AFAIK, it’s unclear if George Hodel knew he was out at Caltech when he took the job at the LA Record in the summer of 1924. In any case, it must have been quite an experience for him there as a 16 year old cub reporter, working the brothels and the speakeasies, checking out homicide scenes, riffling through murder victims’ personal effects, calling upon his precocious knowledge of art and Decadent literature to create word tableaux conjuring the aesthetic side of depravity, degradation and death.
It seems George’s spell at the Record was bracketed approximately by the national sensation caused by the arrest in May of two teenage boy geniuses in Chicago, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, for the kidnapping and murder of 14 year old Bobbie Franks and, locally, by the tragic and murky death of celebrated film producer, Thomas Ince, who took ill — or was shot, if you believed the rumors — aboard William Randolph Hearst’s yacht, the Oneida, in November.1 Hodel got to work on the O. J. furor of the day, the murder trial of boxer “Kid McCoy,” which catapulted lawyer Jerry Giesler to fame and fortune. He would use “Get Me” Giesler’s services years later to get himself off the hook for the charges brought against him by his own 14 year old daughter, Tamar, in 1949. Nothing about the experience was wasted.
[11/6/21]: Steve Hodel has just published The Early Years: Part I, which reproduces a glowing letter of reference George Hodel received from Burton Knisely dated December 19, 1924, mentioning that he’d been with the paper for the “better part of a year.” That suggests that he worked at the Record from May through December, assuming he finished his freshman year at Caltech, which seems likely given several references in the 1924 yearbook.