Excerpt, World War II Arroyo Grande
28 Saturday Nov 2015
Posted in Uncategorized
Monthly Archives: November 2015
Pretty Eleanor, Bank Robber
25 Wednesday Nov 2015
Posted in American History, Arroyo Grande, California history, History
Eleanor Walling was an enchanting little girl—one can easily visualize her in a blouse with a sailor’s collar, with a big bow in her hair, like L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy. She was also a talent and a ticket-office draw for her father, a small-town impresario who owned the Lompoc Opera House, the setting for a 1912 rally for Bull Moose candidate Theodore Roosevelt. On that day, Eleanor enchanted the Lompoc Journal, too. The paper notes that
The program was introduced in a most pleasant manner by little Eleanor Walling, daintily clad and draped in a flag, stepping to the front of the stage and with her little violin leading the orchestra in the Star Spangled Banner in a way that carried the audience away.
Eleanor was eight years old. Her mother had died young, but either she or J.O., Eleanor’s father, had bequeathed the little girl with extraordinary musical gifts. She was an actress as well as a violinist, appearing in her father’s plays, including The Moonshiner’s Daughter or in the title role in Editha’s Burglar, which “proved a hummer,” according to the Journal. Sometimes she shared the bill with silent films like Tobacco Mania.
Eleanor, born in Oregon, San Luis Obispo, or England, depending on the source, had, by World War I, joined her father and siblings in a new enterprise: the Walling Orchestra entertained at concerts and dances in a roadhouse owned by J.O. near Avila Beach. They were the band of choice when Arroyo Grande got its brand-new electric streetlights. But by 1920 or so, Eleanor had struck out on her own, for the vaudeville circuit, the story went.
Pretty Eleanor was 20 years old and just as enchanting when she played the violin for her guards at the Kern County Jail in the spring of 1924. She’d been accused, with a male accomplice, of robbing a Taft bank of $5700. A revolver discharged during the robbery. Eleanor, much later, allowed that it might have been hers, but she wasn’t clear on who was holding it at the time. Then, after that, she suggested that she hadn’t been in the bank at all. Her story changed as often as her birthplace.
But in the robbery’s immediate aftermath, she wasn’t suggesting anything. Detectives from both the sheriff’s office and the LAPD grilled her for two days. They got nothing. EFFORTS OF POLICE OFFICERS AMUSE GIRL HELD IN ROBBERY, a headline read. Her hair was cut short, like a Flapper’s, so she became the “Bobbed-Hair Bandit.” PRETTY ELEANOR SMILES AT OFFICERS AS THEY QUESTION HER, another headline announced. She decided to let her hair grow, now that she had the time. She pled “not guilty” in April.
She changed her plea in May. She might have been threatened by a defense witness called to testify on behalf of Bill Crockett, her accomplice, suspected of planning the bank robbery.
According to the prospective witness, a Folsom inmate, Eleanor had been with him when he had shot a “Dutchman” during an armed robbery in Los Angeles. He complained later that they’d paid doughboys $32 a month to kill Dutchmen, but they gave him 29 years, and he’d just wounded his. And his conviction came because Eleanor had turned state’s evidence. Now, he suggested, she’d been much more than an innocent bystander.
Meanwhile, the papers were reporting that she had been one of the robbers who’d burst into the Taft State Bank on March 13, 1924, at 9 a.m., helping to round up customers and tellers. She’d been dressed as a man. She continued to dress that way—“her crossed legs garbed in khaki and long hiking boots”—after her arrest.
Newspaper stories hinted that she wasn’t innocent in other ways. Both the defense witness and Bill Crockett were infatuated with her. So were the deputies at the Kern County Jail.
But by the time of the trial for the robbery, a reporter wrote, “gleaming hatred” appeared in Crockett’s eyes at the mere mention of her name. Crockett was unlucky in love and inept in crime: his mask had slipped as he herded the bank’s occupants into the vault, so a teller on the witness stand identified him without hesitation. And while they’d made away with $5700–nearly $80,000 today–they’d overlooked another $30,000 nearby.
And not only had Eleanor confessed, but she’d led the detectives to the cash. They found a thousand buried under two railroad ties on General Petroleum property outside of Taft; another $1800 was buried at the base of a telephone pole.
Pretty Eleanor distanced herself from the robbery on the witness stand, when “every pair of eyes in the courtroom was directed at her,” as a Bakersfield newspaper reporter wrote. It’s a good bet that Bill Crockett’s eyes gleamed, him wishing he could burn holes in her, through that
…ponged blouse with a man’s collar, about which was knotted a shoestring “sheik tie.” Over her blouse she wore a brown and fawn-colored barred sports vest. A brown full silk skirt completed her ensemble.
She wasn’t there at all, she said. That was another man, Ray. All she’d done was to burn their clothes after and change the license plates on their car. Oh, and she’d buried the revolvers somewhere between Taft and Fellows.
Eleanor was giving one of her last performances for an audience of any size. They were rapt. She went to prison anyway.
Ironically, Bill Crockett was acquitted, only to be convicted later of a second robbery. He’d do time and so would two of his brothers, one a thief and the other a forger who, according to a family history, would do the hardest time of all, on Alcatraz.
Until Taft, Eleanor’s record was a clean one, with one exception: in 1920, she’d started an 18-month term in a Ventura reformatory. She hadn’t played the vaudeville circuit. She’d run away from home.
Her San Quentin term was five years to life. The “Bobbed-Hair Bandit” shared a cell with Clara, “The Girl with a Hammer,” after her murder weapon of choice. Eleanor had been an actress, but Clara was a drama queen: she tried to escape twice and failed both times, once breaking out of a town jail, once slashing her wrists with a razor blade she’d borrowed from a San Quentin matron. Eleanor did her time quietly.
After her parole, she lived in San Francisco, in the Noble Hotel, on a narrow block of Geary Street. The 1930 census lists her occupation as “musician.”
Two years after that, the Oakland Tribune reported that she’d been questioned and released for a bank robbery in the city. Some San Francisco police detective must’ve been disappointed, because he’d certainly done his homework and it must have looked like a good collar. The armed robbers had been two women, dressed as men.
Intimidation
08 Sunday Nov 2015
Posted in American History, California history, History, Writing
Filipino field workers thinning lettuce with el cortito, the short hoe, Salinas Valley. The tool would be outlawed in 1974. Photograph by Dorothea Lange.
I thought it would be a good idea to write about the Depression and New Deal, and I still think it is. What I wasn’t prepared for was the topic’s massiveness, the inchoate nature of local scholarship on the period, and the kind of conflict that, in some ways, is more hurtful than writing about the war.
I’m using Kenneth Starr’s series—if California has a Historian Laureate, it’s Starr, and he’s pretty even-handed—as a guide. But once you get into Starr’s depiction of the period 1934-37, the wheels start to come off your Comfort Train.
California was unique in so many ways in the Great Depression. The downturn didn’t have the wallop here that it did in the industrial Midwest, where at one point unemployment in Toledo was 80%, because California, in these prewar years, was still largely agricultural. It also, in large part thanks to a reactionary governor, Frank Merriam, resisted the New Deal–failing to stop FDR’s programs, but retarding their introduction into the state until long after they’d taken hold elsewhere. Around here, for example, the New Deal didn’t seem to have had real impact, except for the CCC, and, of course, except for AAA farm subsidies, until 1938 or 1939.
What California did have–and in spades–was a political right wing that veered, intermittently and locally, into a tight and militarized alliance between business and government: that’s a serviceable definition of corporativism–or Fascism.
This alliance had its beginning in the postwar years, with the Palmer Raids, Sacco-Vanzetti and, more locally, with the IWW and with San Francisco dockworkers’ agitation. By the mid-1930s, the right’s fear intensified, because there were communists among farm labor organizers–made manifestly clear by Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle. In reality, the struggles of California workers at the time had little or nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with organizing for a living wage, for sanitary living conditions, and for a safer workplace.
That, according to the powerful elements in the state–the umbrella organization for big growers, Associated Farmers, Inc., the Union Pacific Railroad, Pacific Gas & Electric, and the City of Los Angeles, with the most aggressive “Red Squad” in the nation being the LAPD’s–that kind of agitation was communism, pure and simple.
The right had its roots in LA, although most of the earlier labor strife had come farther north. By the 1930s, the Imperial, San Joaquin and Salinas Valleys, and the Arroyo Grande and Nipomo Valleys, to a smaller extent, had become the front lines for fighting incipient Communism.
When Socialist Upton Sinclair ran for governor in 1934, it was the LA District Attorney who notified thousands of potential working-class voters, potential Sinclair voters, that they would have to appear and present legal proof of their residence. It was the LAPD who, in 1936, sent nearly 200 officers to entry points around the state’s borders with the extraconstitutional mandate to turn away travelers with “no visible means of support”–they waved through, for example, a gentleman in a brand-new Packard but detained, rousted, and turned away a poor family crammed into a 1921 modified Ford pickup. At night, they gathered hundreds of unemployed men–mostly very young men–handed them peanut-butter and baloney sandwiches, and put them on freight trains bound for the Arizona border.
In Salinas–there are rumbles about the 1936 strike in the old Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorders–lettuce workers were locked off the job while hundreds of scabs were brought in. The strikers threw rocks at the trucks bringing in the strikebreakers, which brought the Monterey County Sheriff, the California Highway Patrol, and hundreds of deputized citizens, armed with axe handles, onto the side of the growers. They beat strikers, men and women, senseless, used tear gas and nausea gas, set up machine gun nests, and when deputies mistakenly unloaded their shotguns on three carloads of strikebreakers, it took them all night and most of the next day to coax them out of the fields where they were hiding, terrified.
In an Imperial Valley strike, growers beat the attorney, on the courthouse steps, who was representing labor organizers indicted for criminal syndicalism. The sheriff and his deputies watched, waited, and then intervened, arresting the semiconscious attorney’s wife when she went to their car and retrieved a revolver. Another labor attorney–a Jesuit-educated Irishman, God love him–took over the case, and tore the prosecution to shreds: they had to drop four of the six charges against the organizers. The D.A. prosecuting the case had his term lapse, but was allowed to continue when the state attorney general named him a special prosecutor. The defense attorneys presented six hours of tightly-reasoned legal arguments (How can you send a man to prison, for example, for being a member of the Communist Party when the Communist Party was recognized by the state of California and regularly ran candidates?) while in his summation, the prosecutor–literally–clutched the courtroom flag to his breast and preached Americanism.
The jury deliberated sixty-six hours, brought back a handful of guilty verdicts, and recommended that the convicted be placed on probation. The judge ignored the jury and sentenced the defendants: one to eight years in prison. The women got the lesser sentences; the men went to San Quentin.
There were bitter strikes here, as well, in 1934 and again in 1937, when the CHP were imported to Nipomo, as they had been in Salinas, to protect strikebreakers and to intimidate strikers. The San Luis Obispo District Attorney, with a near-Dickensian name, van Wormer, and Sheriff Haskins felt confident enough to issue the strikers an ultimatum: Go back to work or go to jail, charged as vagrants.
99% of the workers, the Arroyo Grande Herald-Recorder proclaimed, with equal confidence, were eager and willing to go back to the pea fields, but they were intimidated by outside agitators.
The implacable 1%–doubtless, they were Communists–wanted forty-five cents a hamper to bring in the pea crop. The Herald-Recorder soberly reported that one worker maintained that twenty-five cents a hamper was more than enough to allow a family to support itself.
The final offer was presented, not by the growers, but by Sheriff Haskins: Thirty cents. Take it or leave it.
This research is going to lead me into dark places–and shining daylight there, even eighty years later, is going to make me enemies.
Pea pickers’ children, Nipomo, 1935. The little girl’s knocked knees are indicative of rickets, caused by a Vitamin D deficiency. Dorothea Lange photo.
A Work in Progress 