You plan to weave your car quietly home from the bar and not only do you get stopped and arrested, but immortalized by the press. This image, another from the University of Southern California archive, was shot by a Los Angeles Herald photographer and shows motorist Edna Benton failing a field sobriety test administered by highway patrolman M.G. Gaskell. Herald photographers were often on the scene after murders and suicides, but this image shows just how quickly they could be on the scene to shame even the most unimportant of people. We're curious when this type of photo-journalism went out of style. In this case the shame aspect didn't work, as Benton's smile in image two shows. These date from today in 1951. 

The above photo shows twenty-two-year-old Eddie M. Gonzalez, who was discovered dead behind a service station located at 3822 E. Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles. In the background is police detective A.W. Frank. Police decided the cause of death was an accidental overdose, a deduction made thanks to fifty capsules of an unnamed drug found on the deceased’s person. To us the whole scene looks strange—a well-dressed, well-groomed person in shiny shoes who can afford fifty capsules of drugs doesn’t seem like the type who would need to ingest them behind a gas station and end up tangled in a pile of tires. And if suicide was his aim, why fifty leftover capsules? But maybe we’re just conspiracy minded. The photo is part of the University of Southern California’s digital archive and was taken today in 1952. 

When do you smile your way through a drunk driving arrest? When you’re too rich to care. Mary Spreckels was a former dancer who had married John D. Spreckels III, a scion of the Spreckels Sugar empire. By August 1952, when the above photo was taken, she had divorced her husband but had gotten a tidy settlement, and like all self-respecting rich women still went by his last name lest she be mistaken for a mere commoner. The photo below shows Spreckels in court two months after her arrest. We figure there are only two possible reasons she’s being administered a field sobriety test in court—one, she showed up reeking of mimosas, or two, she’s contesting the drunk driving charge by demonstrating that she can’t walk a straight line even when sober. The images come from the University of Southern California’s digital archive of Los Angeles photos. Oh, and did we forget to mention why Mary Spreckels sued her husband for divorce? Because he was an alcoholic.

Above is a random shot from the USC digital photo archive of a man hanged, either by his hand or others, from a Los Angeles underpass located at West First and North Figueroa. At left in the image you a see a detective using an official LAPD pokin’ stick to turn the corpse for a better look. Except it actually kind of looks like he’s sizing up a piñata purchased from the world’s least festive party supply store, and we can be sure that if he gave it a good whack it wasn’t candy that came out. Meanwhile, the cop below must be thinking that the detective’s exam might not be so hard to pass after all. This happened today in 1951. 

We found a few interesting shots from the USC Film Library and thought we’d share them. The four photo sequence above shows the aftermath of a suicide attempt in Santa Monica, California. The woman leapt from a well-known bluff in Palisades Park and landed on the Pacific Coast Highway about forty feet below. It was a serious attempt, as you can see from the woman’s battered state, but she survived. That was today, 1951. 

More from the USC digital photo archive. It looks like just another black Cadillac, but no, this one belonged to mobster par excellence Mickey Cohen and it’s parked outside the L.A. eatery Sherry’s, where he was the target of an assassination attempt in July 1949. Gunmen shot Cohen in the shoulder (or arm, depending on the telling), fatally wounded one of his friends, seriously wounded two others, and managed to hit journalist Florabel Muir in the ass with a non-penetrating ricochet. Having learned a lesson, Cohen had his next Cadillac bulletproofed (bombproofed as well, by some accounts). Below are a couple of photos of that car and the two-inch-thick glass that was installed (all well and good to be sealed inside an armored hotbox, but what if your driver ate broccoli with dinner?). Anyway, Cohen sold the Caddy in 1951 for $12,000, supposedly because it wasn’t street legal. He died of natural causes in 1976. 

This uncredited photo shows a suicide jumper in mid-fall sometime during the mid-1950s, somewhere in downtown L.A. (we've seen this photo elsewhere dated 1966, which is wrong, based on the two new-looking cars parked below the jumper, and the sign which we think advertises 1955's The Magnificent Matador with Thomas Gomez). It came from the University of Southern California digital archive, where there are tens of thousands of mid-century photos from Los Angeles and its environs. We’ll post more shots in the days and weeks ahead.