Sublime

RUTHLESS PEOPLE

FDR would be the firm’s front man on Wall Street, for which Black agreed to pay him $25,000 a year, five times his salary at the Navy Department. It was an arrangement from which both stood to profit. The hemorrhaging of Roosevelt’s finances would be stanched, and Black would benefit from Franklin’s name on the masthead.

“Here in Los Angeles the shape of the city is soft at the edges, piled layer on layer, cloud on cloud,” Charles Moore wrote in The City Observed, Los Angeles (1984). Gutierrez, from San Pedro, was a scientist professionally, but was perhaps better known as a climber of stairs.

“Bob always took care of people who cooperated with him.” If you cooperated.

Kilgore Trout was and is a science-fiction writer, of course.