Word: dietriched
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PHELAN. Tired of driving to a broker's office in downtown Los Angeles at 6 a.m. to get the earliest readings off the stock market ticker, Hughes in the late '20s wanted a private ticker of his own in his Ambassador Hotel suite. As Phelan tells it, Dietrich ingeniously got around regulations against such a personal installation. He rented a downtown office, had a ticker legally put in there. Then he discovered that a trolley line to the Ambassador had some unused insulators on the poles and that he could get a private line strung on them...
...when the ticker was disconnected by "a friend who knew a lot about electricity" and carried to the Ambassador, a red light flashed at Western Union offices. Dietrich's friend had incorrectly hooked up a resistor that should have prevented this. The Western Union men rushed to the rental office and found Dietrich holding only the glass top of the ticker. They asked where the rest of the machine was. He ad-libbed, said it had been knocked over and was being repaired. They offered to repair the machine themselves, and Dietrich had to retrieve it from the Hughes...
...room at the Ambassador Hotel . . . But I got the terminals reversed, and this immediately showed up on the Western Union Board-a red light flashing-and so they sent over a couple of workmen to the Figueroa Street office that I'd rented ... They found Noah Dietrich there, standing there like an idiot with the glass dome of the ticker-tape machine in his hand-but no ticker-tape. I don't know how he got out of that one, but he did ... and so I hooked the terminals up again properly, and the machine ran perfectly...
PHELAN. During his moviemaking days, Hughes carried a 100 notebook in which he jotted down technical points about the craft that he picked up along the way. Says Dietrich: "One day he called me in a state of agitation and told me he had lost it. 'I've got to get it back,' he said. 'Do what you have to do to recover it.' I offered a reward in every available medium, and advertised for weeks. I spent over $1,000 trying to retrieve his 100 notebook, but we never got even a nibble...
IRVING quotes Hughes: "I made up a little code for figures, for prices and costs . . . Then I lost the notebook. I was beside myself because it seemed that everything I knew was in that notebook, and I had lost it." Hughes ordered Dietrich to retrace every step that he, Hughes, had taken on the day of the loss, to get down on his hands and knees every 25 yards along the route to inspect the ground. Adds Hughes: "He sent me the cleaning bill for his trousers, the cheap bastard...