Minerva's Mailbag! 1920s Letters from Young Women in Long Beach

Each day in the late 1940s, thousands of sick people visited the residential Long Beach home of Roy Beebe, a self-styled "scientist" whose homemade "cosmic ray" machine was said to cure all of mankind's ills.
Beebe's "cosmic ray" laboratory and its growing army of true believers made national news as a normally quiet Long Beach neighborhood was overrun with thousands of desperate patients seeking treatment from the mysterious machine.
Was it all a scam?  Join us, won't you?

 

With a wingspan as wide as a football field, the Spruce Goose was the largest plane ever built.   The craft—designed by eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes and made out of wood—was intended for use in WWII, but the plane wasn't finished until after the war was already over.  Under intense pressure from the government to show results, and still recovering from a major crash of his own, Hughes took the Spruce Goose out for its one and only test flight in Long Beach harbor in November 1947.  Join us, won't you?  

In 1923, the Long Beach Press began an advice column—Minerva's Mailbag, later changed to Tell It to Mary—geared toward the young women of Long Beach.
What problems were vexing the teen girls and emerging adult women of Long Beach?  Join us for an absolutely terrif discussion about flappers, dating, petting, loneliness, and upturned gender norms in a hotsy-totsy, yet topsy-turvy, time of rapid change in Long Beach.

It's money, murder, and madness in old timey Long Beach as our case goes to trial!  Join us for the final installment of this tale of greed, guns, drugs, ice cream, oil scams, Charlie Chaplin, and Ponzi schemes among the upper class in Long Beach's golden age!

Did a prominent Long Beach businessman get away with killing his wife and his business partner?  Probably!  Join us for a tale of greed, guns, drugs, ice cream, and con games as we deep-dive into a case of murder most foul among the elite business class in Long Beach's golden age!

In June 1956, just days after his infamous hip-thrusting performance on the Milton Berle Show, young rocker Elvis Presley came to Long Beach to play the Municipal Auditorium and a near-riot broke out.  What did Long Beach teens and grown-ups think of Elvis and this new dangerous thing called rock and roll? 

On July 12, 1922, two young women spent the day in a Long Beach speakeasy, drinking and commiserating about their unfaithful husbands.  That evening, on a remote road in Los Angeles, one of those women would beat a romantic rival to death with a hammer.  The brutal  murder case became one of Southern California's very first trials of the century, with the accused becoming the object of almost cult-like fascination in the public.  

On July 12, 1922, two young women spent the day in a Long Beach speakeasy, drinking and commiserating about their unfaithful husbands.  That evening, on a remote road in Los Angeles, one of those women would beat a romantic rival to death with a hammer.  The brutal  murder case became one of Southern California's very first trials of the century, with the accused becoming the object of almost cult-like fascination in the public.  

In 1976, a film crew for The Six Million Dollar Man was prepping for a shoot in the Laff-in-the-Dark fun house at the Pike in Long Beach when they discovered that a wax dummy hanging from a noose was actually the real human body of an embalmed gunslinger shot by a posse in 1911.  Wha?  Join us as we explore this amazing, truly strange story and how carnival lore and forensic science helped solve the case of mummy in the fun house.

1927’s Wrigley Ocean Marathon was an epic and brutal swimming race from the island of Catalina to the mainland of California, a feat never before recorded.  Many of the world’s most famous swimmers came to Long Beach to train and compete for the race’s $25,000 prize.  In this episode, we’ll look at how two virtually unknown swimmers—George Young of Canada and Myrtle Huddleston of Long Beach—battled severe exhaustion, fierce currents, frigid water, disorienting fog, and a barracuda attack to accomplish something a Los Angeles Times headline called the “Greatest Achievement in [the] History of Aquatics.”