Ralph: Now it's the Fifties, and here we are at Gilmore Stadium, where we can find... well, almost anything.
[Lively music playing] This wonderful old adobe is the last memento we have to a big, tall, husky tycoon named Earl Gilmore.
Gilmore owned 58 acres between Third and Beverly in Fairfax, and underneath those 58 acres was a big puddle of oil, and he used that oil to really make his mark on the city of Los Angeles.
Now, there really ought to be a bigger monument to this, to the guy who was behind Gilmore Field, Gilmore Stadium, Gilmore Bank, Gilmore Drive-In, Gilmore Gasoline, the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, to say nothing of the Farmers Market, which is still very much here.
[Music playing] Gilmore Stadium was not a perfect little football stadium.
It was primitive and not that successful.
But around the edge of the field ran an oval race track, and that's where Earl Gilmore struck oil again.
[Music playing] Danny: These midgets had just started then, and it was an exact copy of the Indianapolis engine, only it was half the size.
Boy, that was the greatest thing that ever hit racing.
But anyway, the first races I was in, I enjoyed driving so much that I never paid any attention to anything, and after the race was over, I just loaded up my car and went home, back to Santa Barbara, at first.
And after about the third or fourth race, the fella that paid the prize money said, "I wish you'd come by "after the race is over today, "because I have quite a bit "of money sitting there, "waiting for you.
"You're never here "to collect the money when the race is over."
And I said, "I didn't even know I was getting paid for this."
Barbara: Well, I remember being there at night and being very cold and being all dressed up in a gorgeous white outfit or a summer outfit while the boyfriend went around and around and mud splattered all over you, and I was just always annoyed, wondering when in the world we were gonna get out of this place and go down to the Palomar and dance, because that's what I thought we ought to do.
[Music playing] Ralph: Midget autos roared onto the quarter-mile oval in 1934 at the bottom of the Depression and provided enough spills and chills to stay alive until the postwar years, when the Offenhauser cars really went big-time.
[Music playing] Los Angeles had several Chinatowns but only one China City and only from 1938 to 1948.
It was supposed to be a sister street to Olvera Street, just cattycorner across the old plaza, and it was organized by the same civic-minded developer, Christine Sterling.
She wanted to pay tribute to the Chinese who built the railroads and a lot of Los Angeles with an Oriental showplace.
[Oriental music playing] There was a Chinese temple with burning incense, a rickshaw with driver, long gowns, pigtails, coolie hats, paper lanterns, tinkling Chinese music, chop suey, everything stereotypically Chinese, except a laundry.
Ruby: My dad was a very conservative man, was asked--and he did-- wear a Chinese costume.
I mean, my mother said, when she came over to America, that was the last Chinese dress she wanted to wear.
Because she had come to a new country, she felt she owed it to her host country to be like them.
This is the early immigrant.
For show purposes, everyone wore the little hats, you know, just to give as much atmosphere, and it was really the exoticism that attracted.
It was a tourist attraction.
Benjamin: They had rickshaws.
This was a great gimmick, because they had these young Chinese boys just dressed like they do in China, and they had the rickshaws and the hats and all that, and they would go throughout that whole block.
Ruby: It was all cobblestone.
So, you rickety-ricked all over China City.
You could have a picture taken for another 25 cents.
And I remember an older lady who was very good at selling gardenias.
She used to run around and say, "Gardenia leis!"
And she'd say it in such a fetching way that people would feel, "Oh, this little old lady "should have...you know, we should buy something from her" kind of a thing.
Ralph: After a number of fires, China City finally closed in 1948, and on this corner, China City is just a memory.
For about 30 years, Howard Hughes was Los Angeles' number-one eccentric, and he had some tough competition.
What will probably be his monument is a huge plywood boondoggle, the world's largest airplane with the ridiculous title of "Spruce Goose."
On November 2, 1947, in Long Beach Harbor, Hughes shoved the throttles full forward and got the flying lumberyard a few feet out of the water.
Then the plane went back into its cocoon, and Hughes went back into his.
After Hughes died in 1976, the "Goose" finally waddled out of hiding and squatted next to the Queen Mary, trying to be a tourist attraction.
It never really got off the ground there either, and it was disassembled and shipped to an aviation museum in Oregon.
But of all the things that aren't here anymore, Hughes' flying boat is probably the weirdest.
I mean, for one thing, the "Spruce Goose" was made of birch.
[Music finale plays] [Music playing] Woman: ♪ You, you, and you And you ought to be in pictures You're wonderful to see You ought to be in pictures Oh, what a hit you would be... ♪ Ralph: The rest of the world thinks Hollywood is Los Angeles, but you and I know that isn't true.
Hollywood is just another community here, the one that specializes in making movies and music and malarkey.
All the stars had to come from somewhere, and many people think they came from right here.
[Music playing] Woman: ♪ My star My star of stars ♪ Man: Schwab's was the kind of place where Frank Sinatra could come in and read "Daily Variety," and nobody would ask for an autograph.
This was a big place, and it had anything and everything.
But most of all, it was a meeting place.
Woman: Schwab's was a way of life.
I mean, people came for breakfast and stayed all day.
Ralph: Schwab's drugstore was known around the world as a place to be discovered, where everybody who wanted to be somebody had to be seen.
Maybe the real reason Schwab's became so famous is that one man wrote it all down.
Jack: Sid Skolsky.
Was that the man's name?
That...that was his office.
He made that place his office.
He wrote a big column, and everybody knew what was happening in the whole of L.A. from Sid Skolsky's column, which he wrote in Schwab's.
Woman: So, he made it his base of operations, and he started writing about it.
And then people would read about it, and when they came to California, they would rush to Schwab's.
Greg: My first trip out here, my dad took me to Schwab's, and I was so excited, because I thought Lana Turner would still be right there on that stool.
Ha ha ha!
And I miss it.
It wasn't anything special, but I'll tell you, thousands of girls in tight sweaters did sit there, hoping to get discovered.
Ralph: And in Hollywood, so many people wanted to be discovered that, in 1956, Schwab's Drugstore expanded eastward and added a coffee shop.
But, unfortunately, a sad day for many Angelenos came in 1983, when Schwab's Drugstore closed their doors.
Sondra: Harriet Nelson, she was so upset when it closed that when she would come in and drive by, if she had to go down Sunset Boulevard, she couldn't look at it.
She turned her face to the right.
She got so upset.
She said, you know, she always felt like Schwab's was Hollywood's corner.
Ralph: A lot of myths and legends came out of Schwab's, but the real legends lived across the street in an exotic old hotel called the Garden of Allah.
It was the former home of Alla Nazimova, one of the silent-film sirens who became an instant antique when talkies came in.
But she fought back, building a bunch of stucco cottages around her main mansion, and, voila, a hotel.
Now, if Schwab's was the hangout, the Garden of Allah was the hideaway for hanky-panky.
So, what happened?
Why did it disappear?
Well, the employed actors bought homes in Beverly Hills.
They didn't need hangouts and hideaways anymore.
Both Schwab's and the Garden of Allah were replaced by super shopping malls.
So, now the sun is going down, the stars are coming out, and it's time to have a ball.
But do you realize how few people have ever been to a real ball with ball gowns and corsages and tuxedos and patent leather?
And it wasn't just Saturday night.
Every night of the week, in ballrooms all over Los Angeles, young men could foxtrot together with their first love, step together, step.
They really were a way of life at night, but I'd hate to make a living trying to sell dance wax and corsages these days.
What really isn't here anymore is that high-spending brother-in-law of the ballroom, the nightclub.
A nightclub is really just a small, fancy ballroom with a restaurant to serve you food and a floor show to entertain you while you eat, and Los Angeles had the biggest, the best, the most famous, and the most expensive.
And the nightclub that was all of that and more was the Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel.
Jack: Now, as you entered the Cocoanut Grove, it really was a grove of coconuts, and not fake-looking coconut trees.
They were really good-looking.
Everything was done in magnificent taste, and then a big stairway down to the dance floor, boxes all along the side.
Up on the top, there were more boxes and then tables all around.
The Cocoanut Grove was not a big barn.
It was a gorgeous place.
You came in, parked your car, then came through a series of beautiful shops.
In fact, you could blindfold me, and I wouldn't know what town I was in, and you walk me through those shops, and I'd say, "I'm in the Ambassador."
[Big-band music playing] On the casino floor, which was directly across from the Cocoanut Grove, one of the places that was occupied by the Blue Book models of Hollywood.
Now, anybody that thought they had photographic qualities and things like that could enroll in this school.
And if there was anything good about you in connection with entertainment, this lady was able to bring it out.
[Big-band music playing] Ralph: On every Sunday afternoon, an amateur photographer grabbed his movie camera and came back with more than just pretty pictures.
Leo: One girl was particularly very cooperative.
She just wanted to do anything I said, like I was a big-time director.
Here I was a nobody.
And this was in 1942, and that girl was Norma Jean Dougherty.
A lot of people have claimed that they discovered Marilyn Monroe.
Well, in 1942, this is a frame enlargement of my movie.
And that's her at 16.
Ralph: But when the bathing beauties paraded offstage, the Cocoanut Grove would come alive with Freddy Martin or Gus Arnheim or Bing Crosby and The Rhythm Boys.
Jack: I sang in glee club in Hollywood High, and three of us got together and imitated The Rhythm Boys at the Cocoanut Grove, and the Cocoanut Grove, in those days, was the number-one place in the world at which to sing, and, of course, stars galore.
Ralph: And it just so happened that the place in the world in which to sing was holding auditions.
Jack: So, we went over and tried out with all the others, and my mother said, "Now, don't be disappointed if you don't get the job," because I'd never made more than $5.00 from my dad for mowing the lawn and things like that.
And I came back, and she said, "Now, I know how impressed "you are and discouraged probably you are about now."
I said, "No, no.
"We got the job.
"We start next Monday, "and I'm gonna make a hundred dollars a week."
In those days, a hundred dollars, wow.
I'm telling you, the night we opened at the Cocoanut Grove-- and we called ourselves The Three Ambassadors for the Ambassador Hotel.
The night we opened, it held about 800.
We had 1,600 kids from Hollywood High School that night.
I could do no wrong.
[Music playing] Emcee: Here is music by Martin.
Jack: People at the Cocoanut Grove didn't come to dance.
They came to sway.
You couldn't dance.
There were too many people on the floor.
[Music playing] This was a tremendously romantic time.
[Music playing] Emcee: Yes, ladies and gentlemen, here truly is music by Martin.
Freddy Martin, his singing saxophone and orchestra broadcasting from fashionable Cocoanut Grove in the world-famous Ambassador Hotel, located on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, California.
Jack: When you would come to the Grove, they would dance by the bandstand if Phil was there and say, "Phil, would you play 'Rose Room'?"
which would happen to be his theme.
That's our theme.
They loved it, you know.
I think the times dictated an awful lot of wonderful things.
People, uh... were a little different.
I'm gonna say they're far different than they are now.
Leo: I wish somebody would have tapped me on the shoulder and says, "Leo, these are the good old days."
And I would say, "Well, you're kidding, aren't you?"
[Music playing] Ralph: For decades, the Ambassador Hotel and the Cocoanut Grove were the signature way to live it up in Los Angeles.
The music played on and on until January 2, 1989, when they finally closed their doors, and the big-band music stopped.
Today, the Ambassador Hotel is still there, but it's an empty monument, reminding us of a glorious period of Los Angeles history.
Now we're back at the famous corner of Sunset and Vine, except you look around here today, you say, "What's so famous?"
Over there used to be Glen Wallich's Music City.
That was the social center of Hollywood and the national center of the music business.
And behind it was Tom Breneman's restaurant, a tourist landmark, site of a stone-age talk show called "Breakfast in Hollywood."
But it's what used to be right on this corner that made this corner famous.
This was the Los Angeles headquarters of the National Broadcasting Company, a big complex of radio studios that looked like the starship "Enterprise."
And all they produced was sound.
As Ed Murrow used to say, "I can hear it now."
Groucho: It's me, Groucho Marx.
[Applause] Man: Well, I know where my baton is.
It's right here in the hall.
Woman: Oh, no, McGee, please.
Not on Sunday.
Don't... Man: Bessie, what will we talk about?
Bessie: Well, we can only talk about five minutes.
That's all they want us to talk about.
Ralph: Well, they tore it all down.
The whole city block of NBC Radio disappeared in 1964 and with it, all of the magic...almost.
Actually, some of the machinery of that old magic factory is still here in the basement underneath Home Savings in the club room of the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters.
And you know, there are other treasure-troves like this all over Los Angeles.
People are saving little bits and pieces of the past for the future.
I know we've seen a lot of "Things That Aren't Here Anymore," but if you've still got your imagination and your memory, they'll always be with us.
Let's see if the thing still works.
[Speaking Spanish] Ralph Story here for KCET.
Good evening, Los Angeles.
[Big-band music playing]