From Los Angeles Magazine December 1987
 
"Dark Strangers, suicide, a jealous boyfriend, Mob connections — all have been fingered at one time or another for Thelma Todd's death."

May Whitehead pulled up alongside the cliff-side wall high on Posetano Road above Will Rogers Beach. She walked to the garage carrying several bundles in her arms. As always, the massive doors were closed but not locked. Whitehead juggled the packages to free one hand, then slid back the right-hand door. Inside were the shiny grille and headlamps of her boss' chocolate-colored 1933 Lincoln Phaeton. It was 10:30 on the cold but sunny Monday morning of December 16, 1935. Whitehead, attractive, erudite and black, was Thelma Todd's personal maid and confidante. She was responsible for getting the curvy blond comedienne to work on time at the Hal Roach Studio in Culver City. She would pull Todd's Lincoln out of the garage, leave her own car in its place, then drive the steep, meandering lanes to a white stucco building at the bottom of the hill on what is now Pacific Coast Highway. The rambling, vaguely Mediterranean three-story building housed Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Cafe, a chic, pricey and popular restaurant operated by Todd's partner and lover, film director Roland West.
 
On this morning Whitehead approached the Lincoln from the passenger side. With a start she saw Todd slumped behind the wheel, her eyes closed, her head inclined toward the car's open door. She was wearing a full-length mink coat over a metallic blue sequined evening gown and matching cape, blue silk slippers and about $20,000 worth of jewelry, including a square-cut diamond ring, a diamond-studded wristwatch, pin and brooch and two diamond hair clasps. She wore, in fact, exactly the same outfit Whitehead had dressed her in to attend a celebrity-studded dinner party at the Sunset Strip's trendy Trocadero nightclub the previous Saturday evening. "I went around to the left side of the car, the driver's side," Whitehead later told a coroner's jury, "and I thought I could awaken her, that she was asleep."
 
But Thelma Todd, "the Ice Cream Blonde," "the Blond Venus," Hollywood's notorious party girl, was dead.
 
Whitehead ran back to her car and drove to the cafe, where she got hold of Charles Smith, the septuagenarian café treasurer and veteran assistant film director who'd served Roland West for decades. West, 48, was a little shorter than Todd's five-foot-four, swarthy and sharp featured. He and Todd lived in modest second-floor apartments connected, for an outward show of propriety (West was still married to silent-film star Jewel Carmen), by sliding doors that could be locked from either side. Adjacent to the apartments was a private club, Joya's, and an oversize lobby with couches where "overtired" guests sometimes napped.
 
Smith buzzed West, who was upstairs and apparently still asleep, on the intercom. West appeared in minutes, ashen faced and carelessly dressed, and leaped into Whitehead's car. In her excitement, on the way back to the garage Whitehead missed a turnoff and had to stop and turn the car around in the narrow lane.
 
At the garage, West raced inside and put a hand to Todd's face. He pulled his hand back, there were a few drops of blood, which he wiped on his handkerchief. West told Whitehead to fetch Rudolph Schafer, the cafe manager and his brother-in-law. Schafer lived in Castillo del Mar, an enormous hillside villa owned by West's estranged wife, which overlooked West and Todd's place. Schafer, who had also been asleep, got to the garage about 11:15. He touched Todd's cold cheek. The police must be called, he decided, and West agreed. Electing not to use the phones at the Sidewalk Café or those at Castillo del Mar, Schafer took West's Hupmobile, parked as usual in the stall next to Todd's Lincoln, and drove several miles to a Santa Monica print shop, where he called the LAPD's West Los Angeles station on the proprietor's private phone.
 
At the death scene police noted no signs of violence. There were 2.5 gallons of gas left in the Lincoln's tank; the ignition was on, but the battery was completely discharged. On the seat was Todd's small white party purse. Inside was a key to her apartment's outside door. Thus began one of the strangest chapters in the history of Los Angeles crime. Immediately, the 29-year-old actress' death made page-one headlines across the country. As the investigation wore on, the local papers were filled for months with speculation, rumor and charges-most of them unfounded and inaccurate — that soon made the case one of Hollywood's most sensational unsolved deaths. Over the years, scores of articles and books have been written hypothesizing what really happened to Thelma Todd that night in 1935. "Dark strangers," suicide, her jealous boyfriend, mob connections — all have been fingered at one time or another for her death. But despite more than five decades of speculation and hype, the final chapter of Thelma Todd's mysterious death has remained unwritten.
 
Until now. What follows, for the first time, is the true story of what happened that night-and why Hollywood conspired to keep it a secret for half a century.
 
Thelma Todd was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1906. Her father was an important local figure, a merchant and perennial alderman. At 15 Thelma went to work in a dime store, but when crowds of people, mostly young men, jammed the store merely to look at her natural beauty, the proprietor had to fire her. The Lawrence Elks club proclaimed her Miss Lawrence and sponsored her in a statewide competition in which she became Miss Massachusetts. For extra money during high school, she modeled clothing in a local theater, so impressing Napoleon DeMara, manager and principal performer for a community theatrical troupe, that he sent her picture to Jesse Lasky at Paramount. Lasky liked what he saw.
 
Studio press agents would later describe her as a former schoolteacher, but despite being elected freshman-class spokesman, Thelma dropped out of Hood Normal, a teacher's college, after one year to attend Paramount's training school in Astoria, Long Island. She graduated with the class of 1926, which included such later notables as Buddy Rogers and Josephine Dunn. Todd's first film was God Gave Me 20 Cents. Paramount liked her way with fine clothes and her forceful, intelligent looks. She appeared in 13 silent films, easily making the transition to talkies in 1927. She had a vibrant, cultured speaking voice and strove to enhance it with voice lessons.
 
By the late Twenties her private life was being radically shaped by her sudden affluence and Hollywood's fast, hedonistic society. In July 1932 she eloped with Pasquale ("Pat") De Cicco, an agent, to Prescott, Arizona. But she was already accustomed to the fast lane. She had affairs with actor Ronald Colman, band leader Abe Lyman and several other men before divorcing De Cicco in March 1934.
 
Thelma acquired faster and faster cars. She drank freely. She was cited for speeding and for driving under the influence. And on January 23, 1933, she ran into a palm tree near Hollywood Boulevard and Nichols Canyon, suffering three broken ribs, a shattered collarbone and internal injuries. She contracted peritonitis and hovered on the brink of death, then rallied. When the Roach studio forbade her to drive, Thelma began taking Whitehead along to drive and hired Ernest Peters as her party chauffeur. Todd's career had taken a new turn when she met Roland West in 1930. The director changed her screen name to Alison Lloyd — "so that no taint of comedy would cling to her skirts" — and starred her as a jaded, manipulative, pleasure-seeking debutante opposite his good friend Chester Morris in Corsair. Though Todd would later appear in other dramas with such superstars as Humphrey Bogart, Randolph Scott and Gary Cooper, she went back to being Thelma Todd after producer Hat Roach half-seriously threatened to change her name to Susie Dinkleberry "so that no taint of drama would cling to her skirts." Roach knew that Depression-era audiences wanted to laugh, and nobody in skirts was funnier than Todd, who went on to star in such comedy classics as Horsefeathers and Monkey Business with the Marx Brothers.
 
But Corsair was to be West's last film, and before it was finished he and Todd began their tempestuous affair. And though he strenuously denied a relationship with Todd, it was to last, off and on, for five years, until her death.
 
From the beginning, the investigation generated controversy and conflicting reports. For weeks after Todd's death the city's lurid dailies ran stories recounting purported details of her last hours.
 
The first mystery confronted by the police was why Todd had not slept in her apartment. Todd had been driven from the Trocadero and dropped off at the entrance to the café by her chauffeur at 4 a.m. Sunday morning. She had not taken the keys to the main ground-floor entrance or to the inside en-trance to her apartment, but she carried one to the outside entrance to her apartment. How is it, the coroner asked Roland West, that she didn't use it?
 
West told the coroner that, not realizing Todd wasn't carrying her other keys, he'd bolted the outside door from the inside because of recent prowlers and death threats against Todd. He retired at 2:30 a.m. Sunday morning, but at about 3:30 a.m., he said, he was awakened by the whining of his bullterrier, White King.
 
The dog would have barked if anyone except he or Todd were nearby, said West, so he assumed Todd had returned. Later, hearing an electric water pump, he concluded that Todd was using the bath. He awakened Sunday morning to find Todd gone. Judging by an impression left on a lobby divan, West said, he assumed she had slept there, rising early to depart, perhaps to visit her mother in Hollywood.
 
Police eventually advanced the theory that Todd, finding herself locked out, had decided to sleep in her car and climbed the 271 steps cut into the steep cliff behind the café to the garage. It was an exceptionally cold and windy night, and she might have started the engine to keep warm. Since the autopsy revealed a blood-alcohol content of .13 percent-. .8 today is considered the legal threshold of intoxication-she might have dozed off before being overcome by the engine's fumes. But that theory immediately came under attack.
 
Todd hated to walk, insisted West. She had a heart condition, he said, and her physician had forbidden strenuous exercise. Though the autopsy indicated no heart or other organ abnormalities, West claimed Todd was subject to frequent "fainting spells" because of her heart condition. Nobody publicly asked why Todd would have chosen to sit freezing in her open-topped phaeton when West's unlocked Hupmobile sedan was right next to it.
 
The press seemed bent on discrediting the police investigation. Several papers dug up stories with remarkable testimony. of people who claimed to have seen or spoken with Todd well after the time of death fixed by the coroner: "anywhere from 5 or 6 o'clock on to 8 o'clock" on Sunday morning, December 15. Hearst's L.A. Examiner ran a page-wide headshot of autopsy surgeon A. F. Wagner over the headline "I do not believe she could have died earlier than 5 or 6 o'clock last Sunday after-noon." Totally inaccurate, it served to heighten the mysteries of Todd's last hours.
 
Despite the inquest testimony of LAPD captain Bruce Clark, the first cop on the scene, that the bottoms of Todd's silk slippers were "scuffed up quite a bit" and "gave the appearance or indication she had walked quite some distance on cement," it was widely reported that her slippers showed no sign that she could have climbed the 271 hillside steps, the most direct route between the café and the garage. So much play was given this bit of disinformation, in fact, that the LAPD had a 120-pound woman, the same weight as Todd, climb the stone steps in similar slippers, to the delight of the press, who witnessed the test but all but ignored the results, which confirmed the inquest testimony.
 
Some news accounts described a tooth knocked from Todd's mouth; others turned the few specks of blood found on Todd's lip into a fountain of gore. One police-beat reporter wrote about great bruises inside Todd's throat, suggesting they'd been made by a Coke bottle. There was in reality no broken tooth or any bruises, and the tiny bit of bloody froth on Todd's lip was consistent with postmortem changes in mucous membranes typical of carbon-monoxide poisoning — facts contained in the coroner's report but never publicized. There was one possible witness, night watchman Earl Carder, who by his own calculations walked past the death scene 15 times between midnight and dawn-an average of once every 24 minutes. But Carder, tall, burly and employed by West, said he neither saw nor heard anything unusual.
 
As the investigation continued, rumors of foul play took on a new slant. Todd's hired driver, Ernest Peters, had testified to dropping Todd off at the Sidewalk Café just before 4 o'clock Sunday morning. Oddly, for the first time in the three years Peters worked for her, Todd had declined his offer to escort her to the outside door of her apartment. Peters testified that Todd said nothing at all on the ride home; nonetheless, reporters were soon quoting him as saying that after leaving the night-were soon quoting him as saying that after leaving the nightclub, Todd insisted he drive faster because she feared being killed or kidnapped by "gangsters."
 
Then two men who worked at a Christmas-tree lot in Holly-wood came forward to report selling Todd and a "dark stranger" a tree at around midnight Sunday, adding, days later, that two burly gunmen in a long black car subsequently warned them against telling police they'd seen Todd. Soon anonymous officials were leaking stories about a supposed Mafia connection. It was alleged that Lucky Luciano's mob, attracted by the Sidewalk Cafe's semi-remote location and wealthy clientele, had sought to open an illegal casino on the third floor and that when Todd opposed it she was murdered.
 
The press also made much ado about Todd's Trocadero attendance in the company of such luminaries as Sid Grauman, British director Stanley Lupino, his daughter, Ida, and starlet Margaret Lindsay, who arrived on the arm of Pat De Cicco, whom Todd had divorced nearly two years earlier. De Cicco was attending another party there, but the dailies made much of the couple's inevitable meeting, insinuating that he sought to embarrass his ex-wife by bringing along another woman. It was all irrelevant but titillating.
 
The press, however, weren't the only ones who had doubts about the Todd case. Grand jurors were not persuaded by the collectively incredible testimony from the parade of celebrities who seemed to go out of their way to contradict each other.
 
West, for instance, insisted that if Todd had attempted to start her car, it would have awakened Smith, who lived in rooms above the garage. He insisted that the Lincoln's 12-cylinder engine was loud and pointed out that there was a large hole in the garage's plaster ceiling. The assertion got a lot of newspaper ink. In a reenactment, the hole proved smallish and far from the upstairs bedroom. Police listening for engine noise heard nothing.
 
Jewel Carmen, West's wife, testified to seeing Todd, dressed quite differently from the way her body was found, driving her car with a dark, mysterious man beside her on Sunday evening. Carmen adroitly avoided cross-examination by collapsing on the witness stand, though she later was sufficiently recovered to give Louella Parsons an "exclusive" interview confirming West's contention that he and Todd were merely friends.
 
To further confound the matter, despite Whitehead's testimony that Todd detested using telephones and always go someone else to make her calls, two witnesses — a middle-aged male liquor-store owner and a widowed druggist-swore that Todd had used a pay phone in their respective establishment Sunday afternoon and evening. Even more astounding, Mr. Wallace Ford, wife of the noted actor, insisted Todd had telephoned her Sunday afternoon. to confirm an invitation to the Fords' cocktail party.
 
"Several witnesses have not told all they know," said one juror. It wasn't long before some began to suspect a cover-up. "Some of those who appear most mute, most dumb, apparent are deliberately concealing facts," noted grand-jury foreman George Rochester. "Potent Hollywood interests have tempted to block the probe [into Todd's death I from the beginning," he added, warning witnesses about perjury. Likewise, prosecutors smelled something rotten. "falsehoods have been told by certain witnesses inside the grand-jury room," complained deputy DA George Johnson. "Someone covering up something. Someone, we think, knows how Thelma Todd died ... none of the apparent facts smooth out."
 
"Has pressure from some influential source been brought I hear in an attempt to halt this investigation?" a reporter asked Rochester. "We are not stopping," he replied. But the witnesses stuck to their stories. In the end, the grand jury did stop.
 
Todd's death was left an accident. Case closed. But not solved.
 
As it turns out, some in the police department knew very well who killed Thelma Todd, and how as well as why. They kept their silence but closed the file only when the killer died in 1951. Still, the real story could not be told. A handful of powerful Hollywood insiders with long memories and wide connections maintained a conspiracy silence. Even after the architect of the conspiracy died in 1961 associates continued to suppress the story. Over the years, whenever a film studio expressed an interest in the mystery of Todd's death, someone always intervened, and the idea was quietly dropped.
 
To comprehend exactly what transpired, it is necessary to understand a little about the times and the principals involved. The Todd affair was particularly sensitive to L.A. film, business and civic leaders of the day because on the very day her body was found, Warner Bros. director Busby Berkeley went on trial for three counts of second-degree murder for his alcohol-related head-on collision with another car on Pacific Coast Highway, not far from Todd's café. If there was one thing the L.A. Establishment did not want, it was yet another showboat murder trial involving alcohol and a noted director. Now an almost forgotten figure, Roland West was at the time one of the most innovative directors in Hollywood, pioneering techniques that now seem strangely modern. His film noir scenarios were all variations on a single theme: the workings of the criminal mind. West's amoral protagonists typically masquerade behind respectable public images, as in The Bat and its talkie sequel, The Bat Whispers. In Corsair, a college football hero quits a brokerage firm after realizing he's preying on widows and orphans, only to become a thuggish, manipulative rum runner. By guile and brute violence, most of West's protagonists manage to evade punishment for their crimes. It was while performing in the play The Criminal, in which he appeared for years on the vast Loews theater circuit, that West met Joe Schenck, then Loew's booking manager.
 
West soon turned to producing, and in 1912 he directed his first film, Lost Souls, produced by Schenck. Schenck was born in Rybinsk, Russia, on the Volga, Christmas Day, 1877, and came to New York at age 10. He and younger brother Nicholas earned $4.50 a week as factory laborers. They soon became drugstore delivery boys in New York's Chinatown. After several years of hustling, Joe had saved enough money to start a New Jersey amusement park, with Nick as a partner. Schenck displayed a genius for show business. He parlayed the Jersey property into a larger one in the Bronx, then sold that to Marcus Loew and, along with brother Nick, went to work for him. Schenck left Loew's in 1912 to launch a movie business with Roland West. In 1917 he stole Fatty Arbuckle away from Keystone with a salary increase, an independent production deal and the keys to a new Rolls. Like many a Schenck deal to come, it was all done on a handshake. In 1917 he took his company to California.
 
By 1921 Schenck's man Arbuckle was the nation's second-biggest box-office draw. But over the Labor Day weekend Arbuckle touched off the film industry's most infamous scandal. Arbuckle was charged with the rape and murder of actress Virginia Rappe during a drunken orgy he hosted at a San Francisco hotel. The day Fatty was arrested, Schenck pulled ..is latest film from distribution. Within days, cities across the country passed ordinances barring Arbuckle's films from theaters. With their friend, former postmaster general Will Hays, the Schencks created an industry watchdog agency and helped promulgate the infamous morals clause.
 
The Arbuckle scandal proved that Hollywood needed a place to play where moviegoers' disapproving eyes couldn't see them. That led Joe Schenck and a number of partners, including local vice lords and the very respectable Jacob Paley (father of William S. Paley, founder and chairman of CBS), to open an exclusive resort, complete with casinos, racetrack, hotel and fine restaurants, at Agua Caliente, near Tijuana. As the major investor, Schenck was chairman of the board.
 
Schenck became chairman of United Artists in 1924. In 1933 he left to found 20th Century Productions along with Louis B. Mayer's son-in-law, William Goetz, and Darryl F. Zanuck. Initial capital of $750,000 was put up by Mayer and by Nick Schenck, who was by then running Loew's. In 1935, 20th Century bought Fox, which was in bankruptcy but con-trolled a huge chain of theaters.
 
Schenck soon became one of California's wealthiest men, with vast real-estate holdings in Arizona and California. For a time he owned, with Jacob Paley, Del Mar Race Track and a Lake Arrowhead resort. He controlled the Federal Trust and Savings Bank and was a major stockholder and director of the Bank of Italy, now the Bank of America. He became great friends with William Randolph Hearst.
 
At the time of Todd's death, he was already one of the most powerful men in the Industry. His brother was the head of Loew's and MGM and therefore the boss of Hal Roach, the man who had made Todd a star.
As writers, we first became familiar with the Todd case while researching it for a recent book, Fallen Angels, which chronicles 39 true stories of Los Angeles crime and mystery. But since we had to rely on mostly secondary sources in researching all the chapters, the death remained an enigma. For years we'd heard rumors about the case, and Katherine Mader, who grew up in Pacific Palisades near the scene of Todd's demise, insisted we could solve this crime. There had to be somebody still alive from the era who knew what had happened. In the spring of 1987, after finishing the book, we had, for the first time in years, time on our hands. We began prodding a screenwriter friend who, between family connections and writing projects, had become something of an authority on old Hollywood. He admitted to having heard whispers about Todd's killer, but he refused to go any further, saying he couldn't betray confidences.
 
Instead he referred us to a number of low-profile industry insiders. For the most part, however, they either ducked our questions or referred us cryptically to still other people, most of whom turned out to be long deceased. Even so, the one name that kept coming up again and again was Hal Roach. We were somewhat surprised to find that, at 90, the legendary comedy producer was still very much alive. However, when we finally got hold of him on the phone he was alternately accommodating and evasive: First he was ill with a virus; then a few weeks later, he was too busy; then he was going out of town. Finally, though, Roach agreed to meet us at his home and talk about Thelma Todd, whom he remembered fondly.
 
When we were at last seated in his den, surrounded by an impossible number of film-celebrity photographs and other mementos documenting a career that began in 1912, Roach skipped the preamble and went right to the point. On December 17, 1935, the day after Todd's body was found, three Los Angeles County sheriff's detectives came to Roach's studio office. The deputies told Roach that Roland West, under intense questioning, had confessed to killing Thelma Todd.
 
"West was very possessive, very controlling," said Roach, the last survivor of the affair. "He told Thelma she was to be back by 2 a.m. She said she'd come and go as she pleased. They had a little argument about it, and then Thelma left for the party. When Sid Grauman called West, about 2:30, to tell him Thelma was leaving,

West went into her apartment and locked her out. He was going to teach her a lesson. "Apparently when Todd returned at almost 4 a.m., she declined her chauffeur's offer to walk her upstairs because she knew there would be a scene with West. When she found the door locked, she shouted at him, and they had another argument through the door. West told her he didn't want her going to so many parties. Todd, still a bit drunk, screamed that she'd go to any party she pleased. She was invited to one later that day, at Mrs. Wallace Ford's, and she said she'd just go to that party now." According to Roach, she climbed the steps to the garage. West followed. When he arrived she was already in her car. She started the engine, and he ran around and locked the garage door. "He wasn't thinking about carbon monoxide, just about teaching her a lesson about who was the boss. So he left and went back to bed," says Roach. After daylight West returned to the garage to find Todd's body. "He didn't know what to do," says Roach. "So he did nothing. He closed the door — but didn't lock it — and went back to the cafe. All that day, when people called for Thelma, he said he didn't know where she was. If he really hadn't known where she was, he would have been calling all over trying to find her. That's the kind of man he was."

We listened in barely suppressed excitement. Besides naming the killer, Roach was admitting he had played a role in a cover-up. The sheriff's detectives had called on Roach, it turned out, because they were sent theme to seek his opinion on what they ought to do about West's confession. "I told them I thought they should forget about it," says Roach. "He wouldn't have gone to jail anyway, because he'd have the best lawyers, he'd deny everything in court, and there were no witnesses. So why cause him all that trouble?"

We left Roach's house in a state of wonderment. Out on the street, blinking in the brilliant sunshine of midday Bel Air, we compared notes. A trio of deputy sheriffs had visited Roach. Though that was illuminating, it raised more questions than it answered. Who sent them? Whom did they report to after leaving Roach? And would Hal Roach, in 1935 at the height of his influence, have had the clout to stop a police investigation? It was all very unsettling.
 
The first issue to consider was why Roach should have protected the man who killed his $3,000-a-week star. One reason, of course, was that implicating West would have meant exposing Todd's adulterous affair, and that could have meant a scandal like the Fatty Arbuckle affair some years earlier, surely at the price of heavy box-office losses for his studio.
 
The deputies left, and the case against West never surfaced. But, as we soon learned, Roach was hardly such a powerful figure that three deputies would simply take his advice and quash a wrongful death investigation. It was also difficult to believe that the deputies who visited Roach could have many any decision concerning a homicide case without consulting someone in higher authority. So, who sent the detectives to Roach in the first place?
 
Whoever dispatched the deputies to talk to Roach had to have worked for the sheriff. A few days spent prowling dusty stacks and uncatalogued archives in the USC Library convinced us that Eugene Biscailuz, who in 1932 had resigned from the California Highway Patrol to win election as sheriff, was well acquainted with former highway commissioner Joe Schenck, He was a frequent visitor to Agua Caliente and was often photographed visiting film locations and studio sets with Darryl F. Zanuck, Schenck's partner, and with Mayer, whom Biscailuz made an "honorary deputy.' Biscailuz also knew Todd's best friend, Zasu Pitts, a heavy contributor to his election campaign and in whose private car the he had installed a police siren.
 
And Biscailuz knew Roland West as a 32nd-degree Mason and lodge brother, at a time when such associations meant a lot. Though it's rare, the Sheriff's Department can investigations of crimes committed within its boundaries. Biscailuz chose to do so in 1935. He was also very good friends with deputy DA U. U. Blaylock, the man who helped prepare and present the Todd case to the grand jury, which was to return no indictment. As sheriff and as a deeply rooted Angeleno, Biscailuz had an institutional interest in the film industry's financial health: The movies were the nation's fifth largest industry and L.A. County's most visible.
 
As for the LAPD, in 1935 Mayor Frank Shaw ruled Los Angeles like a private fiefdom. Police corruption was so pervasive that when in 1937 Shaw was recalled from office, dozens of senior officers fled to avoid prosecution. In. 1935, anyone with money to spread around could have easily gotten to the LAPD. Chief of Detectives Thad Brown, who knew West had killed Todd, was told to back off "because there was no evidence."
 
Obviously the police had conspired to suppress West's confession, a fact known by only a handful of senior cops. (The Todd file was said to be among dozens of suppressed records seized by an LAPD flying squad from Thad Brown's garage hours after his death. The files have never been made public.
 
With the Fatty Arbuckle imbroglio still a vivid memory, avoiding yet another movie scandal became Joe Schenck's chief concern. But he had other reasons as well — reasons that hit a little closer to home. In 1941 Schenck was convicted three counts of tax evasion and one of perjury. Schenck's tax-evasion charges included unreported income between 1935 and 1937, preposterous "business deductions" and a stock-sale fraud. In 1935 a new Mexican dictator issued an edict "outlawing" gambling. Translated, this meant that he expected a bigger cut. Schenck, who controlled Agua Caliente's lucrative gaming, would eventually spread enough money around Mexico City and Baja California to come to terms with the new government, but in the meantime he saw an opportunity to recoup his investment. As Roland West later testified, Schenck sold him $410,000 in Agua Caliente stock for $50,000. Schenck then took a tax loss of $360,000, though he never actually transferred the shares and continued to vote them for years through hidden proxies. To make it easy for West, Schenck had his company, Fox, loan West the price of the stock. West gave Schenck a check; Schenck then secretly reimbursed West in cash, money which he in turn used to pay off the Fox loan. West's first $5,000 installment was paid in July 1935. The balance was to be paid in $5,000 installments.
 
According to uncontroverted testimony at Schenck's trial, West paid the second installment and was secretly reimbursed on December 17, 1935, the day after Todd's body was found West's garage. It was the same day the three deputies visited Roach, a day when West and Schenck had much to talk about Though Schenck's concern for the Industry was a compelling factor, his eagerness to cover up the potential scandal had a much more immediate cause: keeping his lifelong friend away from any temptation to trade information on Schenck's tax fraud in return for a reduced sentence. (Schenck himself eventually got a reduced sentence of $432,050 in fines and back taxes and served four months in prison.)
 
Nobody was ever indicted for Thelma Todd's death. Any attempt to penetrate the veil of secrecy surrounding the affair was met with stony silence for as long as Joe Schenck and his associates lived. To this day, Hal Roach continues to deny knowing of any connect between Schenck and West.
 
Released from prison in 1942, Schenck began rebuilding image by leading innumerable Industry and Jewish charity drives. While FDR lived, Schenck's particular favorite charity was polio. He is credited with inventing the March of Dimes concept and with getting collection boxes put in nearly all US movie theaters.
 
Sheriff Biscailuz won the contested reelection campaign in 1936 — and went on being reelected until he retired in 1958. After 1935, however, he distanced himself from the studio moguls. From then on, he limited his Industry exposure to public events and photo opportunities involving charitable causes, posing for photos with an endless stream of film stars, but always within the security of his own office.
 
On his Saint John's Hospital deathbed in Santa Monica in 1951, a guilt-ridden West confessed his role in Todd's death to a close friend, actor Chester Morris. Morris, who committed suicide in 1972, repeated West's confession to director Gordon, who recently confirmed it for the writers.
 
Last year, after speaking about Fallen Angels at a Biltmore Hotel literary event, we were introduced to Don Gallery, adoptive son of film comedienne Zasu Pitts. After we spoke to Roach, we tracked Gallery to his home on Catalina Island, where he confirmed that his mother, Thelma Todd's best friend, had once confided an almost identical version of her death.
 
Joe Schenck died on October 2, 1961, in Beverly Hills. Pallbearers included Irving Berlin, Sam Goldwyn and Jack Warner. In his eulogy, Association of Motion Picture Producers president Y. Frank Freeman told the assembled. Hollywood mourners, "Joe Schenck never waited for a man who needed help to come to him. He went to that man for that purpose."
 
© 1987 Marvin J. Wolf  and Katherine Mader

It Was 1957 and a Skinny 16-Year-Old Needed an Emergency Loan to Keep His Family Up and Running. Enter Mort Reubens.

VERY FIRST PERSON
Los Angeles Times Magazine, October 11, 1998

Marvin J. Wolf
 
Journalist and author Marvin J. Wolf is immediate past president of Independent Writers of Southern California. His most recent book is Where White Men Fear to Tread (St. Martin's Press), which he co-authored with Russell Means.
 
I stood on tiptoe and handed the 3-by-5 card from the Help Wanted board at Fairfax High up to the tall, broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced man behind the counter of Mort's Deli at Farmers Market. He wore a starched chef's hat and a clean white apron over slacks and a sports shirt, and even before I opened my mouth to speak, he was frowning and shaking his head.
 
"This is a tough job for any high school kid," he said. "I need somebody big and strong."
 
At 16, I looked younger and was barely 5 feet tall. "I worked last summer washing dishes in a boys camp," I said. "Near Chicago. I'm not afraid of hot water, dirty dishes or heavy lifting."
 
"Florine, come out here a minute," called the tall man. In the kitchen doorway appeared an elfin presence, his dark skin mottled and wrinkled with age. He was even shorter than I was. Several long, wispy white hairs sprouted from his chin. "This is Mr. Joaquin, the chef. He's 80 years old. He needs someone strong enough to lift great big pots filled with boiling water."
 
"I can do the job."
 
"Really, we need someone bigger. You'll find something easier than this, kid," the tall man said in a kind voice. It was September 1957, and my family had just arrived in California. Without seniority in the local union, my father, a sheet-metal worker, was lucky to get work two or three days a week. Our meager savings were gone, and I, the eldest boy among what would soon be six children, was the only one able to help. I'd applied at retail stores, but without local references, shopkeepers were reluctant to let me handle cash. And everyone said I was too small.
 
"Tell you what," I said. "Put me to work the rest of the week, and if you don't like the way I do the job, don't pay me."
 
The tall man stared at me, then nodded. "I'm Mort Reubens," he said. "What's your name?"
 
The patio at Farmers Market, then as now, was a collection of small shops and about 30 highly individualized restaurants. All used the same crockery and silverware, retrieved from tables by busboys and returned for washing. At Mort's, a river of soiled utensils, trays and dishes flowed into my sinks. Huge pots and pans came off the stove and out of the ovens to be scrubbed. I washed and rinsed and scoured; by the end of my first after-school shift, sharp pains were shooting up my heels and lower legs from four hours of standing on concrete without a break.
 
My father suggested that I would get used to it, but as closing time approached on Saturday, I was in agony. I would need better shoes if I was to continue working here, but I had no money and no idea if Mort would pay me for four days of work. Near the end of the day he called me up front. "How much did that card at school say this job paid?" he asked.
 
"Dollar an hour," I murmured. "The minimum wage." I was willing to take less.
 
"That's not enough for someone who works as hard as you," said Mort. "You start at $1.25."
 
Over the next few weeks I learned a lot about Mort. He was a few years older than my dad, was from Chicago and had a daughter my age. About 1937, Mort had joined the National Guard's horse-drawn artillery because he loved horses. Early in World War II, he was nearly killed in a savage battle in New Guinea's Owen Stanley mountains. Recuperating from a terrible head wound, he was attached to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's personal staff as a military policeman, where he cultivated an Aussie accent while tracking down GI black marketers. When things were slow at the deli, he often shared stories from his Army days. But things were never slow in the kitchen; there was always something to be washed or swept or scoured.
 
We were closed on Sundays, and so every Saturday evening, Mort encouraged me to take home the leftover soup in a huge jar. A rich broth of turkey, rice and vegetables, it was a meal in itself, a treat for my struggling family. My father usually picked me up after work on Saturdays because the soup was too much to lug home on my bike. Then, one Saturday about six weeks after I began working, my father was hired to hang gutters on a neighbor's house, and I took the family car.
 
After work I drove home and parked on 6th Street, a few doors from Sweetzer Avenue, and, with the warm jar in my arms, crossed the lawn. As I passed the living room window, I glanced inside–and almost dropped the jar. In my father's chair–my father's chair!–was a large, heavy bald man. He was cursing my father, flinging the most obscene words in a voice dripping with contempt. My brothers and sisters sat like statues. Dad's face was stone; Mom wept.
 
I crept into the darkened kitchen, carefully set the soup on a counter and listened through a crack in the swinging door. The bald man wanted to take our 1952 Chevy. Dad offered to pay the three weekly payments that were in arrears, but the man demanded the entire sum–$325–or the car.
 
I had been in Los Angeles just long enough to understand how essential a car is. I slipped out the door, pushed the Chevy down to the corner, then started the engine and circled the neighborhood, thinking furiously. Who might have $325? Who would even consider loaning me such a princely sum?
 
The only person I could think of was Mort. I drove back to Farmers Market, rapped on the rear door, then waited until the window shade went up. I found myself staring down the barrel of an Army .45. "What do you want?" growled Mort, lowering the gun but peering behind me into the darkness.
 
I stammered out my tale: The bald man, his foul cursing, the outrageous demand. "So, could you possibly loan my father $325?" I finished, realizing how absurd it sounded.
 
Mort's eyes bored holes in my face. His cheeks began to purple, and his lips quivered. I realized that he was still clutching the gun, and took an involuntary step backward. At that, he smiled. "I'm not going to shoot you," he chuckled, placing the pistol on his tiny desk. Abruptly he knelt, pried a worn red tile from the floor to reveal a safe and began to twist the dial.
 
He counted the money twice, placing it in an old envelope. "This is $325," he said. "When school is out this summer, you'll work full time. I'll take back half your wages until it's repaid."
 
"Thank you," I said, trembling at this responsibility. "Do you want my father to come over and sign something?"
 
Slowly, he shook his head. "No, son. I'm betting on you."
 
I went in the back door like the lord of the manor, and Dad came rushing into the kitchen, the bald man on his heels. "Quick! Drive away, take the car away!" cried my father. I calmly handed the repo man the soiled envelope. "Count it, give my father a receipt and get out of our house," I said, a speech I'd rehearsed all the way home.
 
That night I was a hero to my family. But the real hero was Mort Rubin, who not only saved us from certain penury, but also quietly raised my salary every month or so until, when summer came, I was earning $2.50 an hour, double the original wage. I worked for Mort until I graduated in 1959 and joined the Army. We stayed in touch for many decades, but I lost track of Mort several years ago and don't even know if he's still alive.
 
But this I know: Mort Reubens made Los Angeles a better place.
http://articles.latimes.com/1998/oct/11/magazine/tm-31306
© 1998 Marvin J. Wolf

* * *

Copyright © 2000 Marvin J. Wolf
First published in TWA Ambassador, February, 2000, with this notation:
"Marvin J. Wolf, the author of nine nonfiction books,* was the only U.S. serviceman to arrive in Vietnam a private and depart as an infantry lieutenant."
-----------------------------------------------
*Update May 23, 2018: Marvin J. Wolf is now the author of eleven nonfiction books, three novels, and a made-for-television movie script.

Cover Story, Los Angeles Times Magazine
November 14, 1999
Marvin J. Wolf's last piece for the magazine was about his father, a junkman in Los Angeles

So here's young Frank Malina out of East Texas, slim and dark, mind quick as a prairie twister, studies engineering at Texas A&M and makes ends meet playing fiddle in his daddy's band for hick-town dung-stompers, and graduates in 1934, a Depression year.
 
When Caltech offers him a scholarship, his family is busted so flat that he's got no way to Pasadena. So his college teachers pass the hat and durn near the whole town of Brenham, mostly Czech immigrants like the Malinas, scrapes together $300. Comes 1936 and Frank, after earning two Caltech master's degrees--you ready for this?--decides that he wants to build a rocket. Not a spaceship to reach the moon--that might come later--Malina's modest missile would merely haul instruments to plumb Earth's upper atmosphere and measure cosmic rays at the edge of space. But when he tells his professor, Clark Millikan, son of Nobel laureate and Caltech president Robert Millikan, that he wants to write a doctoral dissertation on rocket propulsion and high-altitude rocket characteristics, the prof tartly suggests that Malina leave academia and find a job in the aircraft industry.
 
Forgive that man. It was 1936, only nine years since Lucky Lindy hopped the Atlantic, and those who set America's science agenda saw rocketry as pulp fiction. Certainly no one would expect that fiddle-playing Frank Malina out of East Texas was destined to cross paths with three hugely eccentric characters--a Hungarian Jew, a Chinese mandarin and a self-taught chemist--to give birth to the institution that has become mankind's window for exploring the universe.
 
Malina, who had gulped down Jules Verne in Czech and had big dreams, did not give up. He went to Theodore von Karman, director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology and one of the world's leading scientists. Sharp-featured and elfin, irresistibly charming, a confirmed bachelor perpetually suspected of seducing colleagues' wives, amusing in half a dozen tongues, intellectually fearless, terminally curious, Von Karman liked to lie in wind tunnels to feel the air rushing over his body. A Hungarian descendant of Rabbi Judah Loew, the 16th century Prague mystic who is said to have created the Golem, a mechanical man brought to life with sacred writings, Von Karman was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1914. There he devised a tethered helicopter to replace observation balloons and redesigned Anthony Hermann Gerhard Fokker's device so Austrian machine guns could fire through aircraft propellers. After earning wide recognition for pioneering the physics of flight turbulence, he came to Caltech during Hitler's rise. Von Karman knew that German scientists were interested in rockets; he gave Malina a green light. In this uncharacteristically unwitting fashion, he ensured his own legacy.
 
Word of Malina's project got around town, and Pasadenan John W. Parsons offered help. Parsons, unencumbered by knowledge of higher math or molecular processes, was a cookbook chemist obsessed with things that go bang. Tall, beefy, insouciantly handsome, he was a mama's boy who hated authority and detested societal mores but gave no outward hint of the inner stirrings that soon would propel him to leadership of an unlikely cult.
 
Parsons and a childhood sidekick, mechanic Ed Forman, had tinkered with black powder rockets, and had backyards littered with craters to prove it. With Von Karman's blessing--but no school funds--Parsons joined Malina's project. Forman helped by turning Malina's designs into hardware. Between jobs and studies, for months the trio prowled junkyards and used machinery shops, trying to patch together test equipment. Desperate for funding, Malina and Parsons set out to write a movie script about mad scientists building a moon rocket; they hoped to sell it to a film studio. They worked in Parsons' kitchen until Malina realized that the bags, boxes, bottles, cartons, jugs, tubes and vials piled everywhere were filled with assorted explosives, combustibles and chemical accelerators.
 
Malina began designing a firing chamber and exhaust nozzles--tasks that, before computers, required laborious hand calculations. In October 1936, the first motor was tested in the Arroyo Seco, three miles north of the Rose Bowl. Fueled by a brew of gaseous oxygen and methyl alcohol, after a few false starts it burned for three seconds, until an oxygen hose burst into flame and began snaking across the rocky ground. The rocketeers scattered in panic. They returned to the arroyo on Nov. 28 and got the motor to run for 15 seconds.
 
In January 1937, an improved motor ran for 44 seconds, and Malina invited another grad student to join: Tsien Hsue-shen, among the first of a generation of Chinese to benefit from educational reforms. A voracious and far-ranging intellect, committed to modernizing his backward homeland, he presented himself as a mandarin, a regal presence who in public could not err or display weakness. He agreed to help Malina and another grad student with the critical equations for a more powerful engine.
 
Upon reviewing Malina's written analysis of the experiments, Von Karman allocated campus lab space to the effort. Following a nitrous oxide leak, however, the group, now dubbed the Suicide Squad, was forced to move all equipment outdoors. Weld Arnold, a 40-ish lab assistant, asked to photograph the experiments. Told that there might be no more unless some funding was found, Arnold pledged to raise $1,000. The first $100, ones and fives, came wrapped in old newspaper; no one questioned the source, which remains a mystery.
 
Near the end of 1937, Malina, with the assistance of grad student Apollo Milton Olin Smith, published his first paper, "Flight Analysis of the Sounding Rocket," which so impressed Von Karman that he sent Malina to New York to present it. With the right motor, Malina told open-mouthed listeners, a rocket could reach an altitude of 1,000 miles. Time magazine and the New York Herald-Tribune reported Malina's speech, the Associated Press sent his photo to newspapers nationwide, and the Los Angeles Times editorialized for more rocket research. A reporter who observed test firings wrote imaginatively about rocket ships blasting off from the Los Angeles Civic Center.
 
In May 1938, a new motor with a graphite lining and copper exhaust nozzles ran for a full minute. But then the money did run out, and the group dissolved, briefly. A few months later, with Hitler rattling sabers in Munich, Army Air Corps boss H.H. "Hap" Arnold popped into Caltech to update himself on aeronautical research. Fascinated by what the Suicide Squad had achieved on a shoestring, he asked a National Academy of Sciences committee to give the lab $1,000 to study rocket-assisted aircraft takeoff.
 
In early 1939, Parsons and Tsien rejoined Malina. In June, the committee disbursed another $10,000. With a wary nod to the rocket-phobic, Malina's group was later designated the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

***

***

***

Frank Malina, the student who started it all, did live to see his dream realized. As JPL's chief engineer, he headed the effort to develop Army guided missiles. WAC Corporal, launched Oct. 11, 1945, at White Sands in New Mexico, soared to more than 205,000 feet.
 
Jack Parsons was not on hand to share this triumph; he left JPL in 1944. A year earlier, he had assumed leadership of the Agape chapter of Ordo Templi Orientis, a cult featuring priestesses rising from alters in diaphanous gauze to perform gnostic masses. Parsons dabbled with peyote, mescaline, marijuana, opiates and hallucinogens. In 1946, his friend, science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, documented a ritual, including frenzied copulation, which Parsons claimed evoked the "goddess Babalon [sic], mother of harlots." Soon afterward, Parsons began using the name "Belarion Armiluss Al Dajjal Anti-Christ." He died in June 1952 in a mysterious explosion, perhaps an accident--but maybe murder. Malina credited him, after Von Karman and himself, with the greatest contribution to JPL's start. The crater Parsons, named in his honor, is on the moon's dark side.
 
As a Caltech don and a premier JPL consultant, Tsien Hsue-shen was regarded by 1949 as Von Karman's peer and probable successor. His blueprint for a passenger rocket linking New York and Los Angeles in less than an hour drew enormous media attention. Less than six months later, however, the FBI revoked his security clearance, suspecting he was a Communist. Angry, he made plans to visit his ailing father in Shanghai. Soon after, war erupted in Korea. His baggage was searched, and when classified documents--his own papers--were found, he was imprisoned as a spy.
 
He was released on condition that he remain in the United States; paradoxically, the INS began deportation proceedings. Despite the many scientists who vouched for his loyalty, in 1955 he was one of two prominent Chinese exchanged for U.S. Korean War POWs. He went on to become one of China's most revered scientists, overseeing development of ICBMs, weather and reconnaissance satellites and the deadly Silkworm anti-ship missiles exported to Third World dictatorships. He lives near Beijing.
 
Von Karman, through his friendship with "Hap" Arnold and participation in World War II scientific planning, had a profound and lasting influence on the U.S. Air Force. At his suggestions, promising young officers attended graduate schools to receive rocketry training and the federal government committed to funding fundamental research. He was honored with America's first National Medal of Science in February 1963, and he died a few weeks later at age 81.
 
After World War II, Malina grew uncomfortable with designing weaponry and with the national obsession for rooting out Communists. When the FBI began investigating Sidney Weinbaum, a Caltech professor and gifted musician, for Communist Party membership, Malina began to worry. With his wife, Liljan, Malina often had visited Weinbaum's home. Along with enjoying music, they had discussed politics and the works of Communist writers. Before Malina's security clearance came up for renewal in 1947, his home was searched by a methodical burglar who examined the contents of file cabinets but took nothing. Soon after, Malina left JPL and accepted a position with the U.N.'s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, in Paris.
 
After a second marriage, he left the U.N. to create striking kinetic art and to found the arts magazine Leonardo. In 1959 he rejoined the world scientific community when Von Karman asked him to become part of the International Academy of Astronautics. As dean of American rocketeers, he roamed the world, speaking of rocketry's origins and envisioning its future. He spoke eloquently of exploring our solar system--and of eventually journeying to the stars. He died in Paris in 1981.

© 1999 Marvin J. Wolf

Published in The Los Angeles Times 
February 20, 1983
 
Matsumoto, Japan--
 
Hunch  down, let the cool smoothness of the polished planks seep up through your stockinged feet and peer through a narrow slit set low in the thick stone wall.
 
Look down at the dark, still waters of the moat a hundred feet below. Let your eyes sweep across the water. Now look past the flowering cherry, plum and apple trees. Look toward the snowcapped, saw-toothed mountains that crowd the horizon from every direction. Imagine that your fingers grip the rough wood of a crossbow, and you may have some idea of what it felt like to be a Sixteenth Century samurai warrior defending your feudal master's fief from a firing slit atop the five-story donjon of Matsumoto Castle. Donjons are the fortified inner towers of Japanese castles.
 
Many call it Karuso-jo, Crow Castle, because it's thick stone walls are black. This is Japan's oldest surviving fortress tower. It's walls and moat were built in 1504, near the beginning of a turbulent era of civil war. Perhaps it was spared the repeated attacks that destroyed most of the country's other castles because Matsumoto is so remote.
 
"The roof of Japan," it was called. An island in a sea of forbidding crags, a landlocked island on Honshu Island. Not even 200 miles from Tokyo, but worlds distant, it is accessible only through high, steep, mountain passes or over dangerous, narrow rivers churning noisily over rocky rapids.
 
Life was hard here. The growing season is short, the winters cold, the altitude takes its toll in human energy. The tough survived, nurtured their culture, valued their land, defended it.
 
Perhaps it was only the remoteness that made outsiders covet this region. Or perhaps soldiers cannot resist the lure of fortresses, even natural ones. So in 1504 the warrior Sadanaga Shimaduchi built a fort here. After 90 years and innumerable intrigues, coups, successions, marriages of alliance and not a few battles, Kazumasa Ishiwaka, a famed fortifier, became lord of this district. He remodeled the castle completely. It is the work of his men that is the Crow Castle of today. But now the brooding stone walls of the donjon, walls that intimidated generations of warriors, can be breached for a mere 200 yen, less than a dollar.
 
Remove your shoes and climb the steep wooden stairs and ladders toward the castle keep, the steps worn smooth by generations of tourists, emperors, foreign plenipotentiaries, schoolchildren, local politicians and, not recently, soldiers.
 
The samurai used clumsy, oversized firearms; a few remain to impart clues to what sort of fighter could use them: tough, strong, patient men.
 
The castle walls are lined with wood hauled down with great effort from the dark forests that still mantle the mountains. Now the wood is dark and smooth, worn by legions of hands and stained by soot and smoke and sweat.
 
The lords and ladies of the donjon lived here with their retainers and their soldiers. They slept on thin mats much like those used by modern Japanese. They cooked their daily rice here, they ate and drank, slept and made love; they conspired, confided and cleaned; they lived out their lives in the low-ceilinged rooms of this castle, and traces remain to remind us.
 
Most of their artifacts, perhaps 50,000 items, are on display at the Japan Folklore Museum within the ancient outer walls of the original castle grounds.
 
Once the castle moats were the last line of defense; they kept an invader just out of bowshot while defenders, allied with the force of gravity, could still hit them.
 
But that was before firearms. Now the moat is the reflective centerpiece of a lovely central park peopled by strolling lovers, families, swarms of tourists. Matsumoto is no longer remote.
 
Now the tallest buildings of this city of 200,000 crowd against the skyline and overshadow the medieval magnificence of the castle. The fortress is a monument to defense of clan, region and animistic religions; the city buildings are castles of commerce, the new religion. They are hung with microwave towers, huge curved shields that connect Matsumoto with Tokyo with the rest of the world, instantly, effortlessly.
 
At the center of the new city is the train station. Japanese National Railways trains roll in from Tokyo and Osaka and from outlying towns and villages, bringing workers, tourists and foreigners on pilgrimage to the industrial mecca that is the Matsumoto of the Twentieth Century. A trip that once took weeks, a trip fraught with danger, a trip for the bold, is now a pleasant, often entertaining, four-hour train ride from Tokyo's Shinjuku Station.
 
The tracks descend through the mountains between small villages, and through manicured fruit orchards and immaculate miniature vineyards from which come delicious varietal wines, some sweet, others rather close to California or European dry vintages.
 
An English priest and alpinist, Walter Weston, was the first Westerner to visit the splendid alpine plain where the city of Matsumoto sits in Nagano Prefecture. Around the turn of the 19th century, Weston looked over the mountains, climbed many of them, and decided that this part of Japan reminded him of the Swiss Alps. And in a curious, East-imitating West fashion, the region is now more than ever like the Switzerland Weston fancied.
 
Perhaps because of Weston's influence—but also, perhaps, because of the many swift mountain streams that once provided industrial power—Matsumoto and environs became the center of the Japanese watchmaking industry and lately its computer industry, too. The factories are quiet, clean and non-polluting; they're all but hidden among the densely populated towns and still upland valleys.
 
You will not be invited inside these factories. If you come to buy products for export, you will be led to a display room, offered o-cha, green tea, shown spec sheets and samples. But behind the factory walls legions of uniformed workers, the lowest indistinguishable from the highest, make electronic marvels in spotless, dust-free rooms.
 
Often they attend tireless industrial robots or work in rooms illuminated only by dim, narrow-spectrum yellow fluorescent lights. Or assemble complex components with deft motions on hushed assembly lines. You know the names of their products: Seiko, Citizen, Epson. These Japanese workers and technicians are very much aware of who buys most of their products.
 
Matsumoto's watches and computers, and some products that seem to be both, are among the world's best and have found markets all over. Many foreign businessmen come here. Much business is conducted around the low tables of traditional restaurants, at the swivel stools of sushi bars or in the comfortable booths of Western-style coffeehouses or discos. So it should be no surprise that the city offers an astonishing variety of dining. It has passable Continental food—Italian, German and French—and the whole panoply of Japanese cuisine to choose from, from local delicacies such as pickled honeybees to traditional meals of sukyaki or tempura, as well as the more modern shabushabu.
 
Matsumoto has no huge, modern hotels. Instead there are dozens of smaller places, many of them recently upgraded with Western-style private baths. With true Japanese efficiency, this was often accomplished by inserting a multipurpose bath module containing miniaturized versions of the all necessities.
 
The oldest Western-style school building in Japan, now a museum, was built in 1876 and is a leisurely 10 minute walk from the castle. Its whitewashed walls contrast with beautiful blue roof tiles topped by a graceful weathercock. Restored classrooms and an auditorium are on display, along with period school books and Japanese versions of Victorian educational materials.
 
Near the swift, koi-filled mountain stream that loops through the city, and not far from the castle, is an enchanting Shinto temple, still very much in use. While sightseers rarely enter, the traditional façade of the temple is surrounded by small outdoor shrines. By local custom some worshippers fulfill religious obligations by singing cantos in a haunting, melodic chant. Their paeans address the rock cairns wherein, they believe, live powerful but benign spirits.
 
In the square before the temple, fearless pigeons flock to gather crumbs scattered by visitors. Some allow themselves to be caught by youngsters, who stroke them fondly for blessings of good luck before releasing them to the spirits of the wind.
 
Matsumoto is famous throughout Japan for its pickles and its many sweetshops. Virtually anything grown locally is available in its pickled form here. The sweetshops offer a variety of tempting traditional sweets and Continental-style pastries; neither are nearly so sweet as the Western palate might expect from their appearance. They are subtle, without the overpowering sugary taste—or the calories—of their Western lookalikes. In Japan, baking is regarded as an art form, and many of the shops offer baked goods that truly look much too good to eat.
 
Many of Japan's most noted artists and artisans live in the alpine region. Displays of 600 wood, glass and bamboo items representing their finest works are at the folk craft museum in Shim-Kanai, about 20 minutes away by bus. The most admired local crafts include beautiful yet functional lacquerware; a bamboo ware known as misuzu zaiko; a decorative cloth incorporating silken threads, Matsumoto tsumugi, and lovely birch carvings. An ornate, embroidered ball called the Matsumoto  termari is the most famous alpine craft product; the best are available only in this region.
 
Most visitors come to Matsumoto from Tokyo by train for about $70 round-trip, first class. There is also a daily Japan Air Lines flight from Osaka. It offers a breathtaking view of the roof of Japan, the mountains that once made Matsumoto a fortress, that kept it safe from foreign invaders.
 
Foreigners are welcomed now, but the dark fortress of Crow Castle remains, evoking the spirits of the past and fortifying the present with its links to an intrepid era.

© 1983 Marvin J. Wolf

Give credit where it’s due: This was Barriga’s idea.  But Staff Sergeant Al Barriga was a cartoonist; he just didn’t have the creative writing chops. Besides, even with over 20 years in uniform, there’s no way he could have pulled it off on his own.

Like Dirty Harry says, a man’s gotta know his limitations.

So Barriga came to me – his boss.

It was 1968, we were stationed in South Korea, and we were bored out of our tiny minds. “We” was me, the Seventh Infantry Division’s public information officer, Barriga, and the five other soldiers who worked for me. 
​
Not that we had nothing to do. We put out The Bayonet, the division’s weekly newspaper. While this was widely ignored as Army propaganda — you can’t fool the troops — we still tried to make it as interesting as possible.  We also pulled field duty, maintained our equipment, froze our butts off and suffered the same lack of creature comfort as everyone else at Camp Casey. And like every other red-blooded American soldier, we endured a lack of off-duty attractions beyond those offered by the venereal disease distribution center outside our gates, better known as the village of Tongduchon.

While working in a warm office is way better than dragging a rifle and combat gear up and down frozen mountains or through icky, sticky rice paddies,  we were bored with putting out a newspaper that nobody read, filled with “news” that everybody either already knew or didn’t care about.

The single exception was sports. Guys liked to read about intramural competition. There were bragging rights in sharing a Quonset hut with a member of a championship team.

But now it was late winter. Football was long over. Basketball was finished.  We had no hockey rink and it would be months before baseball. Our sports page dwindled to almost nothing; troops got their only sports fix from Stars & Stripes, the semi-official Department of Defense daily, which along with world and national news, carried pro and college scores and wire service features.

Then Barriga thought of a way to fill our sports page.

With assistance from the whole office, he invented a sport. Barriga’s parents were from Peru. His ancestors, he firmly believed, were Incas. So we dubbed it “grumaché” and said it was the “Sport of Inca Kings.” 
We began by reporting the results of the first round of the [mythical] Mayta Cup, the [mythical] international grumaché tournament held in Cuzco, Peru, and named for the Inca athlete king, Mayta Cápac.

There really was a Mayta Cápac — 750 years ago. Sports-wise, nothing much has happened in southern Peru since 1533, when Pizarro sacked and looted Cuzco.

We began with the assumption that none of our readers spoke Quechua, the native language of the Central Andes. Not that Barriga did, either, but he knew a smattering. To color our reports, we sprinkled game highlights with whatever words and phrases he could recall. For example, we called the grumaché field rit'i qewa, which means snow-covered grass. [Maybe]. Other grumaché terms were mostly words used by Barriga’s dad when he was drinking. Or by his mom when his dad drank too much.

In reporting a baseball game, no contemporary sportswriter would explain stuff like “strikeout,” “infield fly rule” or “no-hitter.” So while we used assorted grumaché terms, we rarely explained them. Nor did we describe the object of the game or the field it was played on, except in passing or with Quechua words. And of course, we made up rules and changed them as we went along.

Think about what it would be like to read an account of a hockey game if you’d never seen one, and didn’t know the rules or even what equipment players used — that was the fun of it, knowing that our readers would be scratching their heads and for the first time talking about something they read in our paper.

Not until our report of the third round of the semi-finals did we let slip that grumaché was played on a sunken hexagonal field about half the size of a basketball court.  There was a simi rumi [stone mouth or goal hole] in each of the six sides, alternately defended by two opposing teams. The idea was to throw, kick or stuff a rumi pupu into an opponent’s simi rumi. The rumi pupu could be thrown or bounced but never carried or rolled; a rumi pupu, we eventually mentioned, was a 15-pound, leather-wrapped stone.

All these game details, and others, were slipped into stories, a few at a time in no particular order. Eventually, discerning readers understood why, while fielding only seven men, a [mythical] squad needed 30 players. And why so many players suffered [mythical] bruises and serious [mythical] hand, head, leg and foot injuries. Except we didn’t say anything about it being mythical.

In our third piece we mentioned in passing that Special Service officials were discussing plans for a [mythical] Seventh Division grumaché tournament.

I should explain that every story we published, as well as every news release, was reviewed by my boss, Major Matero,* the civil affairs officer. But by 10:00 am most mornings Matero had sipped so much bourbon-laced coffee that he would approve anything, including a test piece I submitted reporting that Amelia Earhart was found working as a Tongduchon bar girl.
 
We had planned four stories, ending with final playoff results from Cuzco, which would get us almost within spittoon range of baseball spring training.
 
But then came a telex message from Stars & Stripes in Tokyo; I’d forgotten that they were on our distribution list. Stripes editors browsed our pages looking for stories that they could expand or report more widely. The sports editor asked me to send scores and highlights from our grumaché tournament, the Chicha Cup. In Quechua, Chicha [actually] means beer.
 
Obviously, Stripes was just as desperate for sports news as we were.
 
So as grumaché disappeared from The Bayonet, weekly tournament roundups appeared every Saturday in Stripes.  A million readers from Pearl Harbor to Hong Kong, from Sydney to New Delhi, scratched their heads over the mysteries of grumaché. Twice editors telexed requests for explanation of terms; I ignored these until an irate editor telephoned, then had Barriga create a skeletal grumaché lexicon in faux Quechua.
 
Desperate to end the hoax without giving ourselves away, we dreamed up a tournament grand finale: A prolonged, scoreless struggle between the 2072nd Radio Research Group and the 9th Ordnance Depot team. These were, of course, nonexistent units. We did have a small Radio Research detachment, but their mission — mining North Korean Army radio traffic for useful intelligence — was classified. Anybody attempting to contact any unit called “radio research” was routed to a counterintelligence officer who scared them off. We sort of had an ordnance outfit, but its men and equipment had deployed to Vietnam, leaving behind a skeleton force. They rarely answered their phone; I suspected that they all hung out in the PX cafeteria drinking coffee.
 
To tie things up in a bow, we created an exciting finish that we hoped would forestall all further requests for grumaché news: Through four scoreless periods, the Radio Research guys would hold off several clever asnu [donkey] sonqo-suwa [heart-stealer] feints by the Ordnance team. With only minutes before sunset — grumaché play is suspended until daybreak so that qolqe [money] could be erk'eta munay [given affection] — the 2072nd‘s qoyllor [star] songollay [sweetheart] fractured his knee while attempting the difficult munay usa [love louse] maneuver.
 
With both sides out of ambulatory replacements, the kura [priest] ran onto the field yelling “Soq'oita q'owai,” [“Give me something to drink!”] to halt play. He then declared am urubamba [a plain of snakes, e.g., a draw], whereupon both enraged benches limped onto the rit’i qewa and pelted each other with ukuku wiqsa kuna [bear heads, e.g. worn-out rumi pupu]. After MPs restored order it was decreed that grumaché would no longer be played in the division.
 
Just as we were ready to ship this masterpiece to Tokyo, Major Matero’s liver failed; he was evacuated Stateside for treatment. Until a replacement arrived, the chief of staff’s sharp-eyed master sergeant, a veteran of decades proofreading personnel orders, would review our press releases for style and punctuation. The chief of staff himself would spot-check content.
 
There was no way we could sneak even a single rumi pupu past the master sergeant, and the chief of staff would have kittens the first time he encountered a phrase like “Soq'oita q'owai.”
 
I decided to cancel the last piece.
 
Then the Stripes editor called from Tokyo. He’d planned to run our final piece as the lead story in Sunday’s sports roundup. When I started making excuses he asked for my boss’s phone number. I faked static interference as an excuse to hang up, but it was plain that he'd call back.
 
We were screwed.
 
Barriga was scheduled to rotate Stateside and then retire from the Army; I arranged for him to leave Korea immediately. Cleaning out his desk I found a letter he’d written in which he accepted all responsibility for the hoax. I might have been tempted to keep it, except that it was so full of misspelled words and make-you-cringe grammar that no one would believe that this particular cartoonist could have written anything published in Stripes.
 
In any case, as senior officer, I alone was responsible. I made an appointment to see the chief of staff, a humorless, no-nonsense full colonel, and confess all. If by some twist of fate I was spared a court-martial, I could expect immediate reassignment to infantry duty on the DMZ.
 
I began packing.
 
And then the weather turned unseasonably warm; a forecasted blizzard became an intense, slow-moving rainstorm that washed out roads and bridges from South Korea’s Yellow Sea coast to the Straits of Tsushima.
 
A miracle.
 
I telexed the sports editor in Tokyo that due to severe weather, our tournament was cancelled.
 
I heard no more about grumaché until a few weeks later, while attending a conference in Tokyo.  The last day’s events included a tour of Stars & Stripes. As I traversed a top-floor corridor en route to a briefing, a flinty Marine colonel hailed me through his open office door.
 
The new commanding officer.
 
“Seventh Division?” he said, eying my shoulder patch.
 
“Yes sir,” I said.
 
“Then you’d be the public information officer?”
 
“Yes sir.”
 
“Grumaché – that was pure, unadulterated, bull, right?”
 
“Sir?”
 
“Tell me that it wasn’t a hoax.”
 
“No sir, I can’t tell you that.”
 
He threw back his head and laughed. “Captain, you just made me $100 richer,” he said. “A bet with my predecessor.”
 
“Glad to be of service, sir,” I said, choosing my words carefully.
 
He turned my blood to ice with a withering glance.
 
“Pull something like that on my watch and I’ll see you in Leavenworth,” he growled.
 
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, is home to the Army’s maximum security prison.
 
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I mean, no, sir.”
 
“At the Naval Academy I took four years of Spanish,” he said, studying me.  “So when I graduated, in 1939, and chose to serve in the Corps, my first duty station was the embassy Marine detachment in Lima, Peru.”
 
I was beginning to understand.
 
“Spanish is useful in Peru,” he continued. “But back before the war, the locals mostly spoke Quechua. There isn’t a helluva lot for a young man to do at night in Lima, so the first Quechua every embassy Marine learns is ‘Chicha’ — beer.
 
“And the first phrase we learned was ‘get me a drink’ —‘Soq'oita q'owai.’
 
“You really can’t [salty euphemism for excrement] the troops, Captain.”
 
My heart went down faster than the Titanic.
 
“Grumaché!”  he said, barely able to contain his mirth. “The sport of Inca kings!  Really — the very idea!”
Still laughing, he waved me away.

-----------------------
* Deceased 1969
​
Copyright (c) 2014, Marvin J. Wolf

One by one the letters arrived in Florida, Washington and New York. They bore New Jersey postmarks, neatly printed but nonexistent return addresses, and a powder that proved to be anthrax, a bacterium that can cause agonizing death if inhaled. One person died, and dozens were infected.
 
If police, federal agents and postal authorities succeed in tracking down the sender(s) of these guided missives, they will require another type of detective to find evidence linking them to the deadly envelopes.
 
Using techniques pioneered in the nineteenth century along with technology so new that it's still evolving, sleuths called questioned document examiners will attempt to match the handwritten words on the envelopes with known examples of the suspects' writing. They will analyze ink and paper to determine their origins and perhaps link pen and paper to any suspect. And they will peer into invisible realms to ascertain if the anthrax mailer might have written something else on top of the envelopes he or she mailed. 
 
 Most document examiners work for government agencies, but others are in private practice. One of this unsung profession's landmark cases involved the so-called Mormon Will, purportedly handwritten by the mysterious, reclusive Howard R. Hughes.  Dated March 19, 1968, it was three pages long, written on yellow legal tablet with the tops ripped off, and delivered along with two envelopes and a brief note to the Clark County, Nev., courthouse by an emissary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While the will earmarked most of the money for well- known charities, one bequest was startling: Melvin Dummar, owner of a Gabbs, Nev., gas station, was to receive one-sixteenth of Hughes' $2.5 billion estate.
 
The so-called Mormon Will was just one of 30, most hilarious or pathetic, delivered to the court after Hughes died in 1976, supposedly without leaving a will. Unlike the others, it acquired a quick veneer of authenticity when a "handwriting expert hired by a television network peered at the lined paper under a magnifying glass and pronounced it "absolutely genuine." Lawyers representing Hughes' heirs, however, hired John Harris, the legendary founding member of the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners, who soon determined that, like the others, it was a fake.  Charities that stood to reap megabucks from its bequests nevertheless went to court repeatedly to assert the will's legitimacy. Because Hughes was such a famously improbably character, the incident inspired a Hollywood move, "Melvin and Howard," and the Mormon Will remains among the most famous forgeries.
 
Disputed documents are far from rare: Virtually every day in America, someone goes to court to challenge or defend the authenticity of a will, check, credit-card receipt, ledger, contract, power of attorney, bill of sale, deed, medical record, insurance policy, lease, diary or other paper record. Questioned document examiners-the term dates to the early 19th century--are experts employed to authenticate disputed papers. Some are primarily handwriting specialists. Others are particularly adept in the use of laboratory equipment to detect forgery, including analyzing and dating of ink, paper, typewriters, computer printers, faxes and photocopiers, and in revealing erasures and alterations. A tiny cohort of the profession assesses the linguistic or literary qualities of writings as a way of determining authorship.
 
The art of authenticating a single document can involve an array of techniques, from the almost primitive (handwriting analysis) to such advanced technologies as lasers and carbon dating.
 
In North America only a couple of hundred qualified examiners are in private practice. To succeed they must have patience and encyclopedic memories. Other useful traits are a suspicious nature and an appreciation of the criminal mind: If there is a way to fake a document, someone will find it.
 
Most examiners deal with handwriting and hand printing, typewriting comparison and authentication of legal documents. Some specialize in verification of anonymous letters, disguised writing, the detection of erasures, and alterations o disturbance of paper fibers.
 
One such professional is Howard Rile of Long Beach, Calif. He learned his trade as a Colorado police examiner and mastered it under the tutelage of Jack Harris, now retired. Rile notes that while many cases involve forgeries, a great many of the documents he sees are genuine.
 
Wills are among the most commonly disputed papers. Rile recalls one scribbled scrap of paper that began with:

loaf whole wheat
pound sugar
coffee regular grind
eggs
I hereby bequeath my home and its contents to (her grandson).
My other real estate goes to [a nephew] And my stock- holdings are for [a sister]
bacon
laundry detergent
flour
pepper
 
"It was a genuine document," Rile chuckles. "Now, whether or nor the elderly woman who wrote it was of sound mind-that's not a question for a document examiner."
 
Documents are often valuable evidence in the courts. The primary reason that people turn to document examiners is to verify signatures. "That's the bulk of what I do," says Howard Rile. "Here we are in the 21st century, still trying to prove that a person actually signed a piece of paper."
 
 Part of a document examiner's job is educating clients, most of whom are attorneys. "The legal profession still doesn't have a clue about how technology is affecting evidence," Rile says.. For example, he notes the "widespread and naive assumption that a photocopy is a reliable copy of a missing original. Yet it's incredibly easy to manipulate photocopies--at least three techniques can be used and only one, cut-and-paste, sometimes leaves evidence of manipulation." Examiners sometimes prove that a document came from a certain photocopier by analyzing the pattern of tiny dots left by random bits of dirt on rollers, photosensitive drum and glass.
 
"We can discredit a signature on a photocopy, but neither I nor anyone else can say for sure that it's a true copy without the original to compare it with," he adds. "A variant of this is faxes."
He cites a recent case trying to determine the authenticity of a signature and eventually disproved its legitimacy by determining the brand of fax machine used. "The people who presented the document asserted that it came from one of three types of machines," he explains. "(In my experience) it's generally not known, but the information at the top of each page is created by the sending machine. Particular fonts may be unique to a particular brand." Accessing a research database, Rile was able to prove that the fax did not come from one of the three machines. "That tended to discredit the document," he says.
 
To compare questioned signatures with proven exemplars, Rile often works from huge photographic enlargements. On a workbench covered with costly, esoteric devices, such as an infrared-sensitive video display for identifying ball-point pen inks, is a faded wood box--a 75-year-old camera, still used to enlarge signatures. "We sometimes use color photos, but otherwise this is exactly the kind of work that was used in the Lindbergh (kidnapping) case in the '30s," he explains.
 
Most document examiners constantly update their technological expertise. One who has made the leap from the archaic world of typewriters to the latest computerized printing devices is New York's Peter Tytell, who grew up in a family of document examiners. At the 1982 tax-evasion trial of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon in New York, Tytell's mother, Pearl, testified that papers showing ownership of some $1 million weren't produced until a year past their dates. Peter's 86-year-old father, Martin, is a leading authority on typewriters, learning the intricacies of the machines in his father's repair shop. At 11, Peter worked on his first document, one of his father's cases, by counting the times a certain letter appeared on each page. At 55, he has been examining documents for more than 40 years.
 
When the New York Post ran a Page One enlargement of a letter accompanying "Unabomber" Theodore Kaczynski's manifesto in 1995, it caught Tytell's eye at the newsstand. "I took a paper and handed the dealer a dollar," he recalls. "Before he made change, I knew what the letter had been written on, and the year that this model was manufactured." The FBI later confirmed it.
 
When an attorney was accused of over-billing, Tytell examined his time sheets. He found that entries were made by the same typewriter, which had been repaired after the penultimate entry. "One character--the hyphen--had been resoldered. After that, it hit the paper a tad higher," he explains. Examining other time sheets, Tytell saw the same pattern: early entries with drooping hyphens, late ones by the repaired machine. "The problem was that most of the late entries bore dates that were months or even years before the repair," he laughs.
 
Tytell once tracked down the designer of a laser-printer type font to show that the apostrophe character appearing on a questioned lease was not yet available on the date it was signed. So the landlord had added a new clause, then used the original printer with updated fonts to make a new document that he claimed was the original.
 
"Many of the investigative principles developed for typewriters can be used for laser printers and other modern devices," says Tytell. "For example, marks made on paper edges as they feed through a printer can often be matched to individual machines."
 
Miami's Linda Hart also has met the past in the present. In reviewing Dade Registrar of Voter signatures she encountered citizens who had continued to exercise their franchise long after their obituaries were published. "Apparently dead men do vote in Miami," she sighs, pointing to several forgeries. In the 25 years since she left her position as a U.S. postal investigator to become an independent document examiner, Hart has investigated many forensic mysteries. While much of her work involves distinguishing individual handwriting characteristics to identify authorship, she also employs other techniques to verify claims.
 
"Recently I was asked to date bearer bonds offered as collateral for a million- dollar loan," she explains. Issued by three Latin American companies and bound into three books, each bore the date when the respective company was founded, a 24-year span between oldest and newest enterprise. Hart probed paper, inks and printing processes, but after days of toil, could not determine when they were printed.
 
Then she observed that one book bore diagonal striations along its unbound edges, the marks of an industrial paper cutter. "When the guillotine blade drops, any burrs or nicks create a distinctive pattern in the paper," she explains. "I stacked all three on top of each other and looked at them under focused fiber-optic light. The marks were identical. Since every blade develops tiny defects over time, it was plain that all three books had been cut by the same blade at the same time--and that made them fakes."
 
It can't be easy living with such a good spy. Not long ago Hart noticed erasure marks on her son's school attendance record. When confronted, the boy confessed that he'd changed the number of absences because he didn't want his parents to know he'd ditched a day.
 
Like other examiners, Hart draws on a host of resources. One weapon in her forensic arsenal is a device invented by Scotland Yard in the 1950s. The Electrostatic Detection Apparatus reveals faint impressions left in paper by writing on the sheet above it. In the fiction of espionage, secret agents burnish the paper with a soft pencil to create a negative of the imprint. The ESDA accomplishes this without altering the original by creating an electrostatic field on the paper. When fine particles of ink are sprinkled across it, they create a permanent record of the latent impressions.
 
Jerry Brown, who heads the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigations Laboratory, worked as a criminalist supervisor and document examiner for many years. He once used an ESDA to examine an anonymous note threatening Pope John Paul 11 during his most recent visit to the United States. In this case, the criminal mind wasn't operating on all cylinders. Impressions from the sheet above revealed a letter to the writer's mother. "At the end of the page he gave Mom his new address and phone number," chuckles Brown.
 
The constituents of paper often tell tales. Diane Tolliver, a 29-year veteran document examiner at the Indiana State Police Laboratory in Indianapolis, had a case involving a lawyer charged with embezzlement for cashing a check intended for his client. "The lawyer admitted taking the money, but offered a power of attorney granting him check-cashing authority," says Tolliver. Her microscope examination of the watermark, a faint, translucent impression embedded in the expensive bond paper's fiber during manufacture, revealed a code enabling the paper maker to prove the sheet had been manufactured months after the document was dated. "No way it's genuine," concluded Tolliver. A jury agreed.
 
The most esoteric specialty among forensic document examiners involves linguistics, the critical, qualitative and comparative analysis of language within a document. Maybe half a dozen experts practice this art in North America, one of whom is Professor Gerald McMenamin of California State University, Fresno. "A writer's choice of words, use of punctuation, spelling, grammar and sentence structure reflects his class and education," McMenamin explains. "Among the more educated, there are fewer differences," he adds, noting that these disparities often betray claims.
 
McMenamin recalls a case involving a man accused of molesting a child. Reviewing an unsigned letter to the victim an comparing it with other samples of the man's writings, he spotted an oddity: While writing in English, the man sometimes used Latin grammatical constructions such as "Your friend loyal." McMenamin attributes this to the man's education. "He grew up speaking Bengali, learned to speak English in India, then spent several years … studying Latin," explains McMenamin, whose insight was used to confirm the suspect's identity.
 
McMenamin has traced many offenders to their writing through such oddities as distinctive punctuation The text of a bomb threat, for example, contained an extra space after commas, and added two after semi- colons and periods. "When I examined one suspect's other writings, I found the same pattern," McMenamin says. Once able to focus on this suspect, police uncovered further evidence that led to a conviction. "Some who learn English as a second language may use unusual phonetic spellings," he continues. "A woman who grew up speaking Spanish was angry at her boss. She sent (anonymous) typewritten letters to several co-workers, each attributing disgusting behavior to the supervisor. In each she used the phrase, 'A beseen ya,' meaning 'I'll be seeing you.' The writer also sent a letter to herself, which is very common in this kind of case. Police never found the machine used to write the letters, but when I read her personal letters, all handwritten, several contained exactly the same phrase," McMenamin notes. Confronted with this and other similarities between her private letters and the missives to her co-workers, the woman confessed.
 
McMenamin once examined threatening letters that had been produced on an anonymous word processor. He noted that one suspect's business correspondence always contained exactly four paragraphs and used "boilerplate" topic sentences, with phrases such as "I have enclosed" and "I wanted to follow up." McMenamin found the same format and phrases in each offending letter. The findings became part of a case of circumstantial evidence that prosecutors used to obtain a conviction.
 
In one of McMenamin's more unusual cases, an Oregon man murdered his wife and disposed of her body in the Columbia River wanted police to believe that she had been abducted by a mysterious Canadian. He sent authorities a ransom note in which he effectively disguised his handwriting but still left clues. "People speaking aloud may imitate an Irish accent for a few sentences, but they can't keep it up. The same is true when they try to fake a writing style," says McMenamin. "For example, the husband spelled 'color' like a Canadian, 'c-o-l-o-u-r,' but he used American spellings everywhere else. I took that for a red herring."
 
In the page-and-a-half document, McMenamin found 60 "style markers"-deviations from standard usage. Among them: "to late" (for too late), "bossiness" and "confidentuality." "That was a very high number of markers, and it allowed me to demonstrate conclusively that the husband had written the letter." A jury agreed.
 
In addition to the anthrax-contaminated letters mailed to news organizations and lawmakers following the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, since 1998 more than 200 abortion and family-planning clinics in the U.S. have received letters containing white powder and threatening notes. All proved to be hoaxes. The handwriting, paper and ink of these threatening notes, however, have given law enforcement document examiners a trove of valuable evidence.
 
Despite new methods of creating documents and a shift to email for much personal and office correspondence, the venerable document examiner remains in the forefront of efforts to apprehend and convict those who mail terror.
 
© 2011 Marvin J. Wolf

​Ron Hale was in the middle of a residency in dermatology when his friends and neighbors decided that it was time for him to serve his country. This was 1965, the start of the Vietnam War buildup, and Dr. Hale accepted his draft notice and joined the Army Medical Corps.
 
He was sent not to Vietnam but to South Korea, where some 50,000 American soldiers were deployed to prevent resumption of the hostilities suspended in 1953. If a young doctor has not yet completed a residency, the Army almost invariably assigns him as a battalion surgeon. In wartime that would mean running an aid station where battle wounded get immediate first aid. In peacetime it means seeing patients with runny noses, sprained ankles or sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
 
Hale might have completed his service uneventfully ─ except one day several battalion officers called his attention to the unusual behavior of the battalion commander. Hale determined that this colonel urgently needed psychiatric treatment. When he refused to accept such treatment, Hale had him strapped into a straitjacket and sent to the psychiatric ward of a military hospital.
 
The colonel's replacement decided that he would prefer the services of another battalion surgeon. No other battalion commander would accept him, so Doc Hale became the Assistant Venereal Disease Officer for US Forces, Korea, a job where he was unlikely to order anyone put into a straitjacket.
 
For decades those who preceded Doc Hale in his new position had limited themselves to statistical analysis of reported disease. Hale, however, took his new job seriously. While he studied disease reports carefully, he also traveled all over South Korea to visit aid stations and speak with Army doctors and Korean physicians in communities adjacent to bases. He was shocked to discover that a quiet epidemic was raging throughout the country. US soldiers were contracting syphilis, a highly contagious and potentially fatal STD, in record numbers.
 
Syphilis is easily cured with penicillin. But Hale discovered that because the Army classified this inexpensive drug as a controlled substance, only a physician could prescribe it. Every dose had to be accounted for.
 
At the same time, Hale learned from Korean doctors, syphilis was running rampant, virtually out of control, among the local populace. There were thousands of cases, few of them reported to authorities. Because penicillin, which had to be imported from the US or Japan, was too expensive for most Koreans to afford, few cases were treated. Worse, unlicensed medical practitioners often dispensed diluted dosages of the wonder drug, creating penicillin-resistant strains of the disease.
 
Hale waited a few weeks until his boss, the Venereal Disease Control Officer, went on leave. As acting head of the department, he sent memos to every US Army doctor in Korea repealing all controls on penicillin. He suggested that aid stations hold sick calls in their local communities and offer penicillin to anyone who tested positive for any STD. He also shipped large quantities of penicillin to Korean hospitals and health clinics around the country, and let it be known that any doctor who wanted penicillin had only to ask at any US base.
 
In a month the epidemic was over.
 
Hale completed his military service and returned to his residency. Today he maintains a private dermatology practice in Santa Monica, California.

###

​© 2002 Marvin J. Wolf

Softball Can Be a Great Equalizer When You're Short and Lack God-Given Skills. But You Can't Play Forever, Can You?
 
I toe a corner of the rubber with my cleats and bend forward, squinting to peer at the holy trinity: batter, catcher and umpire. It is a late afternoon in early winter; until my eyes adjust, the banks of lights towering above Rancho Park have little effect. Time was when I could see a camouflaged soldier turn his head at 500 yards in twilight--but that was 1959, when I was a 17-year-old grunt with 20/10 vision. Now it takes enormous concentration to focus on home plate only 50 feet distant.
 
It's a long time and a long way from when I picked up baseball's rudiments on the streets of Chicago. Long before Little League came to the inner city, I spent sweltering summers on vacant lots, picking glass, rubble and defecation from the weeds before each game. Bases were cardboard swiped from the corner market. Usually someone brought the essential equipment, but often we swung a broomstick at a worn tennis ball.
 
On the sandlots of my youth the pitcher was inevitably the tallest boy or the best athlete; but early on, I knew I would never be either. Still, I persevered. In my ninth year I went to summer camp, began to learn the intricacies of the game and came to idolize Nellie Fox, the diminutive White Sox sparkplug.
 
At 12, a ball smashed the bridge of my nose. The resulting twin black eyes horrified my mother, who locked away my glove and forbade me to participate until I could "play with boys your size."
 
My vertical growth ended at 64 inches. I went from Fairfax High School--my family moved here when I was 16--to the Army, served 13 years and did not swing a bat or throw a ball again until I was 40. I joined a group of freelancers who challenged some editors from the Herald Examiner (former daily newspaper, long since closed) to a softball game. Nobody wanted to pitch, so I tried. We lost, but by the end of the game I knew that I could become a pitcher if I worked at it.
 
More importantly, I realized how much I had missed the game.
 
This was related to a matter that I had never dared confront. When I left the service, I was married briefly, then divorced. New relationships were elusive, and I wondered if it was because I was short and tubby in a society that equates tall with good, taller with better. I thought being a soldier in Vietnam had settled the issue for me: I had made sergeant before I turned 19, won a battlefield commission, rose to captain, commanded a company of troops. The chevrons on my arms or the bars on my collar proclaimed me a man among men.
 
But few women seemed to care, and going without female companionship undermined my sense of manliness. Between the white lines of the diamond, however, players are what they do. I returned to the game not to meet women or to recapture the spirit of my youth, but for the feeling that comes from playing well, of being accepted by peers. Of liking myself as a man.
 
I know. It's crazy. And I put a lot of pressure on myself.
 
Softball is a hitter's game, but even in slow pitch a good hurler can keep his team in the contest, and a poor one can lose it. Rules require that balls rise above the batter's head and land in a rectangle 17 inches wide by 30 inches deep that includes home plate. For two years, several nights a week, I tossed softballs into a box. Meanwhile I found a Sunday morning pickup game. Eventually I was invited to join a coed team, the Brewjays. I practiced endlessly in my alley, but it was not until I took the field that I learned to pitch.
 
I began carrying a softball everywhere I went. At night I dreamed of becoming the ball, soaring out of my fingers into the wind, rising into the sky, falling toward the strike zone. I thought about each game for days afterward. For years, I hardly slept Saturday nights. In the morning I was exhausted and wanted to stay in bed.
 
Often, just before taking the field, I wanted to puke. I kept it all inside, put everything I had into every pitch. My teammates socialized between innings, but I coached runners or sat alone, immersed in the game.
 
In a late inning of my first championship game, I choked. Tired after pitching two previous games, with irresistible bubbles of fear welling up within me--fear of failing, of revealing that I was a fraud--I walked several batters, forcing in runs and putting our opponent ahead for good. Afterward I apologized to my team. "We would never have gotten this far without you," replied one teammate.
 
I learned to wall off fear, to stay in the moment. A year later we played the same team again for the championship, and in the final inning of the last game, with the bases loaded and no outs, I induced two pop-ups and struck out the last batter to seal a victory. Weeks later I ran into a man against whom I had often played. Tall, handsome, muscular and 20 years my junior, he shook my hand and volunteered to his wife that I was the most intimidating presence he had ever faced on a ball field. I never knew. After that I learned to relax, to stay within myself, to savor every moment.
 
The Brewjays wore beer T-shirts and Toronto Blue Jays caps; as years slipped by we played under different names and sponsors, two seasons a year, April to July and September to December. Players came and went, but our corps of regulars remained intact. My life shaped itself around the team--not just games but practices and trips to the batting cage. As a prolific author with several published titles, I made sure that my books were released between softball seasons.
 
In the spring of 2000 we won the league championship for the third time. Afterward, most of the veterans quit to focus on family or medical matters. Our new teammates were in their 20s and 30s, with little playing experience. The Mixed Nuts, as we were now called, won only one game. I hit .669, my best season ever.
 
In slow pitch, a hitter has an eternity to swing a bat almost 3 feet long and weighing nearly 2 pounds. Aided by graphite composites or aluminum/titanium alloys, even an average player can swat a ball well over 100 mph. It can reach the pitcher in less than the blink of an eye.
 
My teammates once said that I had the fastest glove in the West. Well, at least in the Westside Entertainment Softball League. I snared anything within reach, leaping to capture line drives, bounding off the pitching rubber to scoop up a hot grounder.
 
Every season I took a shot or two off a leg from a ball that I could neither catch nor avoid. Once my sternum stopped a liner. It voided my lungs and I blacked out momentarily. Another time a horsehide bullet crushed my groin. Woozy and rubber-legged, I retreated from the field, asked the ump for a few minutes and returned to pitch--and win.
 
I never thought much about it: Injuries are part of the game, I have a high tolerance for pain and my bruises heal in a week or two. But in the spring 2001 season, I was hit almost every game. After several weeks I wasn't even flinching anymore--I had accepted the inevitability of being hit. I saw then that my glove was no longer fast, that my body could not respond as once it had, that I could no longer will myself to perform. Near season's end I was hit twice in one inning. In agony, I took myself out of a game for the first time. Then I noted that my bruises took longer to heal.
 
Realizing that I was no longer afraid of getting hit, I knew it was time to quit. A shot to the breastbone could precipitate a coronary. I could lose an eye. I could need a new knee joint. There were books I wanted to write, places I wanted to visit. To continue playing amounted to a death wish. I was not ready to die for the sake of my manliness.
 
But knowing how hard it is to find a pitcher, I decided to play one more season, to try and pass along some of what I had learned to my young teammates.
 
Back on the field in the uncertain twilight of December 2001, I straighten up, glove high, right arm behind my body, feeling the breeze from that side. I grasp the ball palm downward, fingers along the seams, thumb below. I bring my arm up rapidly through the dull soreness of my shoulder. Despite the ibuprofen I swallowed an hour before game time, an electric jolt zaps through me as my weight lands on my left leg, residue of an injury suffered months earlier. Wincing, I slide into a crouch, gloved hand in front of my chest, watching the windblown ball's curving descent toward the plate.
 
Now it is the last game of that season, and the ball hurtles out of the dark to land on the front inch of the plate, an un-hittable called third strike. The batter turns away in disgust. We go on to win; I get two hits, knock in three runs, snare a line drive, make three other solid defensive plays and am awarded the game ball.
 
Driving home, I consider playing another season. Maybe I'll find an over-50 league. Then I remember the agony of getting out of bed on Monday mornings. I think about going hitless in my first four games, of finishing the season with a batting average barely above .300--more or less the bottom rung for softball players. I recall nearly getting thrown out at first on a single to left field and the humiliation of legs so sore and bruised that I required a pinch runner.
 
Safe in my driveway, I wipe my eyes and decide to listen to my intellect, let go of my emotions. The boy inside me must shut up and sit down.
 
From my first day, I was the oldest in the league--including umpires. In 27 seasons I missed no more than four games; no one played more. I struck out more batters than anyone and gave up fewer walks per-inning-pitched. No one pitched or won more games. Hell, nobody lost more games. I had nothing left to prove. Gehrig quit. Ryan hung 'em up. Ripken was gone. I didn't play in the majors, but, hey, I was 60 bleeping years old.
 
Two weeks later the playoffs begin and I return to pitch what is likely my last league game. Before we start, league commissioners Adam Rosen and Vince Crooks--both veteran players--assemble the teams. They say nice things about me and produce a cake. Atop its frosting is an icing rendering of a photo: me, my arm thrust skyward to launch the ball.
 
Below the picture it says "Ironman."
 
Players I hadn't seen in years, including Richard Martell, our former manager, turn up to say farewell. Richard takes me aside. "I've never seen anyone with less ability play as well," he tells me, not for the first time. "You don't have much talent, but you got the most out of it." It reminds me of what Yankees skipper Miller Huggins said about 1923 rookie first baseman Lou Gehrig: "Only this kid's willingness and lack of conceit will make him a ballplayer."
 
It's been a year since then. I wear glasses now, and while I often join a Sunday morning pickup game, I haven't returned to visit my old team. I know that I'd want to play, and that I can't. But I'll always remember my last league at-bat, when I singled to center.
 
Take that, Ripken.

January 12, 2003|Marvin J. Wolf | Los Angeles Times Magazine. Marvin J. Wolf last wrote for the magazine about the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

I reported to Ft. Benning, GA and was assigned to the Ranger Combat Conditioning Committee. We were attached to the Ranger School, but not part of it, and that was good: Rangers earn their elite status by learning to fight under the most difficult conditions. That meant nine dirty, weary, hungry weeks patrolling swamps and mountains, eating berries, rodents and rattlesnakes and playing at war while supervised by "lane graders" who took pleasure in finding ways to challenge their charges.

My arrival coincided with the first day of a training cycle, when new students, all volunteers, are introduced to the weary weeks ahead. The students assembled in a U-shaped formation and the Ranger sergeant major introduced them to Lightning, his six-foot timber rattler. Then he put a white rabbit into the snake's cage. Lightning coiled. The rabbit froze.  Finally it twitched — and faster than the eye could follow, Lightning struck. The rabbit jerked, twitched, quivered. In two minutes it was dead.

"Before today is over," bellowed the topkick, "Every one of you will handle this killer snake with your bare hands."

At that moment a staff car turned the corner and drew to a halt behind the snake cage. The rear door opened and a tall officer emerged. He wore a lieutenant colonel's silver oak leaves, and the distinctive yellow-on-brown shoulder tab that identified him as a Ranger. He strode angrily toward the formation.

"Sergeant Major, I thought I warned you about trying to scare these men with that sick, old snake," he said.

"No sir, you never said nothing about it," said the sergeant major.

"I ­know­ that snake, and he's had his fangs removed," bellowed Lieutenant Colonel Denham.  "What did you do, put a drop of atropine from a gas mask kit on the rabbit, so he'd go into convulsions?"

"No sir!"

"These men are never going to learn a thing about handling snakes until you use a rattler with all his equipment," said the colonel.

"I'm telling you, Colonel, that Lightning's got ­all­ his equipment.  He's a killer. He'll croak you or me quick as he did that rabbit."

"Bullroar.  I'm no more afraid of ­that­ old snake than I am of the bogeyman."

"Well, if you feel so strongly, Colonel, maybe you'd like to put your money where your mouth is."

I stared at the colonel as if he was nuts. So did every one of the 200 students.

The sergeant major reached into his pocket and took out a wad of bills.

"Right," said Denham. "I'll wager a hundred dollars that I can put my leg in that toothless, sick, elderly, worn-out snake's cage and let him bite it, and be no more bothered than if I was bitten by a mosquito."

"You're on, Sir," returned the noncom.

"How about another on the side? I'll bet every man here a dollar. My two hundred dollars against your one dollar each," said Denham.

"What do you say, Rangers?" bellowed the sergeant major.

The ranks responded with a raucous cacophony of derision.

"Let's get the snakebite kit out here," yelled the sergeant major, and a medic came forward with a canvas bag adorned with a red cross.

"We better let someone hold the bet, because after Lightning bites him, the colonel will be on his way to the hospital," said the sergeant major, looking around. Just then a field ambulance, emblazoned with a huge red cross, turned off the blacktop and onto the gravel street.  The sergeant major stuck two fingers in his mouth and let out a shrill whistle. The ambulance stopped and the driver's head poked out the window.

"Bring that meat wagon over here, Specialist, I'll have a load for you in a minute," bellowed the noncom. The driver rolled up, then unbuckled a canvas stretcher. I stepped out of the shade to see, and the sergeant-major yelled at me to come over.

"This damn-fool has just bet these Rangers a dollar apiece that he's not afraid to stick his leg in the cage with Lightning. Will you hold the bet, young sergeant?" he said.

I was speechless.

"Won't take a minute, Sarge. Help us out here." So I walked up and down the ranks, collected a dollar from each man, then took the sergeant major's money. Colonel Denham handed me three crisp hundred-dollar bills.

An almost palpable hush descended on the ranks as Denham strode resolutely toward the wire mesh cage. The sergeant major took out a key, broke open the heavy steel lock, pulled it off the hasp. Then he hesitated.

"You really want to do this, Colonel? Ol' Lightning could kill you."

"I'm not afraid of being gummed by that senile, toothless snake," roared Denham.

The sergeant major shook his head in disgust. He took a big forked stick from the top of the cage, then opened the door a few inches. Someone in a back rank coughed, and then it was dead quiet. Denham put his right leg in the cage.

Lightning had flowed to the center of the cage, where he wound himself into a huge coil. When Denham's leg moved, ever so slightly, the snake struck at the khaki trousers, recoiled, struck again.

Denham didn't even twitch.

The sergeant major forced the huge snake to the rear of the cage with the forked stick, then jammed the lock on the hasp.

Four hundred unbelieving eyes followed Colonel Denham as he strolled over to me and stuck out his hand. I handed him the money.

"Sergeant-major, I'll be back at the end of the course, and I expect to see a healthy, poisonous rattlesnake by then."

The sergeant major's mouth hung open. He snapped his jaw shut and swallowed.

"Yessir," he said.

The staff car rolled up and the driver scurried around to open the rear door. The sergeant major exchanged salutes with the colonel, then turned back to the company.

And as Lieutenant Colonel Ernie Denham, who had left most of his right leg behind in a blazing Sherman tank during the Battle of the Bulge, got into the car, he carefully rolled up his pant leg to reveal the wooden prosthesis that had replaced it.

"See you in nine weeks," he said to the sergeant major, who as a teen-aged PFC had pulled Lieutenant Denham from the burning tank.

The sergeant major turned back to the troops. "Today, Rangers, we have learned about the dangers of making assumptions, the importance of planning, and the powerful effect of surprise,"  he said. He went on to say that after Denham lost his leg, he spent years in hospitals, learning how to walk. He could have retired on a nice pension, and spent his life mourning his lost limb. Instead, Denham fought to stay on active duty. Anybody who ever spent an hour around him would never again believe that having only leg is a handicap if you don't want it to be.

So I'll bet $200 that after stumbling around swamps and mountains for weeks, sore, exhausted, bug-bit and ravenous, what kept some of those 200 students from quitting Ranger School was the thought that one-legged Ernie Denham became a Ranger ­AFTER­ he lost his leg.

© 2000 Marvin J. Wolf