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While in my back yard helping my handyman with some work he was doing I heard a lot of cars blowing their horns right before the crash but when my air compressor came on little did I know that was the moment of impact. The driver of a white Ford van going north on the south bound side of Crenshaw Blvd. struck 2 cars with the Lincoln and it’s occupants receiving the brunt of the force from the collision. The couple that were in the Lincoln had to be freed from their vehicle with the Jaws of Life by the L.A.F.D. The crash which took place around 2:25p.m.Tuse. 9/30/15 at the intersection of 54th street & Crenshaw blvd in the Angeles Mesa area near Leimert Park of South L.A. The driver of the gray Cadillac was uninjured and the driver of the van and driver and passenger of the Lincoln are reported to be in critical condition per NBC News. The investigation was reported as still on going to determine why the van was traveling the wrong way.
While in my back yard helping my handyman with some work he was doing I heard a lot of cars blowing their horns right before the crash but when my air compressor came on little did I know that was the moment of impact. The driver of a white Ford van going north on the south bound side of Crenshaw Blvd. struck 2 cars with the Lincoln and it’s occupants receiving the brunt of the force from the collision. The couple that were in the Lincoln had to be freed from their vehicle with the Jaws of Life by the L.A.F.D. The crash which took place around 2:25p.m.Tuse. 9/30/15 at the intersection of 54th street & Crenshaw blvd in the Angeles Mesa area near Leimert Park of South L.A. The driver of the gray Cadillac was uninjured and the driver of the van and driver and passenger of the Lincoln are reported to be in critical condition per NBC News. The investigation was reported as still on going to determine why the van was traveling the wrong way.
Demolition after Implosion to weaken the structure for final tear down. If you gotta see your ponies race you still have Del Mar and Santa Anita race tracks to go see them run. Now that this demolition is taking place people are hopeful that we'll get a NFL team coming back to the L. A. area. Hmmm foot ball, golf, tennis, baseball.... sorry I rather watch grass grow, what we need is a drag strip, a motocross park, monster truck stadium a low rider park and show car arena all rolled into one.
Edmund Lincoln "Eddie" Anderson (1905 – 1977), aka Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, was a Black American comedian and actor.
Anderson got his start in show business In the early 1930s. In '37, he began his most famous role as Rochester van Jones, usually just "Rochester", as the valet of Jack Benny, on his radio show & later TV show The Jack Benny Program also appeared in in movies and other TV shows.
His home in the West Adams district of Los Angeles was one of the few places in L.A. where he could have a home built because even L. A. black entertainers were not welcome in white neighborhoods due to restrictive covenants. He called on Black American architect, Paul R. Williams to designed his new massive home that sat in an area surrounded by smaller, bungalow-style homes. He also had a pool so the neighbors and their kids could play and swim in the pool. The home is currently a Bed & Breakfast.
Destination Crenshaw
Crenshaw Center shops and anchor stores like Broadway Dept store, May Co., Woolworth and many retail stores opened in November 1947. Then in 1988 got a major remodel including a pedestrian walk way that connected the Broadway with the May Co. Dept. stores that crossed over Martin Luther King Blyd. (formerly Santa Barbara Blvd.)
Currently closed/ simi open new stores retail businesses on hold due to Covid-19.
Any comments on pass history, progress and updates welcome.
While in my back yard helping my handyman with some work he was doing I heard a lot of cars blowing their horns right before the crash but when my air compressor came on little did I know that was the moment of impact. The driver of a white Ford van going north on the south bound side of Crenshaw Blvd. struck 2 cars with the Lincoln and it’s occupants receiving the brunt of the force from the collision. The couple that were in the Lincoln had to be freed from their vehicle with the Jaws of Life by the L.A.F.D. The crash which took place around 2:25p.m.Tuse. 9/30/15 at the intersection of 54th street & Crenshaw blvd in the Angeles Mesa area near Leimert Park of South L.A. The driver of the gray Cadillac was uninjured and the driver of the van and driver and passenger of the Lincoln are reported to be in critical condition per NBC News. The investigation was reported as still on going to determine why the van was traveling the wrong way.
Street rod belongs to guy(Charlie Brown) associated with the tow company at scene of the accident to tow away the carnage.
The word is someone has a deathwish and shot at a patroling L. A. County Sheriff's car off of Crenshaw on some side street. Don't know the rest of the story. LAPD & L.A. Unified School Dist. Police gave back up.
Edmund Lincoln "Eddie" Anderson (1905 – 1977), aka Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, was a Black American comedian and actor.
Anderson got his start in show business In the early 1930s. In '37, he began his most famous role as Rochester van Jones, usually just "Rochester", as the valet of Jack Benny, on his radio show & later TV show The Jack Benny Program also appeared in in movies and other TV shows.
His home in the West Adams district of Los Angeles was one of the few places in L.A. where he could have a home built because even L. A. black entertainers were not welcome in white neighborhoods due to restrictive covenants. He called on Black American architect, Paul R. Williams to designed his new massive home that sat in an area surrounded by smaller, bungalow-style homes. He also had a pool so the neighbors and their kids could play and swim in the pool. The home is currently a Bed & Breakfast.
Burden had Metropolis II's cars specially manufactured in China to his custom specifications — unlike Metropolis I, which just used off-the-shelf Hot Wheels toys. "The original toy cars have very thin axles that wear out too fast," says Burden. Given that Metropolis II is supposed to run three days a week for the next 10 years, how will it avoid the "wearing out" problem? Burden's no-nonsense answer: "We made a lot of cars."
www.fastcodesign.com/1664409/how-chris-burden-created-met...
Edmund Lincoln "Eddie" Anderson (1905 – 1977), aka Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, was a Black American comedian and actor.
Anderson got his start in show business In the early 1930s. In '37, he began his most famous role as Rochester van Jones, usually just "Rochester", as the valet of Jack Benny, on his radio show & later TV show The Jack Benny Program also appeared in in movies and other TV shows.
His home in the West Adams district of Los Angeles was one of the few places in L.A. where he could have a home built because even L. A. black entertainers were not welcome in white neighborhoods due to restrictive covenants. He called on Black American architect, Paul R. Williams to designed his new massive home that sat in an area surrounded by smaller, bungalow-style homes. He also had a pool so the neighbors and their kids could play and swim in the pool. The home is currently a Bed & Breakfast.
"We want to be free... Free to ride our machines without being hassled by the man!" It started out with old classics and lowriders and Harleys converging on the bridge and a car show broke out. Then some knuckle head brought unnecessary attention to the whole thing by lighting a smoke canister / bomb. From the distance I guess it looked as if some one was doing a burn out. The L.A.P.D. comes and breaks up the show. But as the photos prove the SHOW still went on.... UNDER THE BRIDGE.
Wishing on a Star is a Eco-kinetic solar sculpture created by Charles Dickson out of his Compton art studio. He was my art teacher back in the day when I was a teen attending his classes in Watts and Compton. This beautiful work is made with many discarded items from engine and automotive suspension parts to rebar and computer and kitchen utensils and other scrap metal and glass.
Los Angeles Memorial Branch Library across the street from the ugliest High school on the planet- L. A. High
Well the show is over and everybody took off. Some went to cruise nite meet and greets others went on home or to grab late nite grub.
If I ever reach heaven I expect to find three wonders there first, to meet some I had not thought to see there second, to miss some I had expected to see there and third, the greatest wonder of all, to find myself there.
John Newton
The Fort MacArthur Museum is proud to present what has become one of our most popular signature events. The Great Los Angeles Air Raid of 1942 is the museums celebration of one of the most fascinating and controversial events in Los Angeles History. A night when literally thousands of people both Military and Civilian were convinced that Los Angeles was being attacked from the air, and even from space!!! What really happened that night is a debate that will probably go on for years, but for those of us it's a time to remember the feeling of those early days of the World War II.
While out and about racing up and down the streets of L.A. running my errands, I crossed paths with a movie set crew a couple of times on Angeles Vista Blvd in the View Park / Windsor Hills area while headed back to my domicile in the Diablo Mesa dark side of town. I popped off some photos and did a little of the- "get outta here you don't belong"- snooping around.
Two man hole covers, asphalt & concrete shower street, front yards and driveways with debris when an underground electrical vault exploded which seems to have been caused by a nitrogen leak. Fortunately no one was hurt and only the back window of a car got blown out.
Crown Bar and Grill, 1005 E Street, NW (Henry J. Blauvelt, 1906, demolished 1996 w/facade preserved) ca. 1988.
The crew gutting this building solved a 30 year old mystery in 1996:
Washington Post - January 5, 1997
DISCOVERY MAY END A 30-YEAR MYSTERY - BONES BELIEVED TO BE THOSE OF VANISHED SOLDIER
Ruben Castaneda, Washington Post Staff Writer
American cities were exploding in race riots. Lyndon B. Johnson was president, and the Vietnam War was escalating. The District's budget was so healthy that it was growing annually by millions of dollars. The date was Aug. 1, 1967. At Fort Myer, in Arlington, Pfc. Allen Lee Adams failed to report for duty. The Army declared Adams, 20, absent without leave, and he was never heard from again.
Nearly 30 years later, the question of Adams's whereabouts apparently was answered the week before Christmas. A work crew demolishing a vacant downtown building at 1005 E St . NW found a human leg bone and pelvis in a pair of jeans. Inside the pants pockets, police found dog tags and other Army identification belonging to Adams.
Homicide detectives and Adams's parents are all but certain that the young private was slain and that his body was placed in the now-demolished building. DNA testing will tell for sure whether the body is Adams's, authorities say.
One mystery solved, another opened: How did Adams die? If he was killed, who did it, and why?
The discovery brought a measure of closure to Adams's parents, Elizabeth and Darrel, who live in Hickory, N.C., but it also brought another layer of grief, piled on nearly 30 years of longing and heartache.
"It's been absolutely one nightmare that's never-ending," Elizabeth Adams said. "You go to bed each night and you think, Maybe I'm just dreaming.' And you wake up the next morning, and it's the same thing." For all those years, Elizabeth and Darrel Adams clung to the dwindling hope that Allen Lee, one of four children and their oldest son, would reenter their lives. To no avail, they tried to get the Army to look for their son, or, later to get the TV show "Unsolved Mysteries" to do a segment on him.
The building where the bones were found had been vacant since the late 1980s. Demolition workers were tearing it down to make way for an office building when they discovered the bones just after noon Dec. 18. At the time Adams disappeared, the building had the Crown Bar and Grill on the first floor and the Apex Billiard Parlor on the second. The third floor was vacant, and there was an attic above that, said homicide Lt. James Boteler, who is leading the investigation.
It is likely the body was on the third floor or in the attic until the demolition brought it down amid rubble, Boteler said. Police investigators summoned forensic anthropologists from the Smithsonian Institution to comb the rubble for more remains. The anthropologists were unable to find other evidence, and some of the rubble had been hauled off by the time they got to it. Although the cause of death has not been determined -- and may never be, forensically, given the dearth of physical evidence -- police are required to investigate all unexplained deaths.
Adams was last seen by family members in late July 1967, when he visited his parents in West Palm Beach, Fla., and other relatives in Indiana. Boteler theorized that Adams may have gone to the billiard parlor to shoot pool and gotten into a dispute there. Elizabeth and Darrel Adams said their son enjoyed playing pool.
People who owned and ran businesses in the neighborhood during the 1960s said that the Crown Bar and Grill was a popular lunch spot for federal workers and that patrons of the nearby National Theater went there for evening meals. "It was a neighborhood place. It wasn't a rough crowd," said Richard Danker, who owned a restaurant near the site where the remains were found. "It was like Cheers.' Everybody knew everybody."
It is that kind of neighborhood coziness that police hope will help them discover what happened to Adams. "We'd like to talk to anyone who owned, worked in or frequented the two businesses that were in the building" when Adams disappeared, Boteler said. Detectives also are awaiting Army records that may help them find people who were soldiers in Adams's engineering company.
Meanwhile, the Adams family is doing its best to cope. At Christmas, Allen Lee Adams's siblings -- Beverly Adams Peterson, 56, David Adams, 48, and Pamela Adams Rockwell, 36 -- gathered at their parents' home. They remembered their brother, how he doted on Pamela, then held each other and cried. He would have been 49.
At the time Adams was reported AWOL, the Vietnam War was wrenching the country apart, and many soldiers were deserting. A month after declaring Adams AWOL, the Army discharged him dishonorably. Through the decades, Elizabeth and Darrel Adams never wavered in their belief that their son was not a deserter. After all, he had reenlisted a couple of months before.
"I asked him once, What if you have to go to Vietnam?' " Darrel Adams said. "He said, That's part of the deal: If I have to go, I'll go.' He said he'd do his duty." Soon, they should find out whether the body in the building is their son's.
On Monday, a nurse will draw a blood sample from Elizabeth Adams. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology will conduct DNA tests, comparing the genetic material in the bones with that in Elizabeth Adams's blood. Results are expected within the month.
Elizabeth Adams has shifted from hoping her son returns to hoping the story of his death is revealed. She said she will petition the Army to clear his name if there is evidence he did not desert. "I hope and pray that somebody will remember something and help the police," she said. "I haven't known for 30 years, and I might never know."
Washington Post - May 22, 1999
BURIED IN THE PAST - After 30 Years, Elizabeth Adams Finally Knows Her Son's Fate. But His Life Remains A Mystery.
Frank Ahrens, Washington Post Staff Writer
It was Elizabeth Adams's 64th birthday, and Christmas was coming. On the cool afternoon of Dec. 18, 1996, she hung holiday decorations inside her red brick home in Hickory, N.C., and waited for her older daughter to swing by. They were going shopping, to buy Mom a birthday present.
Just as her daughter came in the front door, the phone rang. Adams picked up. Birthday wishes from a friend, she figured. No. It was the police calling, from Washington, D.C.
Mrs. Adams, they said. We found your son Allen's billfold and dog tags here, in the pockets of some bluejeans. We found them in the rubble of a building that's being torn down. And we found some bones. We're 99 percent sure they're your son's . . .
The policeman's words stopped making sense to Adams. She handed the phone to her daughter. Sat down. Began to cry. All she could think was: Thirty years. My son has been missing 30 years. Now they've found him. And they're telling me he's dead.
"I liked to went crazy," says Adams, now 66 and retired to South Florida with her husband, Darrel, 71. "I mostly remember crying for an awful long time. People asked me, 'Why are you crying so much? At least now you know.' I told them, 'Now I don't have any hope. As long as I didn't find him, I had hope.'"
On Aug. 1, 1967, Pfc. Allen Lee Adams, 20, went missing from Fort Myer in Arlington. A month later, the Army gave him a less-than-honorable discharge. For three decades, his mother had written hundreds of letters--including ones to each president--trying to find her son, the oldest of four children. Now, a bulldozer had given her the terrible answer.
Even after Allen Adams's remains were found--and received a military burial with honors--his mother kept up the fusillade of letters, now to police and prosecutors. One caught the attention of local prosecutors. A homicide detective is on the case. A grand jury has convened. Suspects have been identified. The case will be profiled on national TV tonight.
In the course of the investigation, Elizabeth Adams has learned some disturbing facts about her son. Things she didn't know--or didn't want to know. Maybe soon, she can find out the truth about her son. Wherever it may have been hidden.
The Scene of the Crime?
Detective Clarence Muse, a D.C. homicide investigator, is discussing what kind of man Allen Adams was. Typical 20-year-old, he says. Liked cars, interested in girls. Is there anything else?
"Just he had a bad temper when he got to drinking. He got into a couple of scraps [in the Army]. He happened to be drinking when got into problems a couple of times," Muse says.
In 1967, the nation was in turmoil over the Vietnam War. But Adams, a supply specialist, demonstrated no internal conflict about the war. He had left high school early to join the Army and had recently reenlisted. He'd already had a 16-month tour in Korea and told his father--a Navy man in World War II--that if he were ordered to Vietnam, he would go. Adams didn't seem like the deserting type.
On July 31, 1967, Adams left Fort Myer for downtown Washington. He ended up, police think, at the Apex Billiard Parlor at 1005 E St. NW, one floor above the popular Crown Bar and Grill. The building's third floor was empty.
That area of downtown had been a destination for soldiers and sailors since World War II. A Marine barracks was a few blocks away. There were restaurants, shops and peep shows. The Apex had its share of scuffles, police say, but it wasn't a rough joint. The Crown Bar and Grill catered mostly to a lunch crowd. There was a rotisserie in the front window.
Muse believes the soldier was playing pool and got into a fight that turned fatal. The killer, or killers, dragged him out of the pool hall and up the stairs to the vacant third floor, where they shoved his body into the ceiling or a wall. The Army declared Adams AWOL when he didn't return to the base that night. On Aug. 30, it "dropped him from the rolls . . . as a deserter," reads a letter to his mother.
In December 1996, a demolition crew was razing 1005 E St., which had been vacant since the late '80s. The work halted when someone spotted a grayed, flaking femur, wrapped in shredded jeans in the shovel of a bulldozer. Nearby was a pelvis. The other bones may have been lost among the chunks of concrete and plaster.
The pants were full of documentation--Adams's wallet, dog tags, a watch, money, papers--a promising guide for investigators, says Ken Kohl, the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to the case. "There are clues from the paperwork of the people he came in contact with and the things he was doing on the day he disappeared."
'The Smell of Rats'
But the contents of Allen Adams's pockets didn't answer a lot of questions. The cause of death, for instance, is tough to determine, given the lack of physical evidence. Equally perplexing is why no one noticed the body upstairs. After all, it was summer in Washington--what about the stench from a decomposing corpse?
"I don't have an explanation for that," says Muse, a 30-year police veteran, "knowing what I know about dead bodies." There were never any rumors about a body upstairs, report tenants of the time. But one did tell Kohl: Sometimes the building had "the smell of rats."
There's another key question: What about witnesses? That's where Kohl pins his hopes of ending this mystery. "Over the years, people make admissions," he says. "Friendships that may have kept witnesses silent no longer exist."
The grand jury has started to hear evidence. Kohl's office has subpoenaed Army records, and Muse has a list of about 35 people who knew or worked with Adams whom he hopes to interview. He has a couple of suspects. Both Kohl and Muse are confident it was a homicide.
"People don't die of natural causes and hide themselves in the walls of a building," Kohl says.
Not the Son She Knew
Perhaps more disturbing to Elizabeth Adams than the unanswered questions are the unanticipated answers. It revealed to the grieving mother that there was much about her son she did not know. She didn't know about his drinking. She didn't know about the fights. And she didn't know about the consequences of the two.
In a photograph of Allen Adams that his mother has, he is kneeling beside a row of tents in a khaki uniform. He is trim and confident-looking. On his left sleeve are two chevrons, designating the rank of corporal. But the Allen Adams that died in 1967 was a private first class.
"I think he had hit an officer or some such thing," says his mother. "I asked Detective Muse about it and that's what he told me he had found out. It wasn't too serious; they always take your stripes." So. Cpl. Adams was busted down to Pfc. Adams. For striking an officer. And his mother only found out three decades after his death.
"The kids are not going to come to me and say, 'I'm in trouble,' " Elizabeth Adams says. "But we didn't ever have any serious problems with the kids." But this seems unlike her son, Elizabeth Adams says. When he was a boy growing up in West Palm Beach, Fla., where the family lived at the time, Allen was into fishing, not fighting. Sure, he and his brother, David, tussled a bit, but no different from any other brothers. As a young man, he was good to his two younger sisters. He got good grades and never was sent to the principal's office.
"I was very, very, very strict with the kids," says Elizabeth Adams. "They knew that if they got in trouble in school, they'd be in more trouble when they got home."
One Burden Too Many
Every morning after Adams rises, she reads her Bible for consolation. It's not hard to see why. As the oldest of 12 children growing up in the hills of Kentucky, she "learned to cook as soon as she could see over the cookstove," says her younger daughter, Pamela Rockwell, who lives in Indiana. Adams had her first child when she was 14. As a wife in Florida, she helped her husband build their new house.
"I was hanging drywall when I was 13," laughs Rockwell. "She taught us how to do this. I could hang drywall and paint and lay carpet. I thought all mothers knew how to do this." But her oldest son's disappearance was one burden too many.
"The possibility that Allen was dead--that was never acceptable conversation in our house," says Beverly Peterson, Elizabeth Adams's older daughter. "It caused her such pain that she really could not speak about it. "You could see a gaping hole there. Just a pain," Peterson continues. Rockwell describes another scene of her mother failing to cope.
"She would get a long-distance call and it would be staticky and she couldn't tell who it was, but she knew it was him," Rockwell says. "She made it up in her mind that he was alive and either had amnesia or was somewhere where he couldn't get home." Maybe Allen had a parachuting accident that resulted in a broken leg; maybe he'd hit his head, too, the mother rationalized.
Kohl would like to solve this case, mostly for the sake of the mother. "We owe it to Mrs. Adams," Kohl says. "The Army said their son was a deserter and they experienced the shame of that, of being treated as the family of a deserter."
He began working on the case a couple of months ago, thanks in part to the efforts of WTOP radio reporter Paul Wagner. Wagner covered the discovery of Allen's remains, befriended Elizabeth Adams and, when she asked him for advice, suggested she write to the U.S. attorney's office. Why not, she figured. She'd written to everyone else.
The case landed on Kohl's desk. He contacted Wagner and told him: We need some national publicity because the homicide is 30 years old and the people who knew Adams are probably spread out all over the country.
So Wagner called "America's Most Wanted," the Fox TV show that seeks to hunt down criminals by telling the stories of their crimes, sometimes with re-creations. The show is popular with law enforcement officials, who see it as a way to cast a nationwide dragnet. The show bit on the Adams mystery. The episode is scheduled for 9 tonight.
In an April 1967 letter to his mother--three months before his disappearance--Adams writes of the beauty of Washington's cherry blossoms, a couple of civilian girls he was interested in and so on. Then, toward the end of the letter, he says:
"I haven't been in to [sic] much trouble lately. I decided to try and make something here because I've only got 18 months left in the Army before I'll be trying to make a living as a civilian and I've been in enough trouble to make it difficult without getting into any more. I should have stopped to think a few years ago I know but it's not to [sic] late I hope."
What did this mean? "We've been through that many times and I wonder what it means," Elizabeth Adams says, starting to cry again. "I thought it just meant he was ready to settle down and start getting serious. It never dawned on me that it might mean anything." She stops to cry some more. "I wish now I had asked him."
Photographer unidentified - Historic American Buildings Survey. 1988 color shot of this block.
New York Times - February 5, 1997
Long Missing and Misjudged, A Soldier is Buried
For 30 years Pfc. Allen L. Adams was branded a deserter, thought by the Army to be yet another soldier who had fled to avoid being sent to Vietnam. But six weeks ago, when workers in Washington, D.C., found human bones in the rubble of a building they were demolishing, that easy assumption was undone: the remains were those of Private Adams, and the authorities now believe that he disappeared in the summer of 1967 not because he had deserted, but because he had been killed.
This weekend, Private Adams was buried here with full military honors beneath a leafless willow in a section of a country cemetery known as the Garden of Peace. His parents, Darrel and Elizabeth Adams, who retired to Hickory five years ago, wept softly as seven soldiers raised M-16's in a salute and a bugler played taps.
''It was a 30-year nightmare that just never ended,'' said Mrs. Adams, 64. ''I always had kind of a hope in my heart, but I knew something terrible had happened to him. He was a good kid, and I miss him.''
Though the uncertainty is over, friends and family say many questions remain: Why was the body not discovered in all this time? Why did the Army not fully investigate Private Adams's disappearance? Why did the Army assume that he had deserted, especially since he had just re-enlisted?
The police in Washington, meanwhile, face their own puzzles as they investigate a homicide three decades old. The task is particularly daunting because records have been lost and investigators recovered only Private Adams's pelvic bone and one femur, encased in a pair of blue jeans. His dog tags and a wallet containing money were found in a pocket.
Private Adams was stationed at Fort Myer, in the Washington suburb of Arlington, Va., when he disappeared on July 31, 1967. His remains were found on Dec. 18 in the rubble of a long-abandoned pool hall that was being torn down to make way for a new sports arena. Investigators believe that he died shortly after disappearing from the base.
Positive identification was made in January by comparing DNA from the remains with blood taken from Mrs. Adams.
The case is like a trip back in time, to a decade dominated by an unpopular war.
Allen Lee Adams was the eldest of four children. He enlisted in 1965, nine months after dropping out of high school in Palm Beach, Fla.
He served at Fort Knox, Ky., and in Korea before being assigned to Fort Myer, where he was learning to work in a field that was just emerging: data processing. Three months before he disappeared, he wrote a letter to his family and told them about the amazing new computers he was working on.
''He enjoyed life, and he enjoyed challenge,'' said his sister Beverly Peterson, who was 9 when he disappeared.
His family assumes that Private Adams had been in the building where his remains were found to enjoy one of his pastimes, playing pool. The building, vacant since the 1980's, housed a pool hall and restaurant in 1967.
Investigators surmise that Private Adams's body was hidden in the attic. They are looking for leads in property tax records and have interviewed the property's owner at the time, but a fire has destroyed Army personnel records that would have helped them find soldiers who served with Mr. Adams.
The Adamses learned in August 1967 that their son, then 20 years old, was missing. Over the years, Army officials, still trying to track down a man they thought had deserted, visited the Adamses' West Palm Beach home to see if their son had shown up. Once, a soldier waited in line at the dress shop where Mrs. Adams worked. When his turn at the cash register came, he said: ''Where's Allen? I know you know where he is.''
The Adamses never believed that their son had shirked his duty, yet they wished that he would surprise them by coming home unannounced, just as he had done many times before when he had leave. The Army discharged him in 1983.
''What we did at the time was based on the best information available and the guidelines and rules we have,'' said Lieut. Col. Anda Strauss, of the Army Personnel Command in Northern Virginia. At that time, the country was absorbed in a passionate debate over the United States' increasing involvement in Vietnam. Many soldiers went absent without leave to avoid assignment there.
But Private Adams had not received orders to go overseas, and his father said his son had told him that he would go if he had to.
''He was a jolly sort who was connected to his family,'' Mrs. Peterson said. ''He even called my mother from Korea on Mother's Day. He didn't miss sending cards. He came home every Thanksgiving and Christmas. They thought he must be dead.''
Nevertheless, Mrs. Adams spent 30 years searching for her son's face in crowds and scouring letters received at her church from missionaries overseas for her son's handwriting. When she heard once that someone had picked up a confused soldier, she wondered: Could it be Allen?
When word came that Private Adams was in fact dead, Mrs. Adams cried for hours.
''There was no hope left,'' she said in an interview after the burial, crying again.
Sgt. 1st Class Andra Powell, who was part of the 14-member military honor guard here for Private Adams's funeral, said of the 30-year military mystery, ''I wish it hadn't started like it did.''
Sergeant Powell's unit from Fort Bragg was here to make sure that the chapter ended with dignity. The family will get the back pay owed to Private Adams -- the amount is not yet known -- and $10,000 from a life insurance policy, all with interest.
Sergeant Powell, 33, handed the American flag to Mr. and Mrs. Adams, who shuddered with silent sobs. He told them that it was presented on behalf of a grateful nation.
As the family turned to leave the grave, David Adams, born two years after Allen Adams and now gray-haired and retired from a job as a firefighter, stopped and tucked a piece of paper inside his brother's steel-gray coffin.
It was a letter he had scratched out in the solitude of his pickup truck in the days before the funeral. He wrote about the times he had shared with his brother, the times he had tagged along. He, too, served in the Army, he told his brother. Now he wished he had tagged along one last time, on that night in the pool hall.
David Adams concluded his letter by saying, ''The Army might have given up on you, but your family never did.''
a case of going too fast and this is the end result.... Traffic Collision; 12:24PM; 1354 W 46th St; goo.gl/maps/CfBdX88biPm; South Los Angeles; 2 car collision. 30M driver of one vehicle with extensive damage required physical extrication (25 mins) and transported in grave condition. 45M in 2nd vehicle transported in fair condition. All ? = LAPD Inc #1973 NFD; FS 46; Batt 13; South Bureau; Council District 9; E46 E215 T15 E34 RA257 RA246 RA866 HR56 RA33 EM13 BC13 ; CH4; 14; Margaret Stewart - See more at: www.lafd.org/alert/traffic-collision-02222016#sthash.EwFf...