PHOTO BY: PAUL CALVERT / LOS ANGELES TIMES
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The Los Angeles Times' photography blog, Framework, http://goo.gl/ghwbWt recently splashed with a remarkable tale of two staffers trapped in an empty building for two long hours, 66 years ago, before helped finally arrived.
For one brief dreadful evening, two seasoned journalists must have felt they were destined for the morgue, not where newspaper clippings are meticulously kept mind you, but the real morgue, used for the storage of human corpses.
Such a fate appeared to have awaited Los Angeles Times staff photographer Bob Jakobsen and reporter Jack Geyer on a cool March day in downtown Los Angeles, back in 1948.
The two able Times' staffers had been assigned to cover new street lights on South Broadway. They decided to pop inside a building at 950 S. Broadway. They then proceeded to the roof to get their shots of the new dazzling street lights. But when they got off the roof and came down, they noticed the building was completely empty; but more alarming was that the door was locked shut with no escape in sight.
Jakobsen and Geyer frantically pounded on the door, hoping some concerned pedestrians would lend a helping hand and call for help.
But not even on a bustling southern California street, flooded with people, would anyone take the time to read a note the two L.A. staffers shoved under the door.
The note read: ``Call City Editor, Los Angeles Times. We’re trapped in this building and can’t get out. Signed Jack Geyer and Bob Jakobsen.”
Finally, at long last, a peach of a citizen, picked up the note and called the Times' city editor Smoke Hale to read them the plea for help. Hale immediately dispatched his “burglar crew,” Bob Will and Paul Calvert to the scene. After a great deal of commotion, locating the owner of the building, and calling police to the scene, the two staffers’ escaped through the building's fire escape.
This entertaining post by Framework is accompanied by photos by staff photographer Paul Calvert, along with a detailed account of the frenzied night in the March 1948 Times' newsletter.
-Bill Lucey
September 13, 2014
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