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Tag: Seal Beach Police

  • October 6th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1963, the Long Beach Independent Press Telegram’s Women’s section ran a profile of the posh Larsen Hall off-campus women’s dormitory at 1310 Electric Avenue in Seal Beach under the breezy headline, “Larsen Hall — Books ‘n Bathing Caps.”

    Coeds Judy Delulio and Jeannine Merril studying in the library at Larsen Hall

    Larsen Hall was previously seen here in this post covering February 21, 1964 – a scandalous post filled with shame, dishonor, ignominy, and disgrace. (I may be overstating a bit.)

    Ah, but what a difference four months makes! On October 6, 1963, the situation still appears sunny at Larsen Hall, inspiring the unnamed reporter to observe, “Dorm living today is like camping in mink.” The reporter felt that the two-story dormitory, “just a bikini-brief walk from the beach,” had “nearly all the the attributes of a resort hotel.” These attributes included a dining and lounge area, a central pool patio, a sundeck, a separate snack room off the kitchen, a secluded library, an intercom system, and an automated laundry. The entire facility could accommodate 37 students.

    Some of the current students did homework and dangled their feet in the pool the day the reporter visited.  Judy Delulio from Lake Tahoe shared that “You’re never lonely here. We stick together — there’s always something fun going on: a popcorn party, a starfish hunt at the beach, a special excursion. Best of all, we have neat management.”

    Ah, yes. The management. At this stage, there’s nothing but praise for Frank and Joan Silone. Frank drove the “girls back and forth to school in the hall’s private bug of a bus” and did the cooking, “turning out menus that would please a gourmet.” Joan helped with sewing and the evening song fests. 

    Just another poolside day in coed paradise – Sherry Delulio plays catch while Jan Petersen strums a guitar and Terry Suffet tries to read

    But there was trouble (and poorly reproduced from microfilm photos) in the sad future of Larsen Hall.

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • September 27th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1927, former Seal Beach City Marshal Thomas Randall robbed the Pasadena Savings Bank. Randall entered the bank just before closing and backed several bank clerks and six bank patrons up against the wall at gunpoint and grabbed $1799 (over $25 grand in today’s dollars). He then escaped in an automobile he had left running in front of the bank entrance. Some of the clerks gave chase, but Randall lost them in traffic.

    Unluckily for Randall, the clerks were able to give police an accurate enough description of Randall and his getaway car, and 29 year-old former Long Beach and Seal Beach officer  was arrested four hours later by the Los Angeles Police.

    In court before Justice J. R. Morton two days later, Randall admitted to the bank robbery and claimed that his gun was unloaded. His reason for the crime was that he had been unable to find work since leaving the Long Beach Police Department and was desperate for money to provide for his family.

    All $1799 from the robbery was recovered.

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • September 2nd in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1959, the Seal Beach Police, acting on a tip from Long Beach Police,  shut down a $4,000 bookie joint at 1605 ½ Seal Way. John L. Allen, 48, and Wilbur J. Hughes, 56, were arrested.

    Allen, who resided at the address, collapsed due to “acute shock brought on by extreme nervousness,” according to the Long Beach Independent, and was taken to the Orange County General Hospital.

    Hughes, a Long Beach resident, somehow managed to weather the ordeal without requiring hospital care.

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • August 25th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1964, a sixty-year old evangelist preaching the bible in Seal Beach was assaulted by a band of teen-age delinquents.

    Mark Frank Forsyth of Huntington Beach told police that he had been preaching at 10th Street on the beach as he done many times before in the previous two years. This time, however, a group of at least five teenagers began to heckle him at approximately 2 p.m. 

    One of the teens grabbed Forsyth’s hat, and then the verbal assault escalated into violence. The other boys pelted Forsyth with rocks, hit him with their fists, and burnt him with cigarettes on the neck and left ankle. Forsyth’s clothes were torn as he tried to flee, and one boy grabbed his bible and tracts and begin to rip the pages of his bible. During the scuffle, no one came to Forsyth’s aid.

    Later, the police brought in a fourteen-year old Long Beach youth on charges of participating in a riot, assault and battery, and armed riot, but he denied taking part in the attack and refused to identify any of his fellow teens.

    When interviewed by an AP reporter, Forsyth said that he preached because he was “concerned for the spirit and physical well-being of the thousands of teenagers who flock to the beaches.”

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • August 10th in Seal Beach History

     On this date in 1944, a car crash fatality at Main Street and Bolsa Avenue in Seal Beach occurred, according to the Long Beach Independent. An unnamed reporter wrote the next day that “Claud Roland, 23, of the San Diego naval base, was killed at 7:27 last night.”

    12-17-1936 aerial shot of Main Street as it turns into Bolsa Avenue right after crossing PCH

    Roland had been turning on to Bolsa Avenue from Main Street when his tire blew. The car flipped over and skidded almost 30 feet, throwing passengers USMC Sergeant James Johnson of the Corona Navy Hospital and Mrs. June Blackman of Fullerton from the car. Blackman and Johnson suffered some bruises and lacerations, and pedestrians Edward Booker and Joe Jackman, both of the Naval Weapons Depot, couldn’t avoid being hit by the car, but were only slightly injured. The injured were taken to the Long Beach Naval Hospital, according to Seal Beach Police Sergeant Charles Irvine.

    Police Chief Lee Howard, Captain James Morousek, and Sergeant Jack Whittington rushed to the accident scene and struggled to remove Roland from the overturned car wreckage, only to discover his head had been crushed and young Claud Roland was dead.

    A 5/23/1931 aerial shot showing how Bolsa Avenue curved into Main Street at PCH and how Main Street continue up into the farmland on Landing Hill.

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • July 26th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1921, Mrs. Frances Talbert, age 20, wept as she plead guilty to assaulting Mrs. Carrie A. Collinge and was sentenced to thirty days in the county jail. The charge had been reduced from assault with a deadly weapon to simple assault. 

    Frances Talbert had been employed by Mrs. Coolinge, who ran a nursery at 137 14th Street in Seal Beach. Around midnight on June 3rd, Mrs. Collinge noticed that Frances was not in her room. Later, when she checked again to see if Frances had returned, someone threw a couch cover over her head and tried to smother her and then dragged her to the next room to strike her four times with a broom.

    Mrs. Collinge, who thought she was being attacked by a man, fell to the floor and pretended to be unconscious. When attack ended, she removed the cover from her head, and the only person in the room was Frances, holding her 2 1/2 year old daughter and a broom handle in the other. She denied having made the attack or having seen anyone else.

    Carrie Collinge seemed more bewildered and curious about the assault than angry. The newspapers cover her account of the assault, but there are no reports of her response to the sentence or details about any interactions with Frances after the incident. 

    There are so many unanswered questions nearly 100 years later, made all the more confusing by discrepancies in the four articles about Frances Talbert’s case in the Santa Ana Register. In one story, the assault happened in May and Frances was arrested two weeks after the story’s publication! This same story gives the daughter’s name as Catherine, but later article call her Lillian. Whatever her name was, she was a real sweetheart and charmed the staff and female prisoners at the jail where she stayed with mother Francis. 

    Another story rather carelessly hints as a possible motive for the assault rumors that Carrie Collinge had just recently made Frances the major beneficiary of her will, but then quickly admits to not being able to verify the rumor and that the authorities disclaimed any knowledge of a will.

    What we do know is that Frances Talbert gave no explanation for the attack, and that she was released five days early on August 23 for good behavior. Was she covering for a late night male guest and given a lenient sentence because the police and judges knew she was paying for a crime she did not commit? It’s pure speculation at this point, and we’re even further from the truth today than Santa Ana Register reporters were in 1921.

    The 1920 census lists a Francis (with an “i”) Talbert, a 19-year old single white female with no schooling, working as a resident nurse for widowed Carrie Coolidge’s nursery in Los Angeles. One of the inmates (the census-taker’s word, not mine) at the nursery is a five month year old girl named Kathrine Talbert with a mother born in Louisiana and a father born in the United States. The census alone makes no overt connection between Francis and Kathrine beyond the listing a shared last name and that they live at the same address.

    Here’s another interesting tidbit from the census. The page lists Kathrine Talbert as black. This is a subjective judgement, but it appears to me that the box for race had “W” originally and then was smudgingly erased to be replaced with a “B” for black.

    It’s easy to imagine a unwed teenage mother leaving Louisiana to have her child away from her home town. That would have been scandalous enough, but an African-American father would have been unthinkable in 1921. Again, it’s important to stress that this is all speculation, and the truth about the beating and Kathrine’s (or Lillian’s) parentage has move out of living memory. 

    Carrie A. Collinge died in Santa Barbara in 1938 at the age of 75. I could find no trace of Frances or Kathrine (or Catherine or Lillian) after Frances is released from jail. 

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • July 11th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1920, a Hindu, Salen Shonka, was arrested on a vagrancy charge because he walked about the streets of Seal Beach “at late and unusual hours without apparent reason,” according to the Santa Ana Register.

    Mr. Shonka, who operated a fortune-telling booth in Seal Beach for several years and claimed to own property in town, pleaded not guilty the next day and demanded a jury trial via his lawyer, G. M. Spicer. Mr. Shonka was released under $50 bail and assigned a trial date of July 21.

    Unfortunately, no follow-up story was printed, so Mr. Shonka’s fate remains a mystery.

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • June 23rd in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1927, two men were rushed to the Seaside Hospital in Long Beach. Robert I. Gilchrist, 54, of Sunset Beach and David Carlson, 37, of Seal Beach were struck by a car as they crossed the highway. The driver, Lynn Colburn of Long Beach reported the accident to the Seal Beach Police, claiming that he had been blinded by the headlights of an approaching car and did not see the two pedestrians. Colburn was released by the police when news came that neither men were seriously injured.

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • May 15th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1954, two “kangaroo men” — as they were named in a headline in the next day’s Long Beach Independent — escaped from Seal Beach Police. John Johnson, the owner of the drugstore at 141 Main Street, was leaving work for the night when he heard noises from the roof above his store.

    Johnson called the police department, and the dispatched officers scaled the building and confronted two suspects. The two men surprised the officers by leaping twenty feet to the ground and making a clean getaway in a car parked nearby. 

    Unfortunately, there were no wandering minstrels nearby to witness this and turn it into a famous folk song.

    The Seal Drug Co. was located at 141 Main Street on the west side of the street where Bob’s Rexall did business for years and where Stitch and Feather has operated a “women’s boho boutique; a Dame’s Market” since 2013.

    This photo can be dated within a seven year period from 1946 to 1953. Along the edge of the left side behind a street lamp, there is a glimpse of the Cole’s Market sign. Cole’s Market opened their Seal Beach location in August 1946 and included the address in advertisement until August 1953. By November 1953, a “Food King Mkt.” occupied 148 Main Street. (The market’s name expanded to John’s Food King later.)

    This photo is filled with long-gone Seal Beach businesses that are little bit easier to see if you click on the image for a larger view.  Also, note the Pacific Electric red car tracks paved over down the center of Main Street.

    Next to Seal Drug Co. was the Seal Beach News, an anti-gambling rival newspaper to the Seal Beach Post and Wave.  The short-lived Seal Beach News started circulating in 1946, but didn’t last long. It was gone before 1954 when a Baptist church took over that address.

    On the other side of the Seal Drug Co. was a jewelry store (probably the actual target of the “kangaroo men” and The Friendly Nook, a yarn and wool store, at 137 1/2 Main.

    Further down the street towards the pier is Frosty’s Shop, specializing in “Ladies and Gents Wear” and helping you “Look Your Best” and “Look Well-Dressed” with “Careful Cleaning,” according to the ad copy on a Frosty’s Shop matchbook. Frosty’s was owned by John C. “Frosty” Felts, an active member of the Seal Beach community and one-time president of the Seal Beach Lions Club. His name is spread across newspaper stories about Seal Beach community events from the thirties to the fifties.

    If you ever rode on the merry-go-round that was installed on the east side of the pier, you’re familiar with his work. He spearheaded the 1947 fundraising and installation of the “flying wheel” as the chairman of public welfare committee of the Seal Beach Lions Club. “Frosty” Felts lived at 502 Central Avenue and passed away in 1956.

    And, if you look carefully just past the Frosty’s sign, you can see the sign for the Circle Cafe. There are other stores and signs that unfortunately didn’t photograph sharply enough to read. One final curiosity is an advertisement for the Hollywood Record Club on the side of one of the Main Street buildings. This wasn’t a Seal Beach business, but a mail order record outfit similar to the Columbia House Record of the Month Club.

    Even though this photo was taken before the rooftop chase described in today’s post, the Main Street it shows would have still looked much the same when those elusive “kangaroo men” made their dramatic twenty foot leap into Seal Beach history back in 1954.

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • May 4th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1933, the Seal Beach city council took measures to balance the general fund  by instituting a new work schedule and pay for the city’s water, street, and janitorial workers. The modified schedule cut four weeks down to three weeks. The cost cutting measures did not affect the police department or elective offices.

    The trouble with keeping the general fund in the black was no doubt related to the world being more than three years into the Great Depression. Local lore has it that times became so dire that many Seal Beachers were forced to illegally shoot jackrabbits on the Hellman Ranch to feed their families while sympathetic Seal Beach policemen looked the other way. 

    – Michael Dobkins

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