Fixation On Youth Brings Death

Lonely Acres, known as People’s Park until about 1933, was located west of Renton, about ten miles southeast of downtown Seattle, Washington. From as early as 1916, groups held many congenial gatherings and celebrations there. But the venue was also the site of a 1937 tragedy that became a notorious part of local history. By then, facilities included a tavern with attached living area, and a pavilion suitable for band concerts and dances. The surrounding park had enough room for a baseball field (or a Bocce layout).

The first use of the “People’s Park” designation appeared in the summer of 1920. Users of the park comprised an eclectic mix. One week might see a trade union gathering, the next a picnic for business owners. Various African-American groups had outings in the park, but so did the Ku Klux Klan. Perhaps the most frequent users were associations of different ethnic groups: Swedes, Irish, Swiss, a Slavic consortium, and more. One on the most common of these, especially after about 1928, were the Italians.

Fred Anrooney.

The Lonely Acres tavern was acquired by Italian-born Fred Anrooney in 1934 or 1935. Born around 1882, Anrooney came to the United States when he was about ten years old. That family name cannot be traced to any common Italian surname, so it could be some sort of Americanization. By 1905, he was married and had found work as a musician, playing the cornet.

In 1914, he relocated the family – the couple had two children – to Santa Barbara, California. Fred became known as a fine band leader, playing at a wide variety of events. Around 1919, they moved to Washington state. There, Anrooney opened a music store, first in Seattle and later in Renton. He continued to operate a store until about the time he bought the tavern. This was also most likely when he began to lose his hearing. In February of 1937, Fred hired a new waitress, Marlene Collier, née Wilda Rae Townsend.

Wilda Townsend was born in 1914 in Seattle. Her father owned and operated a grocery store. In 1930, when she was just 16 years old, she married a young man – he was 21 – who drove a grocery delivery truck. But the couple divorced in March 1932. Wilda went back to her maiden name and found work as an elevator operator. She also began favoring the name “Marlene,” quite likely in homage to superstar Marlene Dietrich, who exploded onto American movie screens in 1930-1932.

Wilda Marlene married again in April 1933. Her new husband, 23 years old, drove a delivery truck for a heating oil company. But the marriage only lasted a year or so, and Wilma went back to her job as an elevator operator. She married for a third time in January 1936, to seaman David J. Collier. However, the couple separated after a year. Then, as noted above, she went to work as a waitress at Anrooney’s place. Although not yet divorced, in March she also began dating Russell Ringer, a 23-year-old truck driver.

In July of 1937, Anrooney began to receive threatening phone calls from an unknown man. Thus, around the middle of the month, he purchased a sawed-off  36-gauge shotgun (a European size similar to the U.S. 410 gauge). However, he was not sure he would be able to hear someone breaking in. Thus, he had Marlene keep the weapon at night

On August 1, 1937, Marlene and Fred closed the tavern about 1:30 a.m. Because the business kept such late hours, Marlene had her own room in the back part of the building. She later testified that she locked her door that night, although she did not explain why. But earlier in her employment, Anrooney had made suggestive comments to her, forcing her to “put him in his place.” Marlene went to bed and fell asleep right away. Fred also went to bed, but at some point he got up and apparently had a few drinks.

After an hour or so of sleep, the noise of Anrooney forcing her door awoke Marlene. He flipped on the lights and started toward her, despite her demand that he get out of her room. So she grabbed the shotgun and fired past him into a piano. Muttering about “damn women,” Anrooney left, but she thought she heard him pouring another drink.

Some minutes later, he re-entered her room, displaying “a wild look in his eyes.” When he started toward her again, Marlene fired another shot. She aimed closer this time, but still meant it only as a warning. It’s at least plausible that she didn’t realize how wide pellets from a sawed-off shotgun would spread. Hit in the upper chest near his right shoulder, Fred staggered out and down the hall, crying, “Help! Help!”

Marlene heard nothing for a few minutes, and finally went to see if her boss was okay. She found him seated behind the bar, but when she touched him, he toppled over, dead. She called the police and then her parents to tell them the terrible news.

News reports did not explain why officials thought that Marlene’s latest boyfriend might have had something to do with the shooting. Still, the prosecutor’s office contracted with private criminologist Luke S. May to investigate further. May’s log entry specifically mentioned that the case would require the use of the polygraph (lie detector). May tested Russ Ringer about a week after the shooting. The young man denied any involvement and passed easily.

Marlene (Townsend) Collier.

Marlene said she was also willing to take the test. However, the prosecutor said “no,” because he had already issued a second-degree murder indictment against her. She plead self-defense, based on her fear that Anrooney had been unhinged by passion and liquor. Her bail was set fairly low, which was fortunate since a series of delays pushed the trial out to May 1938.

Assessment of the pellet patterns showed that both shots had been fired from a low angle. That agreed with Marlene’s statement that she had been seated on her bed. But prosecutors made their case on the fact that Anrooney had not been hit directly in the chest. That, they asserted, should have been the case if the victim had been advancing on Marlene. The defense countered that he probably tried to dodge at the last second when Marlene lifted the shotgun to fire.

But the heart of the defense turned on Anrooney’s behavior. In 1925, at age 43, he had clung to youth by marrying a woman 22 years his junior (his first wife had died five years earlier). A decade later, hearing loss was a cruel reminder that he was no longer a young man. He responded by again seeking youth around him. The operator of a Seattle employment agency testified that he specifically sought “young, pretty, and inexperienced girls” to work at the tavern.

Then Anrooney tended to take, in the somewhat quaint words of the day, “unwarranted liberties” with them. One young woman got so uncomfortable during the interview, she refused to take the job. Several others quit after just two or three days. The agent’s account was bolstered by testimony from several former waitresses. Still, Anrooney managed to hide his behavior from family and friends, who testified on his behalf. In the end, the jury took less than an hour and a half to return a “not guilty” verdict.

A few month later, Marlene divorced her husband and again took back her maiden name, now expressed as Wilda Marlene Townsend. After that, she moved to Portland, Oregon, to work in a hotel there. Some time later, she married yet again, to U.S. Navy sailor Louis G. Sauer.  They were living in San Diego when she had a daughter in September 1948. She passed away in 1986 in Bremerton, Washington.
                                                                                

References: “[Anrooney-Collier/Townsend News],” Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Seattle Times, Seattle Star, Washington; Santa Barbara Daily News, California (July 1916 – June 1942).

“Anyone Remember People’s Park?” Quarterly of the Renton Historical Society & Museum, Renton, Washington (June 2018).

Steven Bach, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (2011).

Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite, Encyclopædia Britannica, Chicago, Illinois (2012).

Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969).

Photo credits: Fred Anrooney, Marlene Collier. Both from Seattle Times, Washington (August 2, 1937).

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Friendly Fire, Delayed Death

The three Prohibition agents walked carefully along the sidewalk in Cosmopolis, Washington, a village located a few miles east of Grays Harbor bay. Showers had drifted in all day from the coast, wetting the pavement and making for a dark evening. The date was September 20, 1923, and the Volstead Act had been in effect for well over three years. William “Bill” Whitney led the team. Whitney was Assistant Prohibition Director for the state of Washington. Very much a “hands-on” boss, Whitney often handled liquor raids himself. One of the other agents was Harold Mooring.

Agent Harold V. Mooring

They tried to act like casual customers as they entered a pool hall where bootleg liquor was reportedly for sale. Later, Whitney told reporters that “Mooring had been recognized” as soon they entered. Thus, “their chances of finding anything incriminating were slight.” Their mission frustrated, the agents left. Whitney crossed the street, then he and Mooring headed one direction while the third agent went the other way.

The third agent was apparently out of sight when a car stopped beside Mooring. Two men jumped out and and began beating him. Then a shot rang out and the agent went down. The attackers leaped back into the car, which sped away. Before he passed out, Mooring identified his attackers as Elmer Todd and H. H. “Gimpy” Smith, proprietors of a Cosmopolis cigar store. The sheriff immediately arrested the two. Neither carried a weapon and they vehemently denied firing any shots. They did admit to the beating attack, but their motive never made it into the news.

Mooring, who had been hit in the back, remained unconscious through the night. Still, the next day, doctors announced that he was “much improved” and should recover fully. They did not attempt to remove the bullet. Mooring never saw who shot him, but assumed it was Smith, presumably because Todd was in front of him. However, the story proved to be far more complicated than that.

Harold Vincent Mooring was born around 1880, in a southern district of London. He joined the Royal Navy as a teenager, but was discharged in less than two years. (The reason is unclear, being hand-written and unreadable on his digitized papers.) After that, he spent several years at sea with civilian vessels before arriving in San Francisco in August of 1910.

Within two years, he had found work in Seattle as a chauffeur. His listing in the City Directory included a wife, Maude, and by 1915 the couple had two children. Harold now made a living as an auto mechanic. The family spent a couple years near Centralia before returning to Seattle in 1922.

And some time during that year, Mooring became an agent for the U.S. Prohibition Unit. One of Harold’s first assignments was to go undercover in Spokane. Leads he generated resulted in the arrest and conviction of several members of a liquor ring in that city. He did not, however, appear as a witness. In fact, his name did not show up in newspaper reports until he was shot.

Here we must make a few “educated guesses.” At some point, Mooring was probably assigned to go undercover in the Grays Harbor area, already known as a destination for the boats of rum runners. Of course he would be recognized right away, as Whitney said. That was the whole point … to be known as “just one of the boys.” But the habitués of the pool hall must have been shocked to see him standing next to Whitney, the well-known “dry law” enforcer.

Agent William M. Whitney

Born in Ohio in 1878, William M. Whitney briefly taught school before volunteering for duty in the Spanish-American War. After earning a degree from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1903, he moved to Washington, D.C. as headmaster of a boys school. On the side, he obtained a law degree from George Washington University. He then opened a practice in Seattle, where he dealt in estate and business law.

But Whitney was far more interested in politics, having been active in the Republican Club at Ohio Wesleyan. In Washington, he became heavily involved with state party politics, and even ran (unsuccessfully) for Congress in 1916. Four years later, Whitney earned some favors helping elect Wesley L. Jones to the U.S. Senate. But Bill also got caught in a messy scandal involving his attentions to a married woman. Thus, Jones gave the full Director position to another crony, who promptly made Whitney his chief assistant to do the real work.

Another educated guess suggests that a phone call from the pool hall brought down some physical punishment on the informer. Although Mooring ended up shot, there are no reports that the two suspects were ever prosecuted for anything. If they struck a plea deal, it was not weighty enough to make the news.

Eighteen months passed. Mooring’s name now appeared in newspaper reports, so he was probably not doing as much, if any, undercover work. Then, on April 2, 1925, a headline in the Seattle Times read, “Harold V. Mooring, U.S. Dry Agent, Dies.” He had become ill while on a moonshine raid in rough country about twenty miles southeast of Olympia. An autopsy gave the cause of death as pneumonia, and blamed the bullet from the earlier shooting as a “contributory” factor.

With that as a basis, authorities reopened the investigation into “who shot agent Mooring?” Recall that nothing serious had happened to the two attackers. The sheriff’s office reported that the only weapons that could be linked to the two were both .32-caliber revolvers. The sheriff also retained criminologist Luke S. May, handing over to him the .38-caliber revolver used by Bill Whitney on the day of the shooting. The slug from Mooring’s body would be available the next day.

I was unable to retrieve a full report on this case from the Luke May Papers, so we do not know much about what he discovered. The slug was indeed .38-caliber, but perhaps too distorted or altered by time to provide a definitive result, either positive or negative. Whitney never explicitly stated that he had not fired his gun, although he tried to leave that impression. Of course, he also never said he had fired.

However, Prohibition enforcers were notorious for their “when in doubt, shoot” approach, as in the Ernest Emley case. Thus, seeing his agent in trouble, Whitney quite possibly tried to help, and hit the wrong target. In the end, we can never know. But if Mooring was indeed hit by “friendly fire,” he was neither the first Prohibition agent, nor the last, to go out that way. The widow continued to press for further action, but a look back at the case in 1927 noted that nothing further was ever done.

Around 1931-1932, Maude began spending time in California. Thus, in the spring of 1932, daughter Vivian married a field craftsman employed by the Southern California Edison Company. Sidney Mooring would have been eighteen years old that same spring, so he probably joined the army shortly after that. In 1935, he was stationed at Schofield Barracks, in Hawaii, and returned stateside in December 1936.

Afterwards, Sidney became a professional photographer. Thus, in 1940, he owned a photography shop in Wenatchee, Washington. At that time, Maude also worked there as a photographer. However, she did not follow when he moved the business to Seattle around 1942, and was in California by 1948. She passed away May 2, 1957 in San Francisco.
                                                                                

References: Norma H. Clark, The Dry Years: Prohibition and Social Change in Washington, University of Washington Press, Seattle (1965, 1988).

Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969).

“[Mooring Wounding, Death, and Afterwards],” Kennewick Courier, Seattle Times, Seattle Star, Spokane Chronicle, Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Washington (March 1914 – August 1927)

Photo credits: Harold V. Mooring, Officer Down web site. William M. Whitney, Gazette-Journal, Reno, Nevada (May 28, 1930).

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