In the police pressroom, reporters had a roaring good time

In the Roaring Twenties, trolley riders stopped in traffic on 1st Street could view a giant poster of a Follies dancer through an open window of the old Los Angeles Police Department headquarters.

The poster was headlined “50 CUDDLING CUTIES NOW!”

This startling notice was put up not by cops, but by mischievous newsmen who inhabited the building’s pressroom.

What the trolley riders couldn’t see in the pressroom were the card games and the occasional drinking of confiscated bootleg whiskey that was contributed by friendly officers.

“We drank the evidence,” the late Times reporter Carl Greenberg wrote years later.

The police pressroom has long been regarded, with justification, as a happy-go-lucky outpost of uninhibited characters free from the gaze of suspicious editors.

But fast-forward to 2009 and not a card table can be found in the press digs of the new LAPD headquarters across from City Hall. It wouldn’t fit. The room is about the size of a large kitchen.

Besides, if swing-shift reporter Lionel Rolfe of City News Service wanted to play cards, it would have to be solitaire.

Owing to cutbacks in news staffs throughout the industry, CNS is the only full-time occupant of the pressroom -- and it keeps only one person there at a time. “It’s a bit ghostly,” Rolfe admitted.

“The parties were before my time,” said Tynesha Daniels, another CNS staffer.

The news outlet’s police reporters, who each write anywhere from 10 to 20 local news stories per shift for CNS’ media clients, rarely go out on assignment.

Such was not the case in the early days of the police beat.

The late reporter Spud Corliss recalled that when the cops were summoned in the 1920s, “the police reporter used to strap on a gun, jump into a hotshot car with the detectives and, with the siren screaming, ride to the scene.”

Standard equipment for the newshounds included honorary police badges and handcuffs -- tools that enabled them to mislead the public into assuming they were cops.

The reporters, whose job was to phone in facts to a rewrite man back in their paper’s City Room, played hard, but they worked hard, too. Once, after 24 straight hours on a story, Rocky Rochlin of the Examiner was too tired to drive home.

So, the story goes, he lay down inside an ambulance from a nearby hospital. When the ambulance later sped to the scene of a murder (unaware of its cargo), Rochlin awoke and scooped his counterparts.

In the 1930s, when the police shifted some executive offices to City Hall, the pressroom followed along -- to the basement.

In his novel “Barker Bites Back,” veteran newsman Jack Jones drew on his experiences when describing the ambiance of the room in the 1950s.

The furnishings included a “half-dozen scarred desks” and a couch whose legs were long gone, “leaving anyone sitting there with a vague sense of imbalance,” Jones wrote.

Because everyone drank, “this was no cause for alarm,” he added.

Possibly the couch had been acquired because ambulance space wasn’t always available.

The basement doubled as a home away from home for misbehaving reporters who had been kicked out of the house by angry wives.

And there was a card table.

One night, a Mirror reporter was in a hurry to phone his newspaper about a store robbery so he could join the nightly poker game, but he realized he had forgotten to ask the store manager his age.

“All store managers are 42,” another player, the Herald Express’ Stanley Bruce, said, relieving the Mirror man of the necessity of calling the market again.

The gambling alarmed Police Chief William H. Parker when he learned that one reporter owed another $16,000. The chief was assured it wasn’t a serious matter. The losing reporter had merely lost several double-or-nothing games of dominoes and sooner or later would win one to erase his debt.

In 1955, when the Parker Center headquarters opened on Los Angeles Street, the pressroom moved into first-floor offices.

The late Examiner reporter Sid Smith recalled one mysterious colleague on the night shift who would spend hours gazing at the stars through his telescope.

It turned out the stars weren’t his only interest. He was also gazing at a prostitute who kept her shades up in a nearby hotel.

The pressroom in Parker was always buzzing with visitors. Ex-Timesian Tom Paegel remembered that in the late 1960s “an old sergeant kept his flask there. He’d get into the poker games, too.”

That pressroom, by the way, was named in honor of the late Norman “Jake” Jacoby, who worked as a reporter for 56 years. CNS plans to ask the LAPD to grant the current pressroom the same name.

Also in limbo is an unofficial shrine to the late Nieson Himmel, a longtime cop reporter for The Times.

Himmel’s files, Rolodex, reading glasses and an old Western Electric telephone operator’s headset are still in now-abandoned Parker along with a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey “with about a shot left in it,” according to CNS. No word yet on whether Himmel’s memorabilia will be put on display.

One thing’s for sure: There’ll be no telescope in the new pressroom. It doesn’t have windows.

steveharvey9@gmail.com