles is boiling over with corrupt cops and politicians, pervasive racism and the drums of war. When the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, thousands of loyal citizens of Japanese descent are shipped off to internment camps and lose most or all of their property. At the same time, a subversive Japanese-American family is found brutally murdered in Highland Park.
That's the merest outline of "Perfidia," the new novel by James Ellroy, which aims to tell the story of these 23 days in L.A. in real time and set the stage for the eventual reformation of the LAPD. "Perfidia" is the backstory to characters Ellroy has already told us about, and Ellroy says it's just the first of four volumes that will cover 1941 to 1972 as "seamless novelistic history."
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He says he chose the real-time format because "L.A., December 1941, was an around-the-clock town. It was a dope binge, a sex binge. Everybody was zonked out of their gourds on booze and dope, chain-smoking..." Everybody in the novel, anyway.
Ellroy says he never agrees with the ACLU, except with it comes to the Japanese-American internment, which he calls "the greatest mass abrogation of civil liberties in American history."
"You have to understand the savagery of Japanese aggressions in the Pacific to truly understand this moment to render it understandable, if not justified," Ellroy said. Americans had heard about the Rape of Nanking and other atrocities, and "we were scared, and properly so."
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I interviewed Ellroy in a holding cell at the LAPD Museum in Highland Park, where future LAPD Chief Daryl Gates was once brought as a juvenile offender. Ellroy spends a lot of time here as part of his immersion in his material. Ellroy has not only never used a computer, but he rarely uses telephones, and writes his novels in block print. You can see what happened when I tried to show him my iPhone.
(Benjamin Brayfield/KPCC)
But he does know what's been happening in Highland Park lately. "It's a hipster hive now," he says. "The hipsters have moved everybody else out. There'll probably be a serial killer coming out soon called the Hipster Hunter, who is tired of the hipsters usurping every place cool and hilly and enclave-like in Los Angeles. "
Listen to to the audio on this page — an extended version of our broadcast interview — for much more on "Perfidia," Ellroy's marriages and the story of his haircut.
LA archivist pleads for cop shows like 'Mob City' to use 'just the facts'
Michael Holland is LA City Archivist. This is a version of a piece he wrote for the city employee newspaper Alive!
From "Dragnet" to "Adam 12" to "LA Confidential" to "Mob City," few LA institutions are more popular with film and TV than the Los Angeles Police Department. I just wish the producers would spend more time in my office gathering … just the facts, ma’am.
“Mob City,” TNT’s new crime series, is only the latest show to explore police work in LA. Set around 1947, with occasional flashbacks, it follows the efforts of a crime unit dedicated to keeping mobsters like Mickey Cohen at bay and - hopefully - out of the city altogether.
“Mob City” is based on John Buntin’s 2009 book, “L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City.” I heard about the show earlier this year because my wife is a TV critic who visited the set and saw some clips last summer as they were beginning production. Before Buntin wrote his book, he did spend some time with us here at the archive, studying several of our archival resources, including the LAPD annual reports and scrapbooks.
The annual report is required under the City Charter and is sent to the Mayor, City Council, and other officials. It compiles stats on everything the police department did in a given year, including numbers of crimes reported, arrests made, and dollars spent.
The scrapbooks were started in 1947 by the department’s PR office for in-house purposes. The books contain clippings from most if not all of the local daily newspapers, highlighting who was committing the crimes and who made the arrests. They were collected and assembled in chronological order and can be very useful to follow a specific event … instead of going through miles of microfilm at the library.
The year "Mob City" opens, 1947, the annual report is 164 pages of densely packed tables, charts and graphs with incredible detail, such as which hours of what days of the week were most likely to have crime take place -- Saturday evenings accounted for 17% of all crimes committed that year. There’s no public relations spin in the report.
That had changed by 1950, the year William Parker became Chief of Police. The Public Relations office became the Public Information Division, and the role of the annual report changed, too, to highlight the department’s role in public safety and quality of life, and why the department needed more resources to do an almost impossible task. One example from 1950 shows how tough the officer recruitment process was: about 6500 people applied, but fewer than 200 survived all the exams, training, and probation for a paltry 3.8% acceptance rate.
The crime stats weren’t forgotten. They became their own published report known as the Statistical Digest and are also in the archives.
Meanwhile, the scrapbooks continued to collect stories about crooks and the cops who arrested them, but Chief Parker seemed to have given the Public Information Division the ability to include the dark side of the LAPD. The scrapbooks include former officers arrested as narcotic dealers and other criminals. One was a Wilshire Division sergeant, Harvey W. Harper. He and his wife Margaret were picked up as bookies in January 1952. The clippings follow Harper’s resignation from the force to his 8-month prison sentence.
1952 also contain many stories about the “Bloody Christmas” bar brawl involving 7 young men – mostly Hispanic – who were beaten by arresting officers at the scene, then by other cops in the Central Jail. That was the story dramatized in James Ellroy’s “LA Confidential” and the subsequent movie.
Other stories include suicides of cops and family members, shell-shocked war veterans in deadly confrontations with traffic officers, and Zsa Zsa Gabor getting a speeding ticket.
The greatest shot in the arm for morale came in the form of Jack Webb’s “Dragnet.” First as a radio show in 1949, and then as a TV show, and allegedly based on real LA crimes, “Dragnet” has its own scrapbook in the archive with press releases, comic book strips, and even real crime reporting written in the Webb’s deadpan style.
(July 25, 1958: "Television star jack Webb (second from right) and retired businessman Milton Fogleman (right) were members of three-man board to give oral examinations to police applicants here. The non-paying posts were assigned to them by the Civil Service Commission. Other board member was Police Lieut. Merle Sutton. Applicant at left is R. W. Werner." Image: LAPL/Herald-Examiner Collection)
If “Mob City” gets renewed, I hope the research staff will pay me a visit. There are enough real-life stories here to support the story they are trying to tell.
The story behind Glassell Park: The strange, fascinating lives of the Glassell family, Los Angeles pioneers
There's L.A.'s Glassell Park, near Mount Washington; there's Glassell Street, in Orange. So, who or what was Glassell?
You can find the answer at West Adams' Angelus Rosedale Cemetery. Among the buried Civil War veterans, movie producers and even the occasional pyramid, there's a giant obelisk bearing the Glassell name.
One of the first Glassells buried at Angelus Rosedale cemetery is Andrew Glassell — a lawyer and land developer, and one of the many tycoons who made Los Angeles the metropolis it is today. He was born on a plantation in 1827 to a large, wealthy family. His place of birth was Orange County… Virginia.
Glassell studied law at the University of Alabama before he joined the federal government as a U.S. attorney. Then, the Civil War happened. The government asked lawyers to sign an oath pledging loyalty to the Union. For the child of plantation owners, things got complicated.
"There was a lot of Southern sentiment in California," said Phil Brigandi, an Orange County historian who's studied the Glassell family. "Being in San Francisco, if he had decided to sign the loyalty oath, he probably could have retained a lot of his practice. If he'd been down south in Los Angeles by then, where there was a much stronger Southern sentiment, it would have been pretty rough for him personally and professionally — much less what the family would think about it."
Andrew Glassell rejected the oath and lost his law license. He went into business, eventually ending up on the small roster of wealthy American settlers who bought up land, sold it and whose names are scattered across maps of California and L.A. He lived in what's now Northeast L.A. — the "Glassell Park" neighborhood sits on what used to be his sprawling farm.
Glassell's biggest undertaking was about 30 miles south, though. He and a colleague named Alfred Chapman founded the town of Orange, California — Glassell Street near Orange's downtown is named for him.
"It's interesting, this whole notion of not just subdividing and selling land, but founding a town," said Brigandi. "And you get very different approaches to it: you have Chapman and the Glassell brothers founding Orange, right nearby at about the same time you get William Spurgeon founding Santa Ana, and Columbus Tustin founding Tustin. And where Spurgeon and Tustin were very much hands on, living in the towns, right in the middle of this — Chapman and Glassell are essentially absentee landlords. They don't live down here. They don't have have their own businesses here."
Brigandi said that had a huge impact on the way these early cities developed.
"Orange, Santa Ana and Tustin all start at about the same time with about the same assets in terms of location, climate, soil, water —all those things," he said. "Within a very short number of years, Santa Ana has really taken off as the boss town of the area."
Another Glassell buried at Rosedale is Andrew's brother, William T. Glassell. William helped lay out plots and sell real estate in Orange — but before that, he fought for the Confederate Army, as a crewmember in a primitive 19th century submarine.
Coincidentally, William's and Andrew's sister Susan is the grandmother of a more famous military figure: George S. Patton.
Stories of tycoons like William and Andrew Glassell help give us context to where street, city and neighborhood names come from, but they also unearth morbid and fascinating tales. Buried alongside William and Andrew in the Glassell plot is Philip Glassell, Andrew's son.
Philip was born in 1867 and didn't appear to have his father's ambition for fame and fortune — his name didn't really appear in the papers until 1901, just six months after his father died. I met Don Lynch, a member of the West Adams Heritage Association, at the grave of Philip. Lynch found Philip's story in an archived edition of the Los Angeles Herald.
"Philip started living with a young lady around 1900; her name was Rhoda Eddo and she was the daughter of a local artist," said Lynch. "She was described as somewhat lame and that she needed a crutch to walk with. And when she was about 19 they moved in together and pretty much lived as husband and wife in various boarding houses and renting homes."
Things went south not long after Andrew Glassell's death. Philip's drinking got worse, and despite his promise to marry, Philip disappeared — hiding in his uncle's house near MacArthur Park.
After searching for days, Eddo drove her buggy to the house Philip was staying at. The Herald provided a grim description of what happened next.
"Suddenly, Miss Eddo drew from the folds of her dress a long, block black pistol, and, pointing the barrel to her head, fired a bullet Into her right temple. She fell to the ground, dead. "
Eddo was just 19 when she died. Her tombstone, if she ever had one, has long since vanished. Her suicide note, however, made the paper:
Dear Sweetheart Philip: I will do as you have heard. You asked me to pray for you, that you would come back that night, and this is the way you came back. Well, dear, I hope we will meet at home or hell — which It is I don't know, but it sure cannot be worse, dear. I love you, and I cannot live without you. Please see that my body gets into the ground.
As ever, your wife, as you must always call me.
Mrs. P. H. Glassell
Rhoda W. Eddo
Clear across Angelus Rosedale cemetery — maybe a couple hundred feet from her lover's body — you'll find the unmarked grave of Rhoda Eddo. The characters in the Glassell drama are long since dead, but at Angelus Rosedale, their story lives on.
Tom explores the caves of Bronson Canyon
Tom Carroll, of YouTube's Tom Explores Los Angeles, visited the famous Bronson Canyon for his latest episode, and filed this report.
When a rock quarry shuts down, sometimes the hole where rocks once were fills up with water and turns into a local swimming hole. Sometimes it becomes a nuisance, or an eyesore.
But in Los Angeles, an abandoned quarry can turn into the Bat Cave.
Video: Watch Tom explore the canyon and cave
When the Los Angeles Stone Company built its Griffith Park quarry in 1903, Los Angeles was hungry for granite.
At the height of its production in 1926, the quarry produced 2,000 tons of crushed granite becoming parts of Wilshire, Sunset and more gravel beds to lay Pacific Electric rail lines on top of. It also became part of the concrete mix for the breakwater in San Pedro.
Literally, Los Angeles was built on top of the rock from the Los Angeles Stone Company quarry.
When the depression came, the quarry shuttered — and soon began its second life as the Bronson Canyon.
The quarry sat not more than a few miles from multiple film studios—just a short drive down Bronson Avenue. It didn’t take long to pop up on the radar of filmmakers. It’s craggy walls and desolate canyon provided a blank slate for narrative films.
Filmmakers always struggle to keep Los Angeles from looking like Los Angeles. The script may say New York, but an errant palm tree might make a cameo in some distant part of the shot.
Since Bronson caves and canyon are fully surrounded by craggy, naked rock, filmmakers could shoot however they pleased. Void of iconic Los Angeles buildings or trees, filmmakers avoided the pitfalls of location shooting.
The otherworldly nature of the Bronson Canyon was irresistible to directors. Constructing a set as large and intricate as the cave and canyon would have easily doubled the budget for most B-movies.
In 1953, the classic “Robot Monster” was shot there in four days for a budget of $16,000 — that's $142,000 in 2014 dollars.
We are lucky — as people who are interested in the history of Los Angeles — that movie makers utilized this space so frequently. We can watch films, starting in 1919 with “Lightning Bryce,” and see a de facto documentary of how the Bronson Canyon looked and evolved over time.
In total, over 90 movies and 32 T.V. shows have used either Bronson Canyon, or Bronson Caves, as a filming location since 1919.
It's the Bat Cave in the original Batman T.V. series, and John Wayne captures Natalie Wood there at the end of “The Searchers.” Woody Allen finds a 200-year-old VW Beetle there in “Sleeper.” The list goes on and on.
The Bronson Canyon is uniquely Los Angeles. We see a barren, naked landscape, one that would be useless in most other cities and towns, reactivated through the film industry. The space itself continues to give back to the city long after its conventional function has passed.
Dark Arts: Artist, occultist Marjorie Cameron featured in new book, MOCA show
UPDATE: The Cameron show at MOCA - Cameron: Songs for the Witch Woman- opens Saturday, Oct. 11. Here's the dish from MOCA:
"Organized by guest curator Yael Lipschutz, the exhibition will be the largest survey of Cameron’s work since 1989 and will include approximately 91 artworks and ephemeral artifacts." -- MOCA blog
During a life that ended in 1995, Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron Parsons Kimmel was an occultist, an artist, an actress and wife to one of the world’s first rocket scientists. Neighbors and local newscasters called her a witch.
Cameron wasn’t really a witch. She was born normally enough — 1922 in Belle Plaine, Iowa. But from the very beginning, her art provoked.
“The first drawing that she did in school was somewhat obscene and she got in trouble for it,” says Scott Hobbs, who was a friend of Cameron and helped start the Cameron-Parsons Foundation in order to preserve and promote Cameron’s work.
Video: Marjorie Cameron performance
Cameron kept drawing after school. In the '40s she joined the U.S. Navy, where she drew maps for admirals and worked in a photographic unit during World War II.
After the war, Cameron moved to Pasadena where she found work as a fashion illustrator for newspapers. While she was living in Pasadena, she met Jack Parsons. The co-founder of Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a renowned occultist, Parsons lived in a towering craftsman on Orange Grove that had become infamous for late night revelries.
The two stayed married until Parsons' death in an explosion in his garage in 1952. In that time, Cameron’s husband Jack influenced her art with the teachings of occultist Aleister Crowley, mythology and magic rituals.
Cameron’s art continued to stimulate. A reproduction of her erotic “Peyote Vision” drawing — not much larger than a matchbook — showed in L.A.’s famous Ferus gallery in the '50s. There, it also became a target for L.A.’s vice cops.
“It was considered obscene and the L.A. police raided the gallery more than once,” Hobbs says. “As result of that Cameron vowed to never show in a gallery again. And she pretty well kept to that.”
But Cameron wasn’t only anti-commercial with her art, she was also destructive with it. “At one point in the early 50s she destroyed all of her work,” says Hobbs. “She burned it. Some of it survived because she sold it to friends for little.”
Director Curtis Harrington’s video portrait of Cameron stands as the only visual record of many of the works she burned:
Cameron had a reputation as an enchantress — and an allure about her on screen that led to acting work too. She shows up alongside Dennis Hopper in the 1961 mermaid creature feature “Night Tide.” Cameron plays a mysterious sea-witch:
Cameron was more than just the real-life witch local TV stations would interview on Halloween, more than the woman who dressed in black and drove a hearse. Hobbs says we shouldn’t forget about Cameron the artist.
With the help of Hobbs and the Cameron-Parsons foundation, Yael Lipschutz is curating a show at MOCA that will focus on Cameron’s work.
“It’s an exciting opportunity for younger artists to see the output of someone who has a rather mythic underground status in the art world but whose objects and creations we haven’t had the opportunity to see in the flesh,” Lipschutz says.
There’s no denying Cameron was a prominent figure in the counterculture and beat movements here in L.A., influencing artists like George Herms and Wallace Berman with what Lipschutz calls a romantic, William Blake-like sensibility. Much of Cameron’s work remains obscure because of her own choices, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t always working on her art.
“She led a sort of renegade life,” Lipschutz says. According to Lipschutz, Cameron was known to escape to the desert, where she led a primal lifestyle and was handy with a shotgun. “No matter how poor her existence was, she never stopped creating,” Lipschutz says. “...It was always the fire that I think fueled her, more than anything.”
As a caretaker and promoter of Cameron’s work, Scott Hobbs agrees that, while Cameron’s fantastic life story might first get your attention, her art will keep you under its spell.
“Her work really does stand on its own,” Hobbs says. “I don’t meet people quite like that anymore.”
There’s a new book out called “Songs for the Witch Woman” that features Cameron’s drawings and Jack Parsons' poetry.
Cameron's upcoming MOCA show runs October 11 through next January.
Sportstalker Petros Papadakis, radio's loudest and maybe smartest host
Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with Petros Papadakis, former singing waiter, captain of the USC football team, English major, color commentator and co-host of "The Petros and Money Show" on AM 570 KLAC.
Culture shock (noun): a sense of confusion and uncertainty, sometimes with feelings of anxiety, that may affect people exposed to an alien culture or environment without adequate preparation. - Merriam Webster
After spending four hours in the KLAC studio in Burbank a couple weeks ago with Petros Papadakis and Matt "Money" Smith, I'm surprised I didn't wake up talking to myself at the Smokehouse, with three or four martinis drained on the table in front of me. It was that weird. Loud, fast, stream-of-consciousness, sound effects, people talking in the studio when the mike is on. If KPCC is a Prius, the Petros and Money Show is a Camaro clown car.
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For all these reasons, the Petros and Money Show, nationally syndicated and heard weekdays on AM570 KLAC, is the opposite of public radio — but in others, it's a kindred spirit. Because when you strip out the focus on sports, and the frenetic pace, it's actually two smart guys who seem to like each other talking about an astounding array of topics in a smart way. The 41-year old Matt "Money" Smith, a Kevin & Bean alum, is more your standard radio host, playing straight man so 37-year old Petros Papadakis can do his stuff.
Papadakis grew up in his family's Greek restaurant in San Pedro, where he still lives. Duties included being a singing waiter (listen to the interview to hear his version of "Rags to Riches"), and he says working in a restaurant taught him how to deal with people. Then, he got a scholarship to USC where he became captain of the football team while earning an English degree.
He was lousy at math and science, he says, "but I always was a reader of literary fiction and real books, you know. And because of that it saved me in my career, in my life, made me able to communicate and impress people I probably shouldn't have."
That shows up in the show, which he regularly starts with a quote like, "Wise men speak because they have something to say. Fools because they have to say something." (That's Plato, another Greek.) But so do his other widely varied interests: Frogman Friday celebrates the show "Sea Hunt."
"I live by the ocean," he says, "and I love water people but I'm afraid of the water." They do "The Bachelorette Report" to review the latest episode of the show. They spent five minutes talking about Ettore Bugatti the day I was there, including an excursion into high fashion. And just yesterday Papadakis closed the show by reading song titles from a new K-pop album; I don't think they even played any music from it. They were just funny titles.
And yes, they do sports. Probably 60-70 percent of the show is sports related, but even that stays smart. When I visited, they had an expert on who could actually explain NFL rules in a way a non-football fan could understand. That's good radio on the public or commercial dial.
I ask if they've ever focus-grouped the show, and Papadakis reacts in horror. "No, no. And frankly I don't care. I really don't. I do a show that we enjoy. We all put the show together, we make it, then we leave. Whatever it is, that's what it is."
When we're debriefing about my culture shock, and I say how different "Petros and Money" is from public radio, Papadakis laughs and says, "I'd like to think the show is different from anything out there. And that makes me good because so much has been done a thousand times. The kind of show we do, we do because we can. We're comfortable with each other to be kinda joyful."