"The End of Cooper's Camp"
by Pablo Capra
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| Beach bathhouse and restaurant that was probably the speakeasy, c. 1926, c/o Acker Archives |
As Topanga Beach fell into limbo, bootleggers sensed a lack of oversight and grew bolder.
In January 1925, Deputy Fire Warden H. D. Smith encountered a gang waiting for a midnight rum ship by an empty cabin. The gang beat him with a club, and left him lying in the sand overnight.
An investigation by Archie Cooper and Deputy Sheriff William Edward Harris turned up a description of one of the suspects, a dark-skinned man in a blue serge suit. The getaway car was described as a gray Studebaker with a white stripe. But could these stereotypical gangland descriptions have been fabricated to hide a sketchier story?
Later that year, Smith and Harris (an Elk) were themselves arrested for running a speakeasy out of a “lunchroom” called the Rustle Inn at the entrance to Topanga Canyon.
Topanga beach establishments have been operating for some time, and… it has been the custom of the operators to bring up many gallons of illicit liquor to the place early Saturday, which has served as refreshments over the week-end.
—“Canyon Raid Disastrous to Deputies” Santa Monica Evening Outlook, 1925-08-17
A photo from this time shows that the facade of the Rustle Inn was painted with a large ad for Eastside, an East LA near-beer that was popular during Prohibition because it squeaked just under the 0.5% alcohol-by-volume (ABV) limit.
The Cooper brothers were not implicated in the raid but surely knew what was going on. They must have advised the defendants to hire Howell W. Richardson, the younger brother of their attorney John L. Richardson (who had died in a landslide in Kern County one month earlier). The defendants were found guilty.
In September 1925, Miller and Mary M. Cooper hosted the wedding of their oldest daughter Edna to Alfred Jackson Sutton (1897-1955) of Metro-Goldwyn Studios. Their middle daughter, Sarah, was the maid of honor, and their youngest, Mary Laurania, was the ring bearer. The wedding was a joyous respite before 1926 arrived with back-to-back disasters.
Early in the morning on January 3, 1926, a fire started in an empty beach cabin and spread in both directions. No lives were lost, but the bathhouse belonging to Alfred Patterson Stewart (b.1874) and 10 cabins burned, and the dance pavilion was damaged. The cause of the fire was not discovered, but Sylvester Elliot (b.1897) of Topanga was arrested. Closer scrutiny revealed that this beach watchman had pretended to be a federal officer in order to get his job, and that he was writing bad checks.
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| "Fire Hits Topanga Resort," c/o Los Angeles Times, 1926-01-04 |
Then, in February 1926, two weeks of storms brought hail and “mountainous waves” that destroyed a fish market owned by J. Loomis and 14 cabins. “Swirling wreckage was hurled with battering-ram effect against standing cabins that dropped like card houses.” A story was told of two women who had rushed all the belongings from one’s cabin into the other’s, only to have misjudged which cabin would survive. (In 1927, another storm wiped five more cabins off the beach.)
Even more tragic were the deaths of two men who were repairing a pier at Inceville when their boat capsized in the storm: Thomas Compton of Santa Monica, and Harry Hoover of Topanga. Lifeguards Jimmie O’Rourke and Allen B. Law rescued two other men who’d been in the boat, resuscitating them in the fake European church on the beach, left over from an Inceville movie set.
The destruction must have devastated the Cooper brothers’ business because they left Topanga Beach soon afterwards. However, more hardships followed them.
Miller and his wife moved to Paso Robles, where their daughter Sarah died at age 19 in November 1926 “after an unsuccessful effort to save her life by an operation”… perhaps from a car accident? Many of Sarah’s former Santa Monica High School classmates attended her funeral.
Archie moved to Mint Canyon, near Santa Clarita, where he got involved with a widowed sculptor who had a restaurant, a 1,600-acre ranch, several children, and two names: Mrs. Vera Sharp and Mrs. De Font. In August 1927, this interesting but unethical woman was accused of stealing clothes and silverware from a neighbor’s house. She and Archie were also accused of stealing a cow and barbecuing it for her restaurant. It would seem that after years of bad behavior, Archie had finally sunk to being a common criminal.
In 1931, he may have had a chance to change when he married a German-speaking Polish woman named Edwina Trusiewicz (b.1881). They lived in Burbank, where he worked as a rancher. However, his life was cut short when he died in 1932 at age 49 of a ruptured appendix.
After the Cooper brothers left Topanga Beach, their resort was taken over by a Scottish widow named Lillian Fields (1883-1941), the same woman who later ran Elkhorn Camp.
In 1928, Cooper’s Camp became the Topanga Beach Auto Court, and was managed by J. C. McGray.
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This is an excerpt from the book Topanga Beach: A History, 1820s-1920s. Author Pablo Capra is a former Lower Topanga resident, and continues to preserve the history of that neighborhood on his website, www.brasstackspress.com, and as a board member of the Topanga Historical Society, www.topangahistoricalsociety.org.
