Photograph courtesy of Bill Wulf

With a stretch of the imagination, Lexington Reservoir could have been the setting for the drowning scene in 'An American Tragedy.'

Picture from the Past

Sob sisters played a role in a corrupt court system

By John S. Baggerly

Back in the 1930s, Dave Hibbs and this writer accompanied Dave's father, Dr. David Hibbs, to the prize fights in San Jose. The senior Hibbs took these occasions to wise up two sheltered teenagers.

On one occasion, Doc Hibbs told of An American Tragedy , Theodore Dreiser's tale of Clyde Griffiths, the son of an itinerant street preacher, whose burning ambition for wealth and special prestige brings him nothing but tragedy.

A job in a factory owned by his wealthy uncle gives Griffiths an opportunity to further his ambitions, but the job makes little difference in his life. He is not accepted socially by his uncle's friends. He eases his loneliness by becoming the lover of Roberta Alden, a young country girl who works in his department.

His circumstances improve when Sondra Finchley, wealthy and beautiful, takes him up and brings him into her circle of the rich. Success is within his grasp until Roberta tells him that she is expecting his child.

His murderous plan is to take Roberta on a seemingly romantic boat ride on a secluded lake and drown her. He doesn't have the courage to carry it out--but the boat accidentally tips over and he lets her drown. (If An American Tragedy had happened in Los Gatos instead of Vermont, Griffiths would have drowned his pregnant girlfriend in our own Lexington Reservoir!)

His father visits him as he waits to be executed for murder, and a "sob sister" attends the meeting of father and son. She quotes the father as saying, "My son, my son, I know you could not have done this horrible deed."

Sob sisters came onto the American newspaper scene early in this century; their job was to evoke sympathy for even the most heinous criminals by ignoring the truth and fabricating it if necessary.

In contrast to sob sisters was newspaper reporter Adela Rogers St. John, the daughter of a prominent Los Angeles trial lawyer. Her father saved property baron Col. Griffith J. Griffith from charges of shooting his wife while she begged for her life. At trial's end, Griffith, who donated land to Los Angeles in 1894 for Griffith Park, offered Rogers several pieces of downtown property. Rogers insisted on his $50,000 fee in cash and it was paid, to the delight of the alcoholic beverage business, as he was a known boozer. There was much bribing of jurors in those days. Bill Fallon, New York's famous defense attorney, was arrested for offering a juror a bribe in a New Jersey roadhouse.

The credibility of women reporters was enhanced when St. John was hired by publisher William Randolph Hearst and sent from Los Angeles eastward to cover the 1932 Bruno Hauptmann trial for kidnap-murder of the first son of Charles Lindbergh and wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

Note: The names of the players in the late George Vlamis' baseball team in the Sept. 1 "Picture from the Past" were supplied by Los Gatan Steve Lepurin, brother of Mina Lepurin Fowler, also of Los Gatos.

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