“A Piteous Plaything of This City’s Gilded Bohemia”: The Death of Minnie Blough and Liquor License Reform in Los Angeles Restaurants, February 1906, Part One

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

A recent two-part post here, featuring a Thanksgiving Day 1905 program at the Del Monte Tavern, went into some of the history of the café, including its prior incarnation in the 19th century as the well-known eatery run by Jerry Illich, its acquisition and renaming in 1900 by Robert Gordan, the March 1903 purchase by John Koster and John J. Lonergan and its operation through 1905.

At that point, we ended the discussion, promising to return today with a new post exploring the “stark and sudden end” to the Del Monte, which came after the death of Minnie Blough on the 6th or 7th of February 1906 after an evening of carousing including a raucous round of revelry at the restaurant, situated at 219-221 W. Third St., and the determined and very public efforts of reformers, long opposed to the serving of alcoholic beverages at such establishments, to have the enterprise’s liquor license revoked and the place shuttered.

While the death of the 26-year old woman occurred in the late hours of 6 February (or perhaps very early the next day), it was not reported on in the Angel City press for over a week. The Los Angeles Times, a conservative paper with a particular penchant for sensationalizing all manner of vice, real or otherwise, ran a headline of “Dark Death Secret, Pretty Girl Victim” above a bordered statement that began with “with haste and secrecy a pretty Los Angeles waitress, Miss Minnie Blough, was hustled into her grave thousands of miles away yesterday.”

This sidebar continued that it was said she died after a blood vessel burst “during a Bohemian revel with a rich young tourist,” though this latter proved to be untrue, and that she was in an ambulance when her life ended. The remains were quickly and quietly sent eastward for burial and the expenses covered by “the young man,” who, it was said, “left town temporarily,” this also not the case. The paper then intoned that “Minnie Blough’s pretty face will be missed from the Bohemian cafes like the Del Monte and the Imperial, where the gilded youth gloated over her; but other victims pretty enough to help them forget her will likely be found.”

Further extending and extrapolating the drama, the Times went on,

Cruelly a piteous plaything of this city’s guilded [sic] Bohemia was carried home to her broken-hearted, deceived people yesterday—a corpse.

The expenses of her desolate funeral were paid by a tinseled tourist youth who has temporarily left his hotel “until it blows over.”

When he returns, it will be his mission in life to find some other café where there are waitresses as pretty as poor Minnie Blough, who spoiled his debauch . . . by inconsiderately dying in the middle of it.

Just this once, by accident, the soft plush curtains where the Del Monte and the Imperial hide their many secrets have slipped back to disclose the doom of working girls whose horrible fate is to be born beautiful.

To apologize for this unseemly jar in the gilded song, a frantic effort has been made to slip the girl secretly into her grave.

The pathos was further propounded with the paper proclaiming that “her deathbed was a careening couch in an ambulance” on the way to a hospital, but that the body was quickly taken to a funeral parlor hurried back to Michigan and “the cowardly young man . . . was distinctly annoyed; but he paid the bills.” Before the rush of the remains from town and at the funeral home, however, it was reported that a doctor, Thomas C. Myers, who was summoned “performed a hurried secret autopsy” and found that Minnie was pregnant and “this made her fall fatal.” It was added that her pregnancy was “in an abnormal way” and that Blough “would have died, anyhow, without this spectacular end.”

The account stated that it was believed that Minnie tried to jump off a table at the Del Monte when she was fatally injured and that, when the party left, “this sportive youth went with her, [and] they continued their debauch” wherever they ended up. Another woman with Minnie told a story of the young woman’s fall was from an earlier incident on Grand Avenue, not at the Del Monte, but this didn’t square with the autopsy

The Times reported that Blough had only migrated from Michigan a short time prior and “was employed at the Rookwood Café, Eighth and Olive streets. Moreover, the physician stated that the death was “entirely accidental, and that there was no criminal aspect to it,” while he demurred on identifying others present and that he was paid for his services. He added that Minnie succumbed just as the ambulance got to the Sisters’ Hospital, so he performed the autopsy at the mortuary and determined the cause of death being a ruptured blood vessel in the abdomen.

The coroner’s office had to record of any filed death certificate nor of a permit from the health department required before the body was sent back to Michigan. A reporter, meanwhile, was dispatched to the Rookwood to talk to Blough’s companion that evening with Nell Blouser asked questions as she served a meal to the journalist. Her comments were mainly about the last moments of her friend at her rooms at Grand and 8th Street and that, finding Minnie very ill, “we sent for an ambulance” to take her to the hospital, but she died before reaching it. Blouser then said it was a few days or a week before that Blough fell in a hole on Grand near her rooming house and that “it was that which caused her death” and that there was no fall at the Del Monte.

When the reporter went to the boarding house, the story was that she did fall on Grand, but that it happened “on her return from a trip downtown” including at the Del Monte. The landlord, however, was very tight-lipped, having promised Minnie’s sister Lillian, who resided and worked with her, the siblings having migrated together from Michigan (a brother lived in central California then), that she would not talk about the incident, though she said “the girl died innocent, and there is nothing more to say about it.”

Having gone into some of these reports of fact, such as they were, the Times returned to its moralizing for a conclusion, remarking that “pretty waitresses like Minnie Blough are objects o special pursuit in this city” and then delving deeply into the drama declaimed:

Slick-looking drinking places like the Del Monte and Imperial [which was adjacent] have sheltered many a story on a pretty waitress whose fate on the whole was worse than Minnie Blough’s—though not so sudden. And the sufferers are not all waitresses, either.

The stories that occasionally creep out, particularly from the Del Monte, are horrible. The Imperial gets a class whose intentions are about as bad, but who haven’t the necessary “long green,” the ruination of a girl being a somewhat expensive affair.

Some of the most fashionable courtesans of this city are graduates of café table flirtations.

Not quite as sensational, though under the heading of “Spirit Corpse to the North,” the Los Angeles Herald, also of the 15th, began its coverage with a quartet of queries about why Blough’s remains were so quickly sent away without any investigation by authorities, whether there was “some dark mystery” involved, why her death was not reported to the police and what the real cause of her demise was. It was noted that detectives were, for the past two days, investigating, but were not revealing anything to the press.

While reiterating most of the pertinent facts related by the Times, the Herald also erred in reporting that Minnie resided in Pennsylvania. It offered the statement from police officials that Blough jumped from a table to a chair and that she “accompanied a young man to another place” before she became very sick and then the facts related to her being taken to the hospital dying en route, conveyed to the Sutch parlors and then that “no time was lost in spiriting the body from this city to the home in the north of a man who was with her.” This last statement was also in error, as it was her brother who resided in the north and returned to Michigan with Lillian to deliver the body for the funeral. Otherwise, there was little more of substance in the report.

The Los Angeles Record of the same day ran its account with the headline of “Gave $500 Check To Hide Scandal” with the paper reporting that the payment “and a loose bunch of white flowers laid on a casket marked with the simple inscription on a card, “From Ed,” were the tributes offered by a Los Angeles man to have his name suppressed in the story of the wild dance to death of pretty Minnie Blough.” The money came from a local bank and was provided to Lillian and the flowers accompanied the remains back to Michigan.

The paper provided some detail that differed from that offered by its contemporaries, specifically stating that the Blough sisters and and Courser went to the Imperial at 8 p.m. on the 6th and then met two men. The account continued that “later they went to the Del Monte and engaged a private ‘dining’ room, ordering champagne” and

Minnie, flushed with wine, suddenly sprang to the table, and began whirling in a gay dance, knocking over the glasses half filled with wine, throwing out her arms in an abandon of mirth, while the men and women sang a popular “coon” [a tune in Black dialect] song.

Suddenly she screamed and crying, “My God, I’m dying,” fell in a limp heap on the table among the glasses and wine.

It was claimed that she was taken to the Hotel Caine at Olive and 2nd streets, where the doctor was summoned and it was decided to convey her in the ambulance, in which she succumbed. The proprietor of the hotel did not know Minnie was in her establishment. The Record also offered partial identifications of the gents, including “Frank,” who resided at the Hotel Venice on East 4th Street and was a recent arrival and the “Ed” who left the flowers and paid the funeral costs “is supposed to live in the University district” near the University of Southern California.

Dr. Myers’ death certificate apparently was located and “gives the cause of death as ‘ectopic gestation’ [in which a fertilized egg ended up outside the uterus, generally in the fallopian tubes]” and which “also means that the girl was doomed and that the incident of the midnight revel only hastened the end.” Koster and Lonergan insisted that the incident did not happen at the Del Monte and it was added that “they were given the [liquor] license on the Imperial on the day before the tragedy occurred.”

Moreover, Lonergan told the Record that “he has tried to discover some trace of the incident, but has failed to find that any of his employes [sic] knew of the midnight revel which ended in the dance of death for the girl.” Again, this account varies from those of the others in stating that there was no jump from the table and one wonders how the paper knew of her purported last remark and other details, if some reports did not provide these bits of information.

Finally, the Los Angeles Express, also of the 15th, used the header of “Lured To Death Is No Crime” and providing a lengthy quote from Police Chief Walter H. Auble:

I have wanted to go after these places (the Del Monte tavern and the Imperial cafe) for some time, and I believe they should be suppressed. It has been common knowledge for a long time that they were disreputable—in fact, they are awful . . . The Police can do nothing in this case. We have investigated and found that the girl’s death was accidental, although it followed a wild carousal at the Del Monte—a scene of drunkenness and hilarity that no respectable hotel would tolerate. But there is no way to get a hold on anybody in a criminal way. The only thing that can be done is to prevent future tragedies of this kind, save young girls from ruin and protect homes from disgrace and heartaches by revoking the licenses of such places.

George Mason, a member of the Police Commission headed by Mayor Owen McAleer, offered a statement noting that he’d voted against the issuance of a liquor license to the Del Monte and would encourage a thorough police investigation of the incident. The paper continued that the establishment “was given over to a celebration” that constituted “greater lavishness of liquor and carelessness as to who drank it, with less regard than ever as to the character of the patrons who called for private rooms in the so-called hotel section of the saloon and dining hall, without regard to law or order or reputation or common decency.”

The result, the paper went on, was “a pitiful tragedy which was concealed more than a week, while the body of a pretty, foolish, betrayed girl was secretly shipped from Los Angeles to her heart-broken parents in the East [Midwest].” In its relation of the facts as it knew them, the Express said that one of the unnamed men involved resided in the hotel portion of the Rookwood, where the Blough sisters worked. A “drinking bout” at the Imperial was followed by the move next door to the Del Monte to “continue their debauch without attracting attention by their noise, and that was so common at the Del Monte, the men told the girls, that it made no difference.”

It was continued that waiters were kept busy supplying drinks and that it was after midnight that “under the influence of the champagne the crowd sang in a maudlin way, and one of them suggested that Minnie Blough give an exhibition of dancing on the table.” Urged on, she climbed upon it and “they sang and clapped their hands while she danced—or tried to dance” in what was claimed to be “one of the wildest orgies in the history of a long series of disgraceful revels which have been reported to the police from time to time.”

Turning to the “dance of death,” the paper related that,

Minnie Blough, in her befogged state, did not know her danger. She became weak suddenly, as she danced, and fell from the table. She struck on a chair as she fell and cried out that she was seriously hurt.

The time of death here was specified as being just prior to 5 a.m. on the 7th and information as provided by other papers was large reproduced here, though it was added that Deputy District Attorney Edward J. Fleming “says that no information or evidence of [an] actual crime has been given . . . and that office can take no action,” while the coroner also could take no action because the body was already returned to Michigan.

To conclude, the Express remarked,

Meanwhile, the police commission is confronted by the question of allowing not only cases of this kind to occur at the Del Monte and Imperial, but the ruin of scores of young girls of good Los Angeles families, which the police say has been accomplished in the two resorts while the authorities have stood by with their hands tied with the cords of politics.

With more press pressure, however, there would be a change in the binds, which leads us to tomorrow’s second part of this post, so be sure to check back then.