The Queen by Josh Levin

Author:Josh Levin
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

The Two Mrs. Harbaughs

The top sanitation official in Oakland, California, said the six buildings owned by William Viera were “the vilest the health department has ever seen.” The families that lived in Viera’s apartments told of clogged toilet fixtures, broken flooring, and wooden beams that had been gnawed by rats. The squalor at 778 Tenth Street, where tenants reported that “small flies gather around the rotted wood,” earned a front-page spread in the Oakland Tribune in 1942. Four years later, an Oakland jury found the landlord guilty of a host of violations owing to the “filth and rubbish” that continued to blanket his properties.

The building on Tenth Street made the paper again in 1948, in an article about a pair of women who’d been arrested for abandoning their children. On February 4, the Oakland police got tipped off that a two-year-old and a three-year-old had been neglected by their mothers. The woman who called the authorities also lived at 778 Tenth Street; she explained that she’d agreed to watch her neighbors’ kids but had left the youngsters on their own because she had to go to town herself. The two mothers were taken to the city jail. Their babysitter, who called herself Connie Harbaugh, faced no charges for ditching her assignment. The cops would come back for her the following month.

On a Thursday night in March, two officers showed up at Connie Harbaugh’s door; their ensuing report noted that they’d “received information” that she’d been seen consorting with “several different men.” What they saw inside her West Oakland apartment confirmed the tip. “When arrested the above had a Mexican, Gilbert Ortiz, in her room,” the report began. “On questioning, Ortiz admitted several acts of intercourse with above and stated that he has slept all night with above on three different occasions while [her seven-year-old] son, Clifford Harbaugh, slept on a couch in the same room.”

The Oakland police detained Connie Fay Harbaugh for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a misdemeanor that could stem from abetting a child’s exposure to “any house of prostitution or assignation” or placing him “in danger of leading an idle, dissolute, lewd, or immoral life.” The case history stated that “Gilbert Ortiz admitted that he had a venereal disease which he contracted only last Sunday.” The woman at 778 Tenth Street, apartment number two, was deemed the probable culprit.

* * *

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.