Remembering the lives of our community.
From a console of pinned index cards and a two-way microphone, she held the whole city in her head and matched forty drivers to fares faster than any map could, until the smartphone ended the trade.
He cast and repaired the ornamental plaster of the old theaters — the rosettes, the cornices, the gilded proscenium arches — matching a hundred-year-old ceiling by hand when a piece came down.
She knotted hair into lace one strand at a time for the studios and the stage, building the wigs that turned a thirty-year-old into a king and back again by lunch.
She built a volunteer choir in 1979 out of whoever showed up — retired teachers, a mail carrier, out-of-work actors, teenagers sent by their parents — and almost never turned anyone away.
She held the room at a string of Hollywood lounges night after night, taking requests, remembering regulars' songs, and outlasting most of the bars she sang in.
For half a century he stood on a Foley stage inventing the sounds a film forgot to record — the punches, the rain, the creak of a door — out of props the audience never saw.
For fifty-one years he cut hair from a single chair in a narrow storefront off Wilshire, where men who came in as boys for a first haircut later brought their own boys and, eventually, their grandsons.
For sixty years she sat at the elbow of the camera, holding a film's thousand small continuities in her head so the finished picture would not come apart at the seams.
From the front of an open-sided tram, he guided tourists past the backlots and soundstages of a major studio for four decades, and knew which stories were true well enough to improve the rest.
By his own count, kept in a spiral notebook for fifty years, he rolled 91 cars on purpose and walked away from all but two. He insisted the work was arithmetic, not bravery.
