Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Monday, March 9

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From The Advocate, March 3, 1983, page 9.

This is another of those places where it’s very difficult to find anything about. Googling “Last Call” doesn’t help, especially when trying to add “gay bar” and “Los Angeles.” All that comes up is a series of articles about the closure of gay bars. The address however pointed the way to a tragic story. It appears that the Last Call Inn was located on the ground floor of the Palomar Hotel, a run-down, overcrowded building with multiple code violations. The building suffered a devastating arson fire in 2001. Two died: a mother who fell to her death after handing her children off to firefighters through a third-floor window, and Arturo Ortiz, the hotel owner’s brother and manager, whose body was found hunched over a gasoline can on the hotel’s second floor. Arson investigators determined that he had spread forty gallons of gasoline throughout the building when a pilot light lit the gasoline before he had finished. Juan Ortiz, the hotel’s owner, was charged with insurance fraud and murder. He was found guilty of insurance fraud, but was finally acquitted of the murder charges in 2007 after two hung jury trials. Since then, the Hollywood Community Housing Corporation rebuilt the historic building, converting it into 27 affordable apartments for low-income and disabled seniors. The Palomar Apartments won the 2006 Los Angeles Conservancy Preservation Award.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
► LA Police Beat Howard Efland to Death During Hotel Raid: 1969. The Dover Hotel was a five-story brick building in downtown Los Angeles where men checked in, removed their clothing, and laid on their beds with the doors open waiting for others to walk by. That made it a favorite target of L.A. police, which raided the place on a fairly regular basis. During the latest raid, vice officers Lemuel Chauncey and Richard Halligan hauled Howard Efland, a nurse who was one of the hotel’s customers, outside of the hotel in handcuffs, and laid him in the ground in front of the hotel where proceeded to beat and kicked him. Witnesses heard Efland scream, “Help me! My God, someone help me!”, while the officers beat him, kicked him, did knee drops on his stomach and stomped on him. Efland died of massive internal injuries.  At first, the LAPD told Efland’s parents that their son had simply died of a heart attack. That lie was betrayed, of course, when they saw the condition of their son’s body. A coroner’s jury then ruled Efland’s death an “excusable homicide,” claiming that he had resisted his arrest, despite witnesses saying that he was helpless against the assault. No one was ever held accountable for Efland’s murder.

TODAY’s BIRTHDAYS:
► Will Geer: 1902-1978. He was Grampa Walton on screen, and a social activist off. He had been a member of the Communist Party in 1934, where he met Harry Hay (see Apr 7) who would go on to co-found the Mattachine Foundation (which later became the Mattachine Society) in 1950. Geer and Hay briefly became lovers while working as union organizers in Los Angeles and San Francisco. But they soon parted ways when Geer married his wife, actress and fellow political activist Herta Ware. Geer went on to work with folk singers Burle Ives and Woodie Guthrie in advocating for migrant farm workers and organized labor. He also found time to do some acting, mostly on the stage, often Shakespeare. Between 1948 and 1951, he was also in more than a dozen movies, but he was soon blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

With the blacklist in force, Geer fell back on his training as a botanist (he had a master’s degree from the University of Chicago) and founded the Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon near Santa Monica, California, with his wife. They would divorce in 1954, but they remained very close friends thereafter. Together, they turned Theatricum Botanicum into an artists colony, with an outdoor summer theater and Woody Guthrie living in a small shack.

By the late 1950s, Geer was back on Broadway, and in 1964 he was nominated for a Tony for his role in the musical 110 in the Shade. His career in film resumed in 1963 with a minor part in Advise and Consent, and in 1967 he played the prosecutor in the film adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. When he died after completing the sixth season of The Waltons in 1978, his remains were cremated and his ashes buried at his beloved Theatricum Botanicum, which continues to host performances and youth acting workshops.

► Samuel Barber: 1910-1981. He was apparently a very precocious child. In a very anxious letter at the tender age of nine, he came out to his mother — as a composer:

Dear Mother: I have written this to tell you my worrying secret. Now don’t cry when you read it because it is neither yours nor my fault. I suppose I will have to tell it now without any nonsense. To begin with I was not meant to be an athlet [sic]. I was meant to be a composer, and will be I’m sure. I’ll ask you one more thing .—Don’t ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football.—Please—Sometimes I’ve been worrying about this so much that it makes me mad (not very).

He wrote his first musical at seven, tried his first opera at 10, became an organist at 12, and began studying piano, voice and composition at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia at 14. That’s where he met his lover, partner and musical collaborator Gian Carlo “Johnny” Menotti, and they would remain together for the next forty years. By Barber’s twenties, his compositions were commissioned or debuted by Vladimir Horowitz, Leontyne Price, Arturo Toscanini, among others. He won the Pulitzer Prize for music for his 1957 opera Vanessa, and for his 1962 Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. But his 1966 opera Antony and Cleopatra was a dud, and he spent his remaining years in isolation and depression, while Menotti, a successful composer in his own right, indulged in dalliances with a string of much younger men. Barber died in 1981, Menotti in 2007, and it is Barber’s work that is better remembered.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?