The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 51

Eos Anflto Stmcjj CALIFORNIA ENCOUNTERS Shots in the Afternoon PART IV TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 197S JACK SMITH The Night L. A. Bombed mil MM 4 -1 A bit I hi i At v- "'M Yi MiuS ff BY CHARLES T. POWERS Timts Staff Writer It cannot be said for sure that Henry and Fern Smid-derka really liked their next-door neighbor. Evidence suggests that a deep sense of Christian charity kept them obligated to him, for Gilford Read, a 78-year-old stick of a man who lived in a tiny one-room house behind a weed-grown lot, was dying of bone cancer and had no one to take care of him.

Gilford Read might not have been an easy man to like. He fought against the disease that was killing him with a ferocity that was almost unbecoming. He looked for cures, wrote long letters in search of new medications, made calls to doctors and seemingly got nowhere and sank back in his chair, staring in gaunt rage at the bottles of pills, powders and fluids on the little table before him. The Smidderkses lived in a large rambling house just above Read in the last home on a dead-end street in the Monterey Heights area near South Pasadena. They, too, were elderly.

Henry was 68, Fern 69, and they had lived in the area nearly all their lives. Both had been schoolteachers, and by the time Mrs. Smidderks retired, the grandchildren of her very first pupils were passing through her first-grade classroom at Garvanza Elementary SchooL Since 1916, they had been devout members of the Herman Free Methodist Church, only three blocks from their home. The Smidderkses ran errands for their neighbor, realizing that in the last two or three years it had become increasingly difficult for Read to get around. Mostly it was Henry Smidderks who had contact with Read, since Mrs.

Smidderks had a fear of going into his house. On top of his other problems, Read had asthma, and he kept his doors and windows shut and the heat turned high, and the air inside seemed stale and sickly. The Smidderkses took Read's pension check to the bank for him every month, carried his trash out to the curbside every week and did the grocery shopping for him. Buying his groceries was not easy. His eating habits seemed eccentric.

He ate seven or eight dozen eggs a week, eating only the yolks and throwing away the whites, and the eggs had to come from a certain Pasadena market He ordered fresh turnips and beets, and ate only the tops. He ordered fresh salmon (not canned, not frozen), also from a special market He always checked the sales slips to be sure his directions had been carried out. For several months, Henry and Fern Smidderks had been planning to move. Their house since their retirement Tve been reading The Glory and the Dream" by William Manchester," writes Carol Cecchini of Glendale, 'and on Page 323 he says, 'Jap submarines shelled Seattle, and 15 carrier-borne Zeros bombed Los Angeles in early Do you remember this really happening? I would be interested in knowing if Manchester has his facts right I am grateful to Mrs. Cecchini for giving me an excuse for reviewing the facts of what was certainly among.the most wonderful diversions of World War II the Great Los Angeles Air Raid.

First, I looked into Manchester's book myself to make sure that Mrs. Cecchini had quoted him correctly. She had. Manchester even goes on to add his own personal appraisal of the actions he described "Militarily," he says, "the attacks were only of nuisance value, but as psychological thrusts they were brilliant" WW 4 sVl TRIBUTE TO A GIANT-Among the stars and Dorothy McGuire, Lauren Bacall and Ann VIPs who turned out to honor the memory of the Rutherford, left to right. The tribute' was spon- late David O.

Selznick were Olivia deHavilland, sored by Friends of the USC Libraries. See Joyce Haber's story on Page 8. Times photo by Harry Chaie Actually, the Great Los Angeles Air Raid did not occur in March but on the night of Feb. 26, 1942. It began at 225 am when the US.

Army announced the approach of hostile aircraft and the city's air raid warning system went into effect for the first time in World War IL I Suddenly the night was rent by sirens. Searchlights I began to sweep the sky. Minutes later gun crews at Army i forts along the coastline began pumping the first of 1,433 rounds of ack-ack into the moonlight. Thousands of volunteer air raid wardens tumbled from, I their beds and grabbed their boots and helmets. Citizens awakened to the screech of sirens and, heedless of the blackout warning, began snapping on their lights.

Police- men turned to. Reporters rushed into the streets. MOVIE REVIEW" An Odyssey in a New Identity BY KEVIN THOMAS Times Staff Writer MW. mnt.fM ytrfWwBrtwij Wwift The din continued unabated for two hours. Finally the guns fell silent The enemy, evidently, had been routed.

Los Angeles began to taste the exhilaration of its first military victory. The Times was on the streets at daylight with a dramatic account of that gaudy night Roaring out of a brilliant moonlit western sky, foreign aircraft flying both in large formation and singly, flew over Southern California early today and drew heavy barrages of antiaircraft fire the first ever to sound over United States continental soil against an enemy invader." But the second paragraph was rather a letdown: "No bombs were reported dropped." However, the account went on, "At 5 a.m. the police reported that an airplane had been shot down near 185th St and Vermont Ave. Details were not available (Neither, as it turned out later, was the airplane.) Though no bombs had been dropped, the city had not its baptism of fire without casualties, including five fatalities. So many cars were dashing back and forth in the blackout that three persons were killed in automobile collisions.

Two others died of heart attacks. A radio announcer named Stokey, hurrying to get to his post in the dark, suffered a deep laceration over his right eye when he ran into an awning. A policeman named Larker, seeing a light on in a Hollywood store, kicked in the window and suffered a half-inch laceration on his right leg. A Times reporter, hurrying from his In-glewood home to the nearby police station, underestimated the height of a curbing and jolted his backbone. From his contacts in Munich, a German and a black man, he receives the first installment a hefty sum, in a series of payments for the next shipment To his embarrassment Nicholson ironically is praised by the black man for his understanding and heroism but he accepts the money anyway and decides to go to Barcelona for more.

Thus begins Nicholson's odyssey in his new identity, an odyssey that will take him all over Spain. Soon on his trail, however, is a TV producer (Ian Hendry) eager to interview the man who could shed some light on the "dead" journalist's final moments. Then Nicholson's wife (Jenny Runacre) soon realizes that her husband is alive and in great danger from agents of that African dictatorship. Also there are those members of the guerrilla underground expecting Nicholson to deliver the goods This may sound like the outline of a TV movie plot, but mere words, if anything, threaten to diminish Antonioni's breathtaking imagery, his superb structuring, his exquisite sense of composition. That notion of the inescapability of responsibility is but a philosophical point of departure for Antonioni to explore the enigma of personality and finally of life itself, revealing in the process the director's characteristic preoccupations with spiritual inertia and, perhaps more pronouncedly than ever, a wish for death.

The Passenger" is the perfect example of a film that never falls back on dialogue to communicate that which a Flease Turn to Page 18, Col. 1 At once a suspenseful adventure, a parable on the ines-capability of responsibility and a tender love story, Michelangelo Antonioni's long-awaited "The Passenger," starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, is a masterpiece of visual beauty and rigorous artistry that is as tantalizing as it is hypnotic. It is a major achievement by one of the world's great film-makers and boasts still another of those splendid portrayals from Nicholson, up for an Oscar tonight for "Chinatown," that are establishing him as the foremost American screen actor of his generation. Nicholson plays a well-known journalist attempting to get some film on an elusive guerrilla war in an African dictatorship. Overcome by despair in the midst of a desert waste, he succumbs to an impulse to assume the identity of a fellow guest (Chuck Mulvehill) of somewhat similar appearance who has died in their Godforsaken hotel.

The sense of futility that Nicholson experiences in trying to relate truly to the guerrillas has extended over the rest of his existence. In exchanging personal possessions with those of the dead man, Nicholson comes across a date book and decides, out of curiosity and aimlessness, to take off for Munich, after a stopover in London, to keep the first of a series of appointments. To his astonishment the dead man, whom Nicholson only knew to have been a businessman without family or friends, turns out to have been supplying the guerrillas with weapons. Mr. and Mrs.

Henry Smidderks seemed large and empty, and they had purchased a mobile home in a park near Escondido, wanting to be close to their daughter who was in ill health. For many weeks the Smidderks house had been up for sale, and they had been gradually moving their possessions down to the mobile home in Escondido. Easter weekend, the Smidderkses loaded their car for another trip. The car was found parked in front of Gilford Read's house. There was a packed lunch on the front seat.

In the wild grass behind Read's house was the body of Henry Smidderks, shot three times in the head. Fern Smidderks lay nearby. Both were covered with old suitcoats. Sometime later that night Read checked into a motel on Please Turn to Page 4, Col. 2 THE CBS EYE: PART II Memo Is Not the Medium The toll was particularly high among air raid wardens, who were said to have acted with valor throughout In Pasadena a warden named Hoffman fell from a 5-foot wall while looking into a lighted apartment and fractured a leg.

Another named Barber jumped a 3-foot fence in Hollywood to reach a house that had a light on and sprained his right ankle. A warden named Campbell fell down his own front stairs and broke his left arm. There was also scattered structural damage. Several roofs were holed by ack-ack projectiles which had failed to explode in the sky, but worked fine as soon as they struck ground, demolishing a room here, a patio there, and in one case blowing out the tire of a parked automobile. Exultation turned' to outrage the next day when the secretary of the Navy said there had been no enemy planes at all It was just a case of "jitters." The Army, being thus accused of shooting up an empty sky, was outraged.

Los Angeles authorities were outraged, especially the sheriff, who had valiantly helped the FBI round up numerous Japanese nurserymen and gardeners who were supposedly caught in the act of signaling the enemy planes. At length the secretary of war came up with a face-saving theory. There had been no enemy military planes, but it was believed there had been 15 "commercial" planes flown by "enemy agents." Though no one believed this romantic fancy, most agreed with the secretary of war that "It is better to be too alert than not alert enough." No, Mrs. Cecchini, Manchester doesn't have his facts right There was no aircraft carrier. There were no Zeros.

There were no bombs. There was no raid. But it was a glorious night, if only a dream. A if i THE VIEWS INSIDE BY DICK ADLER Times StaH Writer The second installment of a five-part look at how the power flows within a vast electronic enterprise like the CBS television network focuses on the president's chief assistant and the head of the programming operation. NEW YORK The internal telephone book for CBS Television is a good place to learn how the power flows.

Directly under president Robert D. Wood, for example, comes a listing for vice president and assistant to the president, John P. guess you could say I'm the oldest aide-de-camp in the business," laughs Cowden, a crisp, softspoken man who in his 33 years of service with CBS knows where all the bodies have been dug up and re-buried. "Since I came out of promotion and spent many years in publicity, I still have a direct interest in anything the network does in those areas," is the way Cowden explains his job. "In addition, any project Mr.

Wood wants me to work on, you'd better believe I'm delighted to do it" Others describe Cowden as Wood's chief troubleshooter, the man sent in when a CBS crisis flares "There's such an interrelation of departments at CBS that we have no such thing as. a small decision," he says. Anything that the program-practices people decide has a chain reaction in terms of programming, sales, station clearance. Anything that the affiliate-relations department comes up with feeds back immediately to everyone else. Nothing is done in a vacuum.

It's much more cooperative than most businesses, where the manufacturing is usually kept quite separate from the selling and from the buying Cowden's loosely structured job gives him a useful overall look at the CBS executive system. "That Monday morn-'ing meeting is just about the only formal thing we he says. "It's educational for those not directly involved in the subjects being discussed, and it's also a chance to assess the impact of everything on your own particular area. The meeting sets up the shape of the week, in effect after that, we're in each other's offices almost constantly. All doors are open all the time, and we drift back and forth informally." Cowden says that unlike many large companies, CBS Please Turn to Page 16, CoL 1 PERFORMANCE PROWESS-Merce Cunningham's company shines in "Event 1 28" at UCLA's Pauley.

Times photo by Mary Frampton DANCE REVIEW Cunningham fEvent' at Pauley BOOKSi Paul Wallach's "Guide to the Restaurants of Southern California" by Robert Kirsch on Page 6. DANCE: Los Angeles Ballet at Huntington Hartford by Lewis Segal orf Page 11., MUSIC San Francisco Spring Opera Theater's "The Pearl Fishers" by Martin Bernheimer on Page 10. Soprano Dorothy Kirsten at Royce Hall by Albert Goldberg on Page 11. 7 Barbara Cook at theAhmanson Theatre by Dan Sullivan on Page 13. AND OTHER FEATURES BY DANIEL CARIAGA Times Staff Writer "Event No.

128" No. 127 took place in Arizona last week and No. 129 is scheduled at the company's New York studio after its current tour ends later this month-it included sections of "Changing Steps," TV Re-run," Canfield," "Landrover" and "Video Piece." This onetime-only work, latest in the series begun by Cunningham, in 1964, occupied 81 intermissionless minutes and held tb watcher through the intensity and tightness of the choreographer's vision. That it was performed up to Cun-Please Turn to Page 13, CoL A bald description of Merce Cunningham's latest "Event which took place Sunday night in Pauley Pavilion at UCLA, would not do justice to the work. Plain lighting, a dance floor occupying a 40 50-foot rectangle at the east end of the arena, some quiet dancing and a sound score of ostensibly uneventful profile are not promising elements.

However, the special nature of the occasion lived up to expectations because of Cunningham's hot-running creative juices, his dance company's performance prowess, the fertile imaginations of no less than four composers, all present and the rapt and active attention of an apparently discerning audience. 1 Joyce Haber Page 8 Robert Hilburn Page 12 On Fashion Page 2 Cecil Smith 15 Pages 15,16,18 Dear Page 3 Beauty Page 7 Page 6 Art Buchwald Page 2 Comics Page 17.