Found Objects: Telephone Service and the War Effort

I found these ads in the 1944 Southern California Telephone Company phone books for West Los Angeles. While I knew about victory gardens, war bonds, loose lips, and butter rationing, this was a new one on me.



Text: "Night-time is about the best time a service man has to call home. That's a good point to remember when you feel the urge to make a Long Distance call between 7 and 10 P.M. If it isn't important, we hope you won't make it. Let the men in service have first call on the wires."



Text: "We appreciate the help you are giving us in keeping the Long Distance lines open for war calls. The production of munitions... the movement of troops... the building of ships and bombers... have put the Long Distance lines squarely up against their biggest task. Materials for building telephone lines are no longer available -- they are needed on the fighting fronts. That is why we ask that only really necessary calls be made to war-busy centers. Thank you for your fine cooperation."



(This one says pretty much the same thing as the one above)



Text: "The trained eyes and fingers of telephone operators are needed, these days, at the switchboards that are heavily loaded with war calls. Telephone equipment of every kind is deep in the war task. Will you help us to make every bit of equipment count? Here is one way: Please look in the Directory for any number you are not sure of. Please look there first before you call 'Information.' Thousands of calls daily, in which 'Information' is asked to help, are for numbers that are IN the Directory. Our foremost job is the war job. It just is not feasible to do all the things for our customers that we were able to do in peace time. We appreciate your understanding and your friendly cooperation.

Weekend Curiosities and Wonders: B is for Bud and Beulah

Here's your bit of odd text for the weekend.

I've recently been preparing for another Los Angeles true crime program at the library focusing on historic crimes of passion. And it's hard to talk about L.A. crimes of passion without spending some time on the lurid, notorious, god-awful trial of Bud Gollum and Beulah Louise Overell, never mind the fact that the pair were acquitted and that the trial took place in Orange, not L.A., County.

It is the quintessential big nasty of love gone bad.

To sum up, on March 15, 1947, a yacht belonging to Beulah's parents exploded in the Newport Beach Harbor while the teenager and her boyfriend, Bud, sat ashore eating hamburgers. An investigation revealed that the adults were beaten to death before the explosion, and dynamite was rigged aboard the yacht. Bud and Beulah were charged with the murders (a brief, but informative summary is available here).


While the pair awaited trial in their respective prisons, they exchanged a series of sometimes steamy, mostly hysterical, melodramatic letters, which were subsequently snatched up by prosecutors and leaked to the now-defunct Los Angeles Examiner. Other L.A. papers quoted the juicy bits (e.g. "If necessary, I'll kidnap you and carry you off somewhere so that no one will ever be able to find us and there I'll make passionate and violent love to you," and "Oh my darling, oh my Pops, Popsie, darling, my beautiful, handsome, intelligent Pops. I adore you, always, eternally. Your slave, Louise"), but the Examiner actually printed images of the letters.

Well, I had to see that. So, I rolled up my sleeves, dug out the microfilm, and went to town.

I particularly admire Bud's sketch of a proposed jailbreak route, as well as his turn of phrase: "Please draw the route to your cell from the elevator. I love you, my dear. I adore you."

Unsurprisingly, the couple's love affair did not survive the trial.

In most cases involving grisly death, I refrain from making light. However, the sensational trial, and even more sensationalized news coverage it received make it hard to take seriously. Additionally, without reasonable guardians to keep a lid on her, the behavior of the teenage Beulah Louise was frequently shocking. She somehow seemed to interpret all the attention as "good" attention, and flirted shamelessly with the press and signed autographs. Other times, she had odd emotional responses, like this picture, taken while she views the site where her parents died.

A guilty party, or merely a 1947-era Britney?

I've added other selected portions of the letters on Flickr for interested parties. Honestly, if the circumstances surrounding them weren't so grim and awful, they'd fit right in at Mortified or PostSecret.

Weekend Curiosities and Wonders: A is for Apothecary

"But while they were eating the stew, they cried out, 'O man of God, there is death in the pot!"
-2 Kings 4:40

"If you drink too much from a bottle marked 'Poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later."
-Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

From biblical plagues of poison quail and the treatment of venereal diseases with mercury, to history's infamous poisoners like Catherine de Medici and H.H. Crippen, there's no shortage of interesting accounts and fun facts in the annals of poison.

Dieter Martinetz's Poison: Sorcery and Science, Friend and Foe (1987) is notable for its particularly lovely collection of etchings, illuminations, Victorian advertisements, and art prints depicting poison in history. Here, I learned of the physical effects of the "flying mixture," an ointment of henbane, deadly nightshade, and thornapple which, rubbed over the chest produces the a rather dramatic sensation.

Following a 1954 experiment, Siegbert Ferckel reported that after applying the ointment, "the walls and ceiling began to undulate and to crash together with a loud bang... Faces came towards me out of the darkness... I soared upwards at great speed..., and I saw hazily, through a pink veil, that I was floating above the town."

Equally curious and entertaining is the Howdunit Book of Poisons, a book for writers that details the exact toxicity, symptoms, and treatments for hundreds of poisons, including case histories about how various poisons have been used in literature and in real crimes and accidental overdoses. Here, I learned that both the leaves of the rhubarb plant and the bite of an adder will cause bleeding from the nose and eyes. Additionally, I found what is quite possible the weirdest use of poison in literature:

"Someone at the picnic had really given Thea an oleander branch. With three notches in it.. to let the deadly sap escape?... And she skewered her frankfurter on it?"
-Lucille Kallen, The Piano Bird

According to our authors, poor Thea would shortly thereafter face unconsciousness, respiratory paralysis, and death.

And fans of true crime and historical oddity will enjoy Peter Macinnis's Poisons, a highly readable collection of accidental and criminal poisonings in history.

Take the tragic story of Humbug Billy, a sweets vendor in Bradford, England in the mid-19th century. A poor confectioner, Billy stretched the sugar in his peppermint candies with a powdered filler of limestone or plaster of paris called "daft," -- perhaps dishonest, but certainly not dangerous. Until the day that the local druggist accidentally substituted Billy's daft with a sack of arsenic. Approximately 200 people became ill, and 20 died from the sweets.

And with that little tale, I leave you for the weekend. May all your foods be pure, and your cordials unadulterated.

Weekend Curiosities and Wonders

Bizarre Books: A Compendium of Classic Oddities by Russell Ash and Brian Lake

I read about this book at Weekend Stubble a few weeks ago, and was immediately smitten. So, imagine my delight when Brady brings it home as a prize the other day. He felt bad that I trudged off to my gloomy office while he spent the day doing his dissertation reading at the beach.

Tonight I spent a happy hour on the couch, giggling at titles both ill-conceived and unintentionally hilarious. A few choice ones include:

Eleven Years a Drunkard, or, The Life of Thomas Doner, Having Lost Both Arms Through Intemperance, He Wrote This Book With His Teeth as a Warning to Others by Thomas Doner
Why Not Eat Insects? by Vincent M. Holt
Gunrunning for Fun and Profit by Ragnar Benson

...and everyone's favorite, Scouts in Bondage by Geoffrey Prout

I'm going to start posting various Curiosities and Wonders on Fridays. What exactly constitutes a curiosity or a wonder remains to be seen, but I work in a huge library, and I'm thinking something along the lines of narwhals, ley lines, and interesting poisons for starters.

Stay tuned.