When last week you read about the Second Battle of Bunker Hill, did you really think that that was all that’d happened at the noble Rossmere? The Corinthian columns! Those dentils! Don‘t they just scream Dope Addict Goes Berserk?
December 28, 1918. Juvenille officers were called to a vacant lot at First and Hope where young toughs were blasting away at tin cans with their air rifles. The two collared ringleaders were on their way to the station house when one of the youngsters tucked a lock of long hair under his cap”¦he being Miss Juanita Stuart, fourteen, of the Rossmere. She protested tearfully when her mother was instructed by officers to burn the costume of khaki trousers, flannel shirt and boy‘s sweater, and to keep the young lady attired in feminine apparel only thereafter.
July 1, 1927. William Barrett, Rossmerian, had been arrested at the hotel by officers on Volstead violations and entered into evidence was one large bottle of gin. At Barrett‘s trial the prosecuting attorney sought to clinch a conviction by producing said bottle, but, like a reversed wedding at Cana, a police property room at LAPD will turn gin into water.
Barrett went back to the Rossmere a free man, thankful to the police for working a miracle.
September 23, 1949. Lloyd E. Bitters, 82, a former shoplifter by trade, decided on September 5 of this year to stop eating. The fourteen-year resident of the Rossmere simply found life “no longer worth living,” which is reasonable enough (moreover recently-assassinated Gandhi had made fasting fashionable). But Bitters was descended upon by members of the Community Chest and the Salvation Army‘s Golden Agers Club, who bundled him up and trundled him off to General Hosptial for psychiatric examination.
September 5, 1951. Whereas the Vanderbilt had a habit of killing children, the Rossmere saved them. Elena Bravo had warned her little Martha, seven, against playing on the third floor fire escape, but Martha didn‘t listen and tumbled off, only to be caught by Mrs. Max Casados‘ ground-floor clothesline. The child suffered a compound arm fracture, a less lamentable situation than another hotel would have afforded.
September 7, 1955. Fred H. Morales, 28, delivered a benediction of blood to six of his sleeping children. And after his sprinkler-like artery-opening anointing act, he beat down a door and chased his wife–she carrying their nine-month-old baby–and her parents into the street outside the Rossmere with a butcher knife. When the cops finally arrived at First and Hope they found Morales inside, having slashed his throat with a razor blade. He was taken to the prison ward at General Hospital.
