LOS ANGELES HISTORY

Honoring the lost areas of Los Angeles

Heritage Square Museum in the Arroyo Seco tries to keep memories alive of what passes for historic L.A. — or is that an oxymoron?

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Hector Tobar

Los Angeles Times

May 7, 2009

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Imagine we could dismantle the skyscrapers on Bunker Hill and step back in time to the downtown Los Angeles that was.

In place of soaring glass and steel, we find the squat wood frames of Victorian mansions and humble clapboard apartments hugging old palm trees. Studebakers and Fords with bulbous bodies and chrome ornaments glide down the streets, guzzling gas.

Just about everyone smokes, including the down-on-his luck writer gazing out from his room at the Alta Loma Hotel. He daydreams about the novels he will write, and takes the Angel’s Flight to the bottom of the hill, where he frequents one of the city’s many cafeterias.

“Los Angeles, give me some of you!” John Fante writes in his 1939 novel “Ask the Dust.” “Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.”

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OBITUARY

‘Wizard of Oz’ Munchkin Town Crier dies at 89

Mickey Carroll was 20 when he acted in famed film, earned $125 a week

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ST. LOUIS – One of the last surviving Munchkins from the 1939 classic film “The Wizard of Oz” has died.

St. Louis actor Mickey Carroll died Thursday at the age of 89.

His caretaker, Linda Dodge, made the announcement Thursday.

Carroll was born Michael Finocchiaro in July 1919 in St. Louis, the son of Italian immigrants.

He was one of more than 100 adults and children who were recruited for “Oz” to play the natives of what author L. Frank Baum called Munchkin Country in his 1900 book “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

Carroll told The Associated Press in a 2007 interview that the Munchkins made only $125 a week while filming, followed by decades of recognition.

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