Kiosk - Chasing Bandits (page 3)

Chasing Bandits
(continued)

Within minutes of reading the article, I turned to an indispensable resource: Google. “Alice Le Fevre,” I typed. “Le Fevre, Alice.” No one born around 1910 showed up. Disappointed but far from discouraged, I searched for her accomplice. I found Dorothy.

In The Los Angeles Times on July 4, 1930, a headline read: “‘Reformatory Bob’ Drives Two Girls Into Truancy.” On May 10, Dorothy Trone and Betty Evans “quit the Ventura School for Girls. Clad only in their night attire, they slid down a sheet to the ground, two floors below, and, still scantily clad, managed to make their way to Los Angeles, where they borrowed suitable street clothes.” Deputies found her working as a waitress in Wilmington. I read on. “Dorothy, charged with having been an accomplice of Alice La Fevre, 22, asserted ‘bandit queen’ of San Pedro, was sentenced to two years at the Ventura school after having been found in possession of a stolen automobile.” Surely, if Dorothy had been taken to the Ventura School for Girls, so had Alice.

I googled the Ventura School for Girls to learn everything I could about the place where Alice might have been. The school opened in 1913. By the time Alice arrived, there were seven cottages that the matrons could have assigned her to: Miramar, El Mirasol, La Jolla, El Toyon, Alta Vista, La Casita (the parole cottage), or Ris Vista (the lost privilege cottage). All came with shingle roofs, wooden floors, radiators, and no fire escapes. Situated amongst the hills overlooking oil fields, the Ventura School for Girls also had a cannery, laundry, school, stables, hospital, auditorium, gymnasium, and slaughterhouse. Authorities drove the girls to local fields where they tended the vegetables they would later prepare in the kitchens.

Rules and monotony were the norm. Some women swallowed safety pins the night before the government transferred them to the school, preferring an extended yet painful stay in a hospital to the pseudo-prison. Others, like Dorothy, tearfully stated that they would prefer to be housed in San Quentin. The California Youth Authority ran the school. It also posted lists of the inmates online, if a judge had sentenced them between 1907 and 1931.

I clicked the letter “L” and scrolled down the page, looking for Le Fevre. Layman, Layton, Le Van, Jr., Lea. She wasn’t there. I moved back up to the top. Perhaps she was under La Fevre. La Bonte, La Grange, La Loge. Surely I was just missing it. Many frustrated attempts and a few days later, there she was: Alice LaFevre, inmate 1458, Ventura, 1930. Dorothy also proved tricky – she was listed as Dorothy Trane, inmate 1470.

I searched the U.S. records online, but found no perfect match. I called the Long Beach Historical Society to see if I could access their archives. With over 30,000 pictures and documents of Long Beach, undoubtedly they could fill in the gaps. Surely they could show me what the Brooks Hotel looked like or exactly where on the map Temple Avenue and Tenth Street met. Maybe they could even tell me where to find Alice and Dorothy.

Except, as I found when I called, all the potential research materials were boxed up from a recent move, unavailable to the public for months. I returned to my other avenue, contacting the California State Archives where the California Youth Authority kept their inmate records – everything from details on admission dates, crimes committed, and interactions with other prisoners. I asked for inmate registries, scrapbooks, superintendent’s correspondence, the discharge register, and anything else an archivist could find. The archivist replied that most results required seven days of research.

While I waited, I spent days trying to find court records. I called the Long Beach courthouse, but learned that records more than thirty years old were no longer there. I tried the Public Records Ombudsman at the Department of Justice. I just want the records from a 1930’s arrest, please. She informed me that after the records come to the Department of Justice they enter the criminal database, which can only be accessed by legal authorities or the individual. The files were no longer public record, she told me. Thank God, I thought, for the archives.

I was now devoting almost every spare minute to combing through Google and Yahoo searches for LeFevre, LaFevre, La Fevre, and Le Fevre. I read newspaper articles, followed family trees on genealogical websites, read announcements, everything I could find. I could tell you from memory that there was an Alice Le Fevre, 69 years old, living in Peoria, Illinois, a 95-year-old one in San Rafael, California, a 52-year-old in Newton Falls, Ohio, a 44-year-old in Ridgecrest, California, and a 72-year-old in Madison, Wisconsin. There was a 38-year-old Alice Le Fevre, 5’8, medium complexion, brown hair, blue eyes, born in Dukla, Austria, that arrived in Ellis Island on board the Bermudian in 1912. In 1888, a Miss Alice Le Fevre carried a bouquet of white lilies as she married Dr. Henry Arnold Fairbairn. On February 27, 1860, an Alice Lefevre was born in Ulster County, New York, the culmination of four generations (on both sides) that had lived there before her. There were Alice Le Fevres in Pennsylvania, Cambridgeshire, Wisconsin, and Kentucky. There was an Alice Lefevre who wrote about library trends in the 1950s, and an Alice Le Fevre who was a bilingual Parisian journalist. Occasionally, I wished I had been actually researching one of them.

While I was searching for Alice, I also checked out every book that even remotely related to the Ventura School for Girls. I read Guidelines for the Development of Policies and Procedures: Juvenile Training Schools, a 1987 book that never mentioned the school directly; Ventura Vocational Project: A Vocational Study Made in the California Youth Authority Ventura School for Girls, a 1953 study that reported that two-thirds of the girls came from families with only one parent, were educated to the level of a 13-year-old, and preferred to read Life and Ladies’ Home Journal; and L.A. Despair: a landscape of crime & bad times, which mentioned the Ventura School for Girls on only one page. I discovered the section of the library devoted to lesbian literature, because in Early Embraces III one of the women had her first lesbian encounter in the Ventura School for Girls, though it was in the 1960’s. I even picked up an original copy of an oil report conducted on the land under the school, complete with yellowed maps threatening to tear at every crease. Alice had been there. She had taken IQ tests before entering, she had been assigned to one of the cottages, she had worn that drab gray uniform.

(conclusion on page 4)