Death in Hollywood

On Wednesday, March 17, 1954—St. Patrick’s Day—my father, 16 at the time, was driving to the Hollywood Athletic Club (HAC) to do some ice skating. He was headed west in the left lane on Sunset Boulevard, which is two lanes in each direction, and directly across from the Athletic Club. There were two cars in the right lane, slightly ahead of him, which had stopped to let a woman cross the street in the middle of the block. My father, not heeding the fact that the cars ahead had stopped, kept going and, as he came parallel to the first car on the right, the woman stepped into his path and he hit her hard enough that she died almost instantly.

The 59-year-old-woman woman, Bertha C. Smith was pronounced dead on arrival at Hollywood Receiving Hospital and my father was booked on manslaughter charges. Later that day he was released to his mother’s custody. The manslaughter charges were eventually dropped, but his driver’s license was suspended for a year and civil charges of negligent homicide were brought by the family of the victim.

My father’s only recollection of the trial, besides the decision that his parents were not financially liable for the death of the woman because she had not crossed at the crosswalk, was of the woman’s two sons, in their thirties, who glared at him throughout the trial.

Two ironic notes are that my father’s own paternal grandmother was named Bertha and that my father would not, himself, live to the age of 59.

My father was in the last half of his senior year at Hollywood High and my father says no more about it in his autobiography other than the fact that he was inconvenienced by losing his driver’s license for a year.

It was on the way to HAC one day, March 17th, 1954, that I got involved in an accident in which I killed an elderly pedestrian. Which, though she had made some negligent contribution, cost me my driver’s license for one year. It also took the wind out of my senior year of high school.

My lack of wheels forced me to concentrate on my writing skills—particularly my editorship of an amateur science fiction magazine, Abstract, a fanzine, as they are called. This brought me closer to a group of similarly minded young men. Charley Wilgus was my closest friend, followed by Don Donnell, Jimmy Clemons and Burt Satz. Don was the most creative and, at 16, already a good writer; Burt, who was universally picked on by the rest, was the best read (Hemingway, Joyce, and a host of others). Clemons introduced me to the world of Science Fiction and the L. A. Science Fiction Society—whose meetings were attended by E. E. “Doc” Smith, Ray Bradbury, and the agent Forry Ackerman. Possibly because of its controversial—read argumentative—editorials, its excellent mimeographed and often salacious art, Abstract became quite popular in the world of science fiction fandom. The high point of my early career was my bus trip to San Francisco to meet various pen pals: Gilbert Minicucci, Terry Carr, Bob Stewart, and Pete Graham. It took something for my mother to permit her 15-year-old son to go up by bus to San Francisco from L.A. to attend a Sci Fi convention on his own for a week!