Word: dietrichs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Irving appeared at a house in Cathedral City, Calif., that belonged to Stanley Meyer's mother-in-law. There, Meyer says, he approached Irving, whom he had known in Los Angeles ten years before, and asked if he would be interested in rewriting the Phelan manuscript for Noah Dietrich. "No, I can't," Irving replied. "I'm already doing a book on the four richest men in the world [including Howard Hughes]." That was not unusual; all through the project, Irving disguised the fact that he was interested only in Hughes by saying he was doing...
...editor than a writer on this project," he said. At the time, that remark seemed a possible reference to the editing of taped interviews with Hughes, but the damning truth now shows through in a comparison of Irving's manuscript with one prepared for former Hughes Aide Noah Dietrich by Reporter James Phelan. Irving brought considerable editorial ingenuity to reworking parts of the Phelan story in order to avoid outright duplication of language. He embellished incidents, arbitrarily changed statistics, had Hughes sometimes doing precisely the same things that the Phelan book claims Dietrich...
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...