German Club Renewed Honor for War Hero

Editor’s note: World War II hero Rodger Young gave his life to save his platoon in 1943. Last week’s column featured a veterans housing project that was named for him -- which, in turn, inspired another honor.

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From the day it opened on Jan. 30, 1926, as the social and athletic center for a German American club, the auditorium that would later be named for World War II hero Rodger Young was one of the biggest gathering places in Los Angeles.

It stood on “Mortuary Row” in the West Adams District, brimming with life. Judy Garland, Rudy Vallee and Dinah Shore sang there. Comic Jimmy Durante broke a piano there. Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and John Kennedy spoke there. The Los Angeles Rams ate and napped there.

And, in 1946, its owner renamed it for the man who had given his life to save his platoon from Japanese machine gunners in the Pacific Theater -- in the process, reaffirming German Americans’ patriotism and his own gratitude that his sons had come home from the war.

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The club dates from 1859, when German immigrant George Lehman opened the city’s first beer garden, the Garden of Paradise, on one-third of the block bounded by Main, Spring, 3rd and 4th streets.

Awash in music, beer and high spirits, the outdoor biergarten became a popular gathering spot for L.A.’s social events and, particularly, the city’s German Teutonia Singing Society. In the daytime, it doubled as a German-language school.

But by night, it soon became a hotbed for trail-hardened, beer-drinking Southerners, some of whom settled disputes with knives and guns, and most of whom favored secession from the Union.

The German immigrants, who wanted to make clear their loyalty to the nation, responded by erecting their own “Liberty Pole,” a red-and-white-striped symbol of patriotism dating to revolutionary times.

In 1871, 12 Germans merged the Turnverein and Teutonia-Concordia clubs into the Turnverein Germania. They wanted to escape the gunslinger trouble perpetually brewing at the biergarten, so they set up their own hall at 231 S. Spring St. It became a center for gymnasts, singers, actors, fencers, marksmen and costume balls.

In 1900, as L.A.’s German population passed 4,000, making it the largest community of European-born immigrants in the city, the organization grew and built halls throughout downtown.

In the 1920s, when Southern California’s major indoor sports facilities like the Shrine and Olympic auditoriums were going up, the Turnverein Germania’s 1,800 members bought land on Washington Boulevard between Oak and Toberman streets. They built a two-story clubhouse, designed by architect John Krempel, that cost more than $200,000. It was complete with ground-level shops, a second-floor gymnasium and showers, a banquet room and other meeting rooms. Many of the gym members would later represent America in the Olympics.

Within a decade, more than 20 mortuaries opened up between Figueroa and Union streets, giving the area its name.

In 1933, the year Prohibition ended, spirited German voices pierced the nighttime quiet of the neighborhood with beer drinking and yodeling contests.

But the club overextended itself during the Depression and forfeited the property in 1940.

Club membership steadily declined during the war, despite a name change in 1943 to the Los Angeles Turners. Although many members served in the U.S. military, a few returned to fight for Germany, giving the group a bad name and often helping to confuse it with the pro-Nazi German American Bund. Anti-German sentiment persisted after the war, but the group held together and opened two more clubhouses, including a popular restaurant, Turner Inn Hofbrau, at 645 W. 15th St., before moving to its final location at Wilshire Boulevard and Highland Avenue.

In 1945, restaurateur Kalman Loeb Sr. bought the handsome two-story brick landmark on Washington for the bargain price of $150,000, which included a miniature golf course next door.

Loeb, a Budapest-born Jew who had arrived in Los Angeles in 1922, had founded La Cienega’s Restaurant Row in the 1930s, according to his son, Rodney Loeb, a Los Angeles attorney.

The elder Loeb also opened the Wilshire Bowl nightclub at Wilshire Boulevard and Masselin Avenue in 1933. There, guests danced to the sound of bandleader Sterling Young. The Jack Benny radio show occasionally broadcast live from there.

At his new property, Loeb found what looked like rifle racks left behind by the Turners, which encouraged the rumor that it had been a Nazi Bund hangout. In fact, the racks were for exercise bars and fencing swords, according to Hans Mueller, a Turner member. But Loeb wanted to erase the Nazi taint.

The following year, he attended the opening ceremony of Rodger Young Village, a veterans housing project named for the war hero, and happened to sit next to Young’s mother.

Rodger Young, 25, had been in the Solomon Islands in 1943 when he and his platoon came under intense fire from a Japanese machine gun nest. Ignoring two wounds and an order to retreat, Young approached the machine gunners and tossed in a grenade, killing them. But their final shots killed him too.

“Listening to the stories of her son’s heroics brought tears to my father’s eyes,” said Rodney Loeb, the youngest of Loeb’s three sons. “He then turned to her and asked her permission to name his auditorium after her son. Dedicating his building, with the blessing of Young’s mother, was the epitome of everything he, as a patriot, felt toward his country.”

“It was also a reflection of my father’s happiness -- when my brother, Roger, and I returned safely from the war -- and my father’s sincere Americanism,” said Kalman Loeb Jr.

Loeb’s restaurant and banquet business flourished, featuring big-name entertainers and serving almost a million meals a year. The stores fronting on Washington were closed to make more room for his operation. Because the streetcar running along Washington drowned out the mandatory after-dinner speeches, the tall arched upstairs glass windows were eliminated. By the 1950s, the miniature golf course had become a parking lot.

But for years, Loeb Sr. used his smarts and chutzpah to keep the auditorium running, offering free second helpings to banquet guests. The center also sported what might have been the city’s longest bar, about 60 feet long, crammed with 50 stools.

Chef Jacob Barsic’s prime rib and Saturday smorgasbord were customer favorites.

The convenient location and ample free parking, along with the food, are what kept customers coming back. Of course, it might also have been the history lesson: The left side of the menu featured the story and picture of Rodger Young; the right, Loeb’s photograph and personal history. Chef’s specialties were printed in the middle.

Loeb Sr. died of a heart attack in 1964, at age 76. But well before then, Kal Loeb Jr. was busy running the auditorium and its staff of almost 300.

The L.A. Rams football team held pregame lunches there. “We always served them filet mignon, dry toast and tea before supplying them with cots for their pregame naps,” said Kal Loeb, smiling at the memory.

But history and heroics couldn’t protect the center forever. As gang influence in the area increased, large banquets and dances dwindled.

Kal Loeb sold the building for about $700,000 in 1978. (Later, it was demolished to make way for a warehouse.) He auctioned off everything, including 1925 stained-glass windows, ashtrays and silverware for 3,000.

He kept nothing for himself, he said, except “money and lots of memories.”