Haverhill’s: a weird stuff-emporium of the 1960s and 1970s, with goofy ads in big magazines like LIFE.
Let’s start with the name, stylized as: haverhill’s. Why? Because this is post-apex America and it’s time to be humble. Fonts go Helvetica on us and upper-case bows meekly into lower-case. The ad copy, too, no longer is no longer boasting and preening about miracle ingredients in gasoline or hair tonic. Instead, it’s all goofy and loopy and prone to tangents, like this for a simple serrated knife:
In our most compulsive desire to make new friends we decided to give away a whole truckload of MAC THE KNIFE…masterpiece of Vulcan’s art.
And later:
But, alas, our generous impulse was thwarted by one of our superstitious supernumeraries of officiously insisted that giving away a knife is very bad luck…
So forth and so on for a knife. A serrated knife.
Or for an AM-FM radio:
When Fred Spanberger, our Controller, returns from his cost accounting seminar at the Wharton School of Finance, he might just decree a screeching halt to this whole crazy scheme.
For a radio. If you dress it up well enough, people will buy.
At the time, Haverhill’s operated out of the very 1960s-ish address of 582 Washington St., San Francisco.
Now, Haverhill’s is operated out of a house at 16911 Grays Bay Blvd, Wayzata, Minnesota.
An overactive imagination could come up with a scenario where Bette Davis kills her second husband, Arthur Farnsworth. After all, pick any Bette Davis movie at random, and she’s probably killing someone. Just the other night, I caught a very random Bette Davis movie: a weird 1964 late-late-film noir called Dead Ringer where Bette Davis kills Bette Davis (she plays two parts: twin sisters). Did she kill her husband, Arthur Farnsworth? That was a persistent urban legend, and here’s why.
Arthur Farnsworth
Today, you can walk past the Frolic Room on 6249 Hollywood Boulevard and admire its Art Deco facade, without knowing one item of trivia that happened below your feet. The Hollywood Walk of Fame star for Connie Stevens is there. Apparently, too, the L.A. Metro Rail, the subway, runs directly underneath that spot. Every piece of ground has its history.
Here, too, Bette Davis’ husband mysteriously dropped dead one day in 1943. Nothing obviously homicidal happened, no shooting, no stabbing, not even a heart attack. This reportedly otherwise healthy man in his 30s simply dropped dead on the sidewalk and no one ever could determine why.
Bette and Farny
By 1943, Bette Davis was already an established movie and stage actress, playing roles as varied as a “vixen and a tragedienne,” as described by the Los Angeles Times. Unlike so many other movie actors and actresses of the day, she married outside of the industry: Arthur Farnsworth.
Born on December 15, 1908, in Proctor, Vermont, Farnsworth was a high school friend of Davis and working as the assistant manager at a ski lodge Peckett’s On Sugar Hill in the White Mountains of New Hampshire when he met her.
On one of Davis’ vacations to her cottage, Butternut, in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, Davis and Farnsworth rekindled their friendship and turned it into a marriage in 1940. Farnsworth was often reported at that time as being a former commercial airlines pilot affiliated with the aeronautical branch of the Minneapolis-Honeywell Co.
Pantages Theater, 1943Pantages Theater, 2019
A Stop in Hollywood
At the time, Davis and Farnsworth were living at 1705 Rancho Avenue, Glendale, in a $50,000 house on the banks of the Los Angeles River that Davis called Riverbottom.
Some reports state that, on that day, Farnsworth first went to Burbank, then came back to Hollywood.
Why was Farnsworth here in the first place?
Farnsworth may have caught a show at the Pantages. On Monday, the Pantages was showing Mr. Lucky, with Cary Grant and Laraine Day. He might have caught a late matinee to see that picture.
Regent Liquors may have been his destination, but proprietor Dave Freedman did not mention Farnsworth visiting the store; only that as Farnsworth “passed his store” Farnsworth emitted a muffled scream.
Regent Liquor Store, Hollywood Blvd., 1949
The fall happened on the afternoon of August 23, 1943. After a muffled scream, Farny fell backward and struck his head on the pavement. He fell into a coma and was dead by 6:30 p.m. August 25.
He never regained consciousness. The base of his skull was fractured and he suffered several hemorrhages and a high fever as he lay in the hospital.
As some of us sit around in the burgs and hamlets of the United States, knitting our fingers and wondering about the shape that China’s “invasion” of the U.S. will take, need we look any further than Hong Kong? In 1997, Hong Kong’s sovereignty was transferred to China, and the “one country, two systems” principle that helped everyone feel better about the hand-off has been diminishing ever since. While Hong Kong is still a freer type of China than Mainland China, those freedoms are winnowing away.
interference and intimidation have become more common. Phone calls from Beijing operatives to Hong Kong officials and journalists are now routine. Chinese security agents have disappeared dissidents from the city’s streets. In 2015, several men who published salacious books about the Party leadership were kidnapped, and later…[confessed] to subversion.
Three decades before the hand-off, the Hong Kong branch of the Bank of China, at no.2A Des Voeux Road Central, Central, Hong Kong, became a giant protest sign. In true globo form, we find three countries’ cultures jammed together into one view: the U.S. Hilton hotel corporation, the Bank of China, and English cricket (in the other image) being played
Explains LIFE magazine, October 13, 1967:
Possibly Red China’s proudest monument outside its borders is the Hong Kong branch of the Bank of China, which towers over the neighboring British Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (right). Last week, to celebrate the 18th anniversary of the Communist take-over, the Chinese bank got a festoon of posters with the predictable slogans: “Long life to the Chinese People’s Republic,” and “Raise the Red flag of Mao’s thought and march forward courageously.” On the same day, however, the Communists once again began supplying water to the British colony, the Hong Kong stock market hit a two-year high and a cricket game proceeded in leisurely fashion opposite the Red bank.
File this one in the annals of things that will never again exist: switchboard operator school.
This ad from the June 1, 1948 Los Angeles Times hit the zeitgeist of the times perfectly well, though. Picture: it’s 1948, the war has just ended, L.A. is booming, phones are still run through switchboards (though not for long).
The location of The Florence Utt Switchboard School was 742 South Hill Street, Los Angeles; translated, it’s downtown, near Pershing Square and The Biltmore Hotel. Not much found on Florence Utt, but she appears to have been born in 1885 and died in Carmel, California in 1986, a very ripe 101 years old.
Florence Utt ran with the times. In 1957, Florence Utt Switchboard Schools, Inc. was incorporated in New York State, then altered four years later to Florence Utt Business Schools, Inc., to teach students IBM keyboard punch systems.
Unbelievably, Florence Utt Business Schools, Inc. is still an active corporation and name (if not an actual operating business), as registered with the New York Department of State.
Sharpen your knife, go back in the past, and slice off any section. It all says something. Everything is significant, every mote of dust on the microfiche slide.
We flip to San Francisco. We look at a woman named Zona Sage. In 1970, Zona Sage is a 25 year-old law student at Hastings College of Law. She is newly divorced. She has red hair. She wears women’s liberation buttons, one of which is described at that time as “a circle with a staff and two cross-bars.”
But we must stop there. More than that would be going too far–for now.
Now, Paul Camera. Paul Camera is 34 years old and a professor at Hastings College of Law. Since Mr. Camera’s parents, Dino Camera and Teresa Daveggio, come from Italy, let’s assume that Mr. Camera name is pronounced not like the picture-taking device but with an emphasis on the second syllable.
What brings these two people into conflict are Professor Camera’s comments in Ms. Sage’s criminal law class about women. He says that women lawyers can get too emotional and vindictive when dealing with divorce cases.
Camera kicked Sage out of the class. Sage brought up a complaint before a faculty panel. Eventually, though Sage was not allowed back into the class–the panel stated that this would only lead to more conflict–she was given a 70-percent passing grade.
What’s interesting is that the writer in the San Francisco Examiner article cannot resist a few digs at Sage, referring to her as “plump,” a characterization that has no bearing on story. She’s also described as “militant,” though at the time, “militant” may not have had the ring of insult that it does today. The other irony is that the faculty panel was composed of five men. Another article in the same paper (San Francisco Examiner, April 29, 1970) refers to a networking group of women lawyers as “lady lawyers.”
