by Laura Monteros
The storm had passed on Monday evening when the Altadena Historical Society rounded up the usual suspects—president Jane Brackman, who goes by the alias “Dr. Barkman,” Capt. Steven McLean of Altadena Sheriff’s Station, woman-about-town Carolyn Seitz, Altadena historian Michele Zack, concertmeister Bob Klomburg, and various types from the historical society and sheriff’s department.
They’d come to get the skinny on the Altadena Sheriff’s station. Sgt. John Stanley (pictured) was just the hombre to dish it out. Before the sergeant took the lectern, McLean pulled this reporter aside.
“There’s something John won’t talk about,” he said. I cocked my ear to get the 411 direct from the captain. He confided that Stanley won’t reveal that he researched the LASD archives and found the first African-American deputy in Los Angeles, Julius Loving, who became a deputy in 1897.
McLean didn’t need to worry. Brackman spilled the beans in her introduction. She added that the write-up Stanley did appeared in “a very prestigious California quarterly”—meaning, she said, that they don’t pay.
Sgt. Stanley described himself as “a historian masquerading as a deputy sheriff.” He sure looked like a deputy. But he talked like an historian. His talk, “The Altadena of Ago,” profiled the Altadena Sheriff’s Station from 1927 to 1950.
It started out with a dastardly deed on a dark night on a deserted dirt drive on the eastside. The year was 1924, and a lovely lady named Miss Tyler was parked with her beau Mr. Jacobson, planning their upcoming nuptials.
“There were both two-legged and four-legged predators,” Stanley said. The cowardly crook was of the two-legged variety. He grabbed the groom’s dough and then grabbed the groom’s girl. Jacobson leaped to his intended’s defense and took two bullets to the torso. Pasadena police jumped on the case like fleas on a dog, but the sheriff’s department was slow to respond.
Altadena formed its own crime fighting team, the Altadena Vigilance Committee, headed up by Edward S. Graham. The short-lived group of irregulars had checkered results, and disbanded in favor of the Altadena Police Department, which didn’t win any awards, either.
Then a capped crusader landed on the scene. William Isham Traeger took the reins of the sheriff’s department in 1921. He was a straight-up guy, “The only sheriff who got through untainted,” according to Stanley. He had a history with the northwest San Gabriel Valley, having been a real player in the first Rose Bowl Game in 1902. He captained the losers from Stanford. Traeger decided a decentralized system was needed and tackled the problem like Cardinal after a Badger heading for the goal line.
The confused response to the Jacobson homicide, the arrest of the wrong man, and the eventual ID of the real perp—The Silk Hat Bandit—by deputy Vincent J. Monteleone of the robbery squad gave impetus to Traeger’s plan. In 1924, he set up sheriff’s substations in two locations and added three more in 1926. In 1927, Altadena got its own digs.
Monteleone was tapped to open the substation on Aug. 15, 1927. The shotgun was his weapon of choice, and all eight of his deputies were armed with them. Station 7 opened to a lot of hoopla, with music and speeches. After he retired, Monteleone earned a few simoleons writing a book. "Criminal Slang: The Vernacular of the Underground Lingo" came out in 1945. The reissue can be picked up for $75 greenbacks online. “You can’t read it without offending someone,” Stanley warned.
So what went down between 1927 and 1950?
Two misguided mountaineers and four kids were rescued off the mountain by Altadena deputies in 1928. “Thus began the relationship between Altadena deputies and mountaineers,” Stanley said.
A new substation building was unwrapped in 1929 at Lake and Mariposa. Chester Allen, veteran of the bloody Union Ice Company shootout in the ‘20s, took command in November, 1929. He opened the station for tours and educated the citizenry about what his deputies did.
Allen increased the firepower of the station with the addition of high-powered rifles for coyotes and shotguns for gophers and other vermin. “We have more four-footed criminals than two-footed up here,” he told HQ. His approach to skunks was to throw a perfumed gas bomb at them.
Uniforms became a requirement for deputies in 1932 when the St. Francis Dam burst and deputies could not be distinguished from civilians. Altadena patrol cars received new-fangled one-way radios in 1934. By 1950, the three cars (71, 72, 73) had two-way radios.
David E. Croushorn followed Allen and served until 1939. He had worked at the County Sieve, as the new Hall of Justice Jail was known. Franklin L. Coe took over in 1939 for a few months, passing the baton to Capt. Cook in 1940.
It was Christmas Eve of the following year, on a dark and stormy night made worse by the World War II blackout, that Altadena lost its first deputy in the line of duty. David Stout Larimer was assisting Mrs. John Girvan across Colorado Boulevard when a speeding car crashed into the deputy. He pushed Mrs. Girvan to safety at the cost of his own life.
Cook oversaw building of the edifice that now serves as the Altadena Sheriff’s Station and sawed a bit of wood as well. Stanley put up a photo of Cook and another man taking a saw to tree to make way for the station. The station cost $138,998 to build and was assigned the phone number SYcamore 8-1131. You can still reach the station there today.
“The Land of Ago is indeed subtle and difficult,” Stanley said. The stories bubble up like freshets and then disappear again in the sand.
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Laura Monteros is a veteran of the Herald Examiner and writes about Altadena.
