The War Apartments and Midcentury · 1943–1965
The apartment door rigged with cutlery
1948
From the source
TWO WOMEN FACE 7 CHARGES EACH IN CRIME SERIES
“In addition a charge of attempted burglary of the apartment of J. E. Smith, 1102 Harvard, was filed Wednesday night after Mr. Smith saw pictures of the young women in Wednesday afternoon’s Chronicle and recognized them.
“Mr. Smith told officers he was awakened at 2:30 a.m. Wednesday when a ‘booby trap’ attached to his apartment door spilled a number of knives and forks on the floor as the door was pushed open. He said he went to the door and found two young women there, but they pretended to be drunk and left when he asked what they wanted.”
Houston Chronicle, September 16, 1948, p. 15.
The full story is better than the anecdote. Houston police were working a two-woman burglary ring, seven charges each by mid-September, and J. E. Smith’s apartment in the old temple was one of their stops. His security system cost nothing: cutlery balanced against the door. At 2:30 a.m. it crashed to the floor, the intruders switched instantly to playing drunk, and strolled out empty-handed.
Then the newspaper finished the job. The pair’s photographs ran in that Wednesday afternoon’s Chronicle; Smith recognized the faces from his doorway, called it in, and the seventh charge was on file by nightfall. In 1948 the afternoon paper was the neighborhood watch, the mugshot database, and the tip line, all in one edition.
The setting is the war apartments in their fifth year: two dozen units carved from the lodge floors in 1943, still full in the tight postwar housing market, defended by whatever a tenant had in the kitchen drawer.
The source
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