Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

poker, because gambling was prohibited on campus. In any event, by the time he was seventeen he had left engineering school and was working at a variety of jobs.

In 1924, mostly as a result of his performance on IQ tests required by the California public school system during his early teens, the noted Stanford psychologist Dr. Lewis Terman selected him to become a member of a tracking group known as 'Terman's Termites.' This was one of the first long-running experiments in developmental psychology, in which Professor Terman, credited with originating the terms 'IQ' and 'gifted,' conducted a survey of more than a thousand intellectually endowed students. Beginning in 1924 with a group of specially selected children, Terman's study began to collect data and follow them as they grew older, to see how their intellectual gifts manifested themselves in their lives and careers. In the seven decades since Dr. Terman's groundbreaking studies began, five books have been published analyzing the data provided from these original students.

Over the years, Father continued to return the extensive research questionnaires; clearly he saw his selection by Dr. Terman as a validation of his own belief that he was special. His scrupulous return of the questionnaires and his adherence to what the study required of him doubtless reinforced in him the elitist feeling instilled in him by his parents. I also believe the fact that his 186 IQ placed him in Terman's highest category of the gifted students to be studied was a vital component of his extraordinary self-esteem that stood him in good stead during his toughest times and into his final years.

From 1924 through 1928, my father worked in various professions in the Los Angeles area normally reserved for much older and more experienced people. In his first job, he worked as a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Record during the most violent years of Prohibition. His particular beat was the LAPD Vice Squad, where he rode shotgun on their raids of downtown nightclubs and local speakeasies. Extracts from an article he wrote on August 20,1924, when he was only sixteen, provide insight not only into what was happening in L.A. during Prohibition but also into my father's thoughts and activities.

LIFE CAFE

WHERE LIQUOR IS HARD

A Raid on the Humming Bird Cafe

Outside the brilliantly lit Humming Bird cafe, 1243 East 12th street, officers are waiting, watch in hand, ready to swoop down on the place, on the stroke of 12 Saturday night.

All possible exits are guarded, all avenues of escape are watched. They are determined that this raid should not fail — that they should clean up the wettest hole on Central Avenue.

It lacks five minutes of midnight.

Inside, a motley crowd is reveling unaware of what developments are about to take place.

The atmosphere is saturated with the odor of intoxicants. The spirit of the men and women inside is changing from one of tipsy fun to that of licentious debauchery. Strong liquor is doing its work . ..

Three minutes of midnight.

The Negro orchestra strikes up a tune, assertively synchopative. The players sway their bodies in rhythm with the music, deftly juggling their instruments . . .

Abandonment, unreserved and unblushing, is permeating the cafe. A loud knock at the door. Four men stride in, officers of the prohibition enforcement and vice squads.

They walk rapidly about from table to table, seizing bottles and collaring men. The proprietor calls excitedly to waiters, who dash about warning the men and women. Dozens of glasses are overturned, dozens of bottles are emptied or smashed.

The noise of broken glass fills the room.

The floor is soaked with alcohol.

The four officers have taken five men, sixteen officers could have arrested four times that number.

The siren of the police patrol dies off in the distance.

The music starts up lurchingly.

Bottles are lifted from the floor. Glasses are refilled.

A woman looks sorrowfully at the broken neck of a smashed whisky flask. She breaks out into a loud high- pitched sob, gasping drunkenly. . .

Arrest Men for Booze

While white women careened drunkenly in the Arms of Negro escorts, in the Humming Bird cafe, 1243 East Twelfth street, early Wednesday morning, vice squad officers swooped down on the place and arrested several prominent citizens for illegal possession of liquor, marking the third raid carried out on the cafe in as many days. ..

According to the officers the Hummingbird has been a nightlife rendezvous, where whites dine, dance and drink with members of the city's Negro colony. A bevy of showgirls from a downtown burlesque theater were on the scene, enjoying the festivities.

Many complaints have been received by police authorities against the Hummingbird and it is said that the wildest sort of orgies are carried on there nightly. White women of the underworld make the place a headquarters, according to the officers, and ply their vocation there.

George isn't just reporting on the raid; he is describing a lifestyle and sexual fantasies that had fully engaged him even as a teenager. He actually recreates an atmosphere of forbidden sexual promiscuity that violates even the taboos of the 1920s. Father's writing was so colorful that he was quickly promoted from cub reporter to his own crime beat. Now he was working with the city's top cops on the LAPD's homicide squad. In a front- page Record story from 1924 about a murder scene he covered with homicide detectives, where the victim, Peggy Donovan, had been kicked to death, he wrote:

Los Angeles Record

June 3, 1924

Two Cents