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(continued) In 1929, there were 23,120,897 automobiles registered in the United States. On Christmas Eve, Alice and Dorothy decided to take one. From Long Beach they sped south towards San Diego, following the curvy road beside the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean. Job No. 2, as Alice would write, was the hold-up of a San Diego service station. They cashed a worthless check to buy gasoline for the return trip. In Job No. 4, they forced another young man to rob the service station at the corner of South Main and Camille streets in Santa Ana. In her diary, Alice attached a newspaper clipping of the robbery that had earned her $27.43. On Christmas day, a bandit robbed a tobacco shop, carrying off $1600 in a cigar box – enough to buy three new Ford Sport Coupes. A thief stole lights from Christmas trees in the business district. Police arrested five men for intoxication, and returned a stolen nineteen-pound turkey, now fully dressed, to schoolboy Miles Snyder. That same night, C.C. Tenkhoff was working in his Long Beach store, at the corner of Temple Avenue and Tenth Street. Alice entered alone, except for her .32 caliber revolver. Tenkhoff surrendered the $10 in the cash drawer, and Alice jumped into her getaway car, the stolen automobile driven, of course, by Dorothy. Job No. 5 was complete. The Christmas holidays passed in a fit of celebration, though presumably not for Mr. Tenkhoff. In Redondo Beach, police discovered 300 gallons of liquor and a mixing plant, then arrested the three culprits – one of them a woman with a one-year-old child. Chef Giuseppi Carboni overindulged in Christmas cheer and promptly died from alcohol poisoning. So much for prohibition. More than crimes made headlines in the end of the year newspapers. Buster Keaton parachuted into a scene of his first talkie, On the Set. The Black and White Cab Company released a new fleet of 102 taxicabs with ultra-low fares. A committee dropped Communist flyers over Roosevelt High School. Scientist A.H. Miller completed measurements that proved the earth was an ellipsoid, not a sphere. Daredevil aviatrix Jean LaVock crash-landed her plane, crawled from the wreckage, powdered her nose, and asked for a glass of ice water. New Year’s Eve came around, and the world prepared to usher out the 1920s. In New York, Guy Lombardo played Auld Lang Syne for the first time. In Los Angeles, hundreds of witches, ghosts, and carnival characters danced along the Venice Pier. Thousands planned to attend the 41st Tournament of Roses Parade the next morning. Chief ‘Two Guns’ Davis, promising to keep New Year’s Eve rowdiness to a minimum, deployed a fleet of plain-clothes policemen. Two of them apprehended a man on charges of possessing liquor, and questioned him at the Long Beach police station. He needed to give them something, so he gave a room number and a name: The Brooks Hotel. Not knowing what they would find, the police headed to the hotel. They entered the room mentioned by their informant and, finding it empty, looked for clues. One officer leafed through the pages of a small black diary with white handwriting. The others gathered around to read, their curiosity strangely intrigued by this memento – much more interesting than the .32 caliber revolver or an empty cigar box. They looked up to watch the door open. Alice and Dorothy walked in. The officers placed the girls in handcuffs and took them to headquarters. With the diary thrust in front of her, Alice admitted to the jobs catalogued on its black pages. But with entries ending on Christmas Day, she defiantly refused any connection with the tobacco shop robbery. After all, why would she admit to a job she never recorded? The star of good fortune abandoned Alice before 1930 ever began. *** Los Angeles, 2007 Much like the cops 77 years before, I stumbled across Alice by pure chance. On October 15, I found myself online, browsing through the Historical Los Angeles Times database. The past seemed lonely, so I thought I’d join it. I looked at the advanced search bar. It looked blankly back. Instead of search criteria, I entered a date range. The 1930s sounded good. With thousands of results, I began at the beginning. January 1, 1930. Some titles automatically caught my interest more than others. “ALIEN LAWYER BAN DEFEATED,” one of them read. I was initially very excited – a lawyer that was from outer space? “BABY DESERTED IN HOTEL ROOM; But Mother Leaves Note Explaining.” “CHEF WYMAN'S RECIPES; STEAMED CRANBERRY PUDDING.” “CHILD PRATTLES TALE OF KILLING; Mother Shot State Trooper, He Tells Police.” “FARMERS' CUPBOARDS GOING BARE.” “GIRL SEIZED AS ‘DIARY BANDIT’; List of Crimes Revealed in Daily Entries Sweetheart Dropped Her, She Says in Preface.” A jilted young lady turning to a life of crime? Sold. I clicked the link and found Alice. A slender column detailing her story ran next to a piece about the ex-actress Mary Miles Minter secluding herself in an eastern sanatorium. I read the piece through at least three times. I was in love. She had her own jazzy title. She got men drunk and robbed service stations. She stole cars. She dedicated her life to creating a little chaos, to taking what she wanted, to fighting the world when she lost what she loved. I am a bookworm who never misses an assignment, never drinks, never smokes, never steals. Alice was quickly becoming, in my mind, the quintessential flapper who stayed out late, swilled bathtub gin, and, to take it to a whole new level, robbed drugstores. We were the same age. Could I have been like Alice, living a life of crime, adrenaline racing through my veins as I hotwired the new Ford Model A or shoved my .32 revolver into someone’s spine, demanding their change so I could knock on an inconspicuous back door and slide into a speakeasy for a Scotch on the rocks? I wanted to know everything about her. What was her childhood like? Who was this lover that abandoned her, and why? What was Job No. 3, conspicuously absent from the L.A. Times article? Did she go to jail? Did she continue her life of crime or settle down and get married? Did she have any children? Where was the diary now? Where was she? |
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