The Apprentice
If the dark, neatly-dressed, foreign-looking “little man” seen “trotting” behind William Hightower in the Pacific Building in August 1921 was a not-quite 14 years old George Hodel, what would he have been doing in San Francisco’s Financial District, four hundred miles north of his parents’ home in Pasadena?
Here’s couple of lines of speculation, not necessarily mutually exclusive:
He could have been working in some kind of office boy capacity at family-friend Alexander Zelenko’s nearby San Francisco HQ, and/or staying at the Zelenkos’ place there. With regard to this hypothesis, it’s perhaps noteworthy that Hodel’s final professional reinvention as a globetrotting international market research expert is a lot closer to Zelenko’s bailiwick than to his previous incarnations as a physician and psychiatrist.
We know that George Hodel’s extracurricular activities at Caltech in 1923-24 included being a reporter for the university’s weekly paper and an editorial assistant on the college yearbook, that he worked as a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Record for the better part of 1924, and that he was columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1932 as a pre-med at UC Berkeley. Could he have worked as a copy boy at the Chronicle or the Examiner in the summer of 1921?
