January 25, 1947
Albuquerque, N.M.
Actor Dean Jagger, 42, proposed to his lady friend Gloria Joan Ling, 24, a Fortune mag staffer. She said yes.
Oh, joyful day! But when the Santa Monica registry office refused to issue a marriage license due to the bride's Chinese heritage, the couple had to roam as far east as Albuquerque, where a call from director King Vidor succeeded in urging clerk May Cleghorn to stay open late to issue the Jagger-Ling license. A handy justice of the peace performed the ceremony in the lobby of the Bernalillo County Clerk's office, and the happy kids were free to return to Tinseltown, married in the eyes of God and Albuquerque, but outsiders in their home.
See Dean Jagger and Robert Mitchum in 1947's Pursued.
1 comment:
He said he didn’t do it. He said he didn’t lure the little girl into his garage on her way home from school. But he was convicted of molesting her.
He kept insisting he was innocent, saying that except for a few minutes when he left to get a haircut, he was at the doctor’s office with his wife, Marie, as their 8-month-old son got a checkup. The doctor’s nurse signed an affidavit supporting his story.
Finally, Harold Cole, a wounded war veteran living in Highland Park, found a commercial photographer who was taking pictures of the garage when the crime occurred.
John A. Russell, an astronomy professor at USC, examined the shadows in the picture. Russell determined that the photographs, showing that the garage was padlocked, were taken at 2:47 p.m. on Sept. 26, 1946. Deputy Dist. Atty. W.O. Russell requested that the charges be dropped after the mother girl’s mother asked that he not be retried.
The Times apparently didn’t report the original offense or the trial, so there isn’t much more to go on. And Cole apparently stayed out of the news afterward. There’s more of a story here, but we won’t know what it is.
Quote of the day: “The U.S. Immigration Service is not supposed to be cultured.”
Chinese Consul General T.K. Chang, explaining discourteous treatment of two prominent young Chinese women.
www.lmharnisch.com
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