Ep. 4—The Story of Johnny Ochsner, The Rich Kid Romeo, and the Lovesick Stowaways

The episode chronicles the romantic life of Johnny Ochsner, a young Oakland oil heir whose escapades in the 1940s became international news.

Marguerite Faye Human and Teresa Briston, separately stowawayed across the Pacific in pursuit of Johnny, driven by dreams of marriage.

The story involves underage sex, a high-seas burglary, and the intervention of the FBI, naval officers, juvenile court, as well as Johnny's wealthy mother, who actively interfered to protect her son from what she perceived as "gold-diggers."

Johnny's romantic life continued to be tumultuous, marked by a number marriages, divorces and annulments, throughout his life.

Wealth, privilege, and very likely alcohol all play a part in these chapters from the life of the rich kid Romeo from Oakland.

Transcript

Hi, this is Knox Bronson at the Secret History of Frisco podcast. We have a rather remarkable episode today. It is the story of an Oakland man, two women who followed him across the Pacific as stowaways, one from San Francisco to Hawaii, one from Hawaii back to California, with dreams of matrimony, and a third woman with whom he eloped to Reno after jilting the first two. It is also the story of underage sex, burglary on a high seas luxury liner, the intervention of the FBI, naval officers, juvenile court, and one mother very determined to protect her randy son from what she perceived as ever-circling gold-diggers. 

[transition]

Newspapers in this era, the Thirties and Forties, carried a tremendous amount of local news, often of a very personal nature. The story of Oakland oil heir Johnny Ochsner and his failed romantic escapades went on for years and the stories were carried in newspapers  around the world.

As Johnny’s story began in 1946, when he was 19, the biggest movie of the day was the noir classic, “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

[excerpt]

The top hits of the day were “Gypsy” by the Ink Spots and “Oh! What It Seemed To Be” – Frankie Carle & His Orchestra

The country was still recovering from World War II. Sugar and Rice were still being rationed and there was nationwide rent control in effect.

One story that particularly caught my eye in The Examiner:

L. A. Dirty Book Sellers Convicted in 25 Minutes

Ten women and two men, jurors in Municipal Judge Arthur S. Guerin's court, today needed only twenty five minutes to decide that Edmund Wilson's novel, "Memoirs of Hecate County," is an obscene book.

Edmund Wilson’s collection of short stories, “The Memoirs of Hecate County,” was found to be pornography by a jury in Los Angeles. 

Jury Foreman Otto H. Hoops of the jury said: "After we had all read the book, as instructed by the court, there never was any doubt in our minds as to its obscenity." Conviction carries a penalty of six months in jail or a fine of $500 or both. At the conclusion of the trial, the book stood branded as obscene and "disgusting" not only by the jury verdict but by the trial judge and both prosecution and defense attorneys. 

Calling the book "filth." Witson said in his final arguments: "If you were standing on a street corner and heard some- one say what is printed on certain of these pages, you would call a policeman."

I don’t know why that caught my eye.

Edmund Wilson was two-time national book award winner.

Hecate is the Greek goddess of sorcery, and Edmund Wilson's Hecate County is the bewitched center of the American Dream, a sleepy bedroom community where drinks flow endlessly and sexual fantasies fill the air. Memoirs of Hecate County, Wilson's favorite among his many books, is a set of interlinked stories combining the supernatural and the satirical, astute social observation and unusual personal detail. But the heart of the book, "The Princess with the Golden Hair," is a starkly realistic novella about New York City, its dance halls and speakeasies and slums. So sexually frank that for years Wilson's book was suppressed, this story is one of the great lost works of twentieth-century American literature: an astringent, comic, ultimately devastating exploration of lust and love, how they do and do not overlap.

Wilson’s tales of Hecate County was fiction, but not so very far from this very real headline from the San Francisco Examiner on JUNE 8, 1946. Prepare yourself, it’s rather convoluted.

Contra Costa Casanova Jailed as Home Breaker

Rancher Files New Charge Mike Prisco, the Pittsburg plasterer, who has been suffering from a plurality of wives, yesterday found himself broken out with a new. rash of woman trouble. Prisco was in jail again after complaint by Ernest Agular, Byron rancher, who claimed Prisco had been too deeply interested in Aguiar's wife and had also threatened to "get him." 

Prisco first came to public attention in February when sheriff's officers discovered him liv ing in a three-room apartment with two wives and sundry children. 

He was released on ball pending disposition of his probation request and took a contract to plaster the Agular home. This week Agular filed suit for divorce against his wife, Lillian, charging she had consorted with a man, and won an interlocutory decree. Yesterday, when Aguiar told his story to District Attorney Francis Collins of Contra Costa County, Collins went before Superior Judge Harold Jacoby and had Prisco's bail raised from two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500) to ten thousand dollars ($10,000). Prisco, arrested, failed to make the increased bond.

Here are a few more stories from that single page in the Examiner.

SALLY SHAKES TAX RHYTHM 

The prosaic click-clacking an adding machine beat like Monday hangover in Sally Rand's El Cerrito cabaret yesterday.

Sally was a an American burlesque dancer, stripper, vedette, and actress, famous for her ostrich-feather fan dance and balloon bubble dance.

Vanished was the music, the gay giggles, the tinkle of high- priced ice cubes In highball glasses. Absent, too, was Sally, and her ogling feather fans. (Customers, that is.) Master of ceremonies was an impassive Federal agent. Making with the rapid downbeat on computing apparati were other agents who were looking into the club's financial status, past and present. Padlocked was Sally'a latest fan-flipping emporium. The trouble was taxes. 

Sally said she was nonplussed about the whole thing. She didn't make a nickel from the El Cerrito club, she said. She had left the partnership, fans and all. What did they mean anyway? she asked. 

But the adding machines clicked on. You couldn't have heard a feather drop.

Other headlines from the same page:

Two Girls Hurt On Hayride

Log Wrecks Bridge

Falling Plank Kills Boy

Girl's Lost Dog Returned

Hotel Fire Routs 32 In Redwood City

Have You Seen Barbara's Dog?

Dog Hero of Fire Rewarded

Vinson Outlines Concepts of Life

This last one was about Chief Justice-Designate Frederick Vinson’s remarks at graduation ceremonies at the University of Kentucky, where he stated that “men everywhere seek freedom, security, and piece as their fundamental concepts of life.”

So these were about half the headlines on a single page out of twenty two in that day’s Examiner in the front section alone.

[intermezzo]

Johnny Ochsner was born to Henry Ochsner, a Stanford University geology professor, and Hilda Carling Ochsner, his third wife, on May 30, 1926. Henry died the next year, leaving his widow, among other things, a 2,500 acre parcel of land then appraised at $500. This garnered little attention.

However, oil was discovered on the land a year later in the Kettleman District of California’s Central Valley, and the value of the estate skyrocketed to $10,000,000, about $165,000,000 today.

Needless to say, the two ex-wives made a beeline for the courts to make their claims and the estate was settled after seven years of litigation, in 1945. Ex-wife number one, Mrs. Frances Ochsner, who claimed she didn’t even realize that she was divorced from Henry until after his death, received one million dollars. Ex-wife Number two, Mrs. Nancy Ochsner Baldy, mother of two daughters with Henry, Winifred and Elizabeth, received $500,000. Henry’s widow, Johnny’s mother, Hilda, received $2,500,00. 

That left a balance of $6,000,000, which the court awarded in equal shares to each of the children. Johnny’s older half-sisters received their inheritances immediately, but his share was held in trust until he reached his majority at the age of twenty-one, under California law. In the meantime, he was in the Navy and it appears he took after his father in the romance department.

Johnny's romantic complications started when, as a seaman first class, he met Marguerite Faye Human, a taxi dancer at an Oakland ballroom. Johnny had to say goodbye to Marguerite when the Navy shipped him to Honolulu in April of 1946. 

Marguerite, despondent but determined, said goodbye to Johnny. 

She soon stowed away on the next ship with $2 in her purse and landed in Honolulu to reclaim her man, preferably at the altar. 

"It was love at first sight," said Marguerite. "His money doesn't mean anything to me. I'm young too, only 18." 

As reported in the Brookneal, Virginia, Union Star on May 31,

“The romance of a blue-eyed New Orleans girl and a California oil heir, which began in an Oakland dance hall and hurdled the separating miles of Pacific ocean by means of a stowaway adventure, ran into obstacles, barring their way to marriage. 

There’s the trouble of being underage. There’s the objection by the oil heir’s mother. And there’s the skeptical probation officer. 

“We are in love and we are going to be married and they might as well realize nothing can stop us,” insisted tall, brown-haired Marguerite Faye Human, 19. 

She came here by stowing away on a naval transport in order to be near John G. Ochsner, seaman first class. In a little more than a year he is to inherit two million dollars of the Kettleman Hills oil fortune. 

“Johnny’s money doesn’t mean a thing to me,” she said. 

The youthful sailor’s mother, Mrs. Hilda Carling Ochsner, cabled from Oakland her objections which halted all efforts to obtain a marriage license, but he was sure of his love although not so sure of a rosy future. 

Being 19, he has to have parental consent under territorial law. After the shore patrol hustled him back to his base for a talk with his executive officer, he wasn’t even sure he’d be seeing Marguerite as often as he hoped. 

And, although Marguerite was released on probation after her hearing for stowing away from San Francisco on the President Hayes, the probation officer showed no inclination to grant his approval, either. 

“If we have to,” Marguerite said, “we can wait two more months (until Johnny is 20) and then get married. I’ll get a job and work.”

She found a job in a Honolulu dime store.”

[intermezzo]

But this is where things began to get weird.

Johnny wrote a letter to his mother around this time, in which he said, "Please don't worry about me. Margie doesn't mean a thing to me.” 

A rather callous remark, revealing the shallow character of  our young heir. I’m sure Johnny considered himself a Valentino, a lover of women, but, as we shall see, his behavior belied such romantic notions as the future continued to unfold.

Through Marguerite, with whom he was still friendly, he met a comely sixteen-year-old girl, one Teresa Briston. Smitten with each other, they began taking long moonlit walks on Waikiki beach. Naval authorities, who were still sorting out the situation vis-à-vis Johnny and Marguerite, became aware of Teresa in their investigation and interviewed her. 

In the interview with the Navy officers, she expressed her love for Johnny and confessed that they had consummated their love repeatedly under the serious Hawaiian moonlight. 

They threw Johnny into the brig for statutory rape.

His mother received the news in Oakland and, panicking, sent a high-priced attorney to Honolulu to investigate. Soon, the charges were dropped for lack of evidence. 

Still, the Navy, aware that they had a public relations nightmare on their hands with an under-age girl, a rich kid lothario, and a high-priced lawyer, knew they had to do something with Johnny and quick. They released him from the brig and sent him to Camp Shoemaker in California, thirty miles east of Oakland. Camp Shoemaker had a hospital and also served as a disciplinary base for soldiers convicted of violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They would keep him confined there until his service came to an end. 

Lovelorn Marguerite and Teresa were left behind in Hawaii, heartbroken, while Johnny languished in California.

Let’s remember that Johnny had only arrived in Hawaii in April and we aren’t even out of May at this point in the story.

By this time, the story of  Johnny’s amorous escapades had spread nationwide and around the world. I found found articles about him and Marguerite and Teresa in newspapers from Oshkosh, Wisconsin all the way to Newcastle, Australia. 

[intermezzo]

Teresa Briston was a determined girl who knew what she wanted and that was handsome Johnny Ochsner, or handsome about-to-be-really-rich Johnny Ochsner.  At sixteen, she was more worldly and experienced than her other young friends and she was aware of her power over boys and men. A striking brunette, she had easily stolen him away from her friend Marguerite, who was three years her senior. Johnny had just turned twenty when the Navy shipped him back to California.

Marguerite had told Teresa how she had stowed away from California to Hawaii and it seemed like the obvious solution to her dilemma, which was the geographic separation of 2,400 miles from her one true love. She checked the newspaper for upcoming departures.

On May 31st, she snuck aboard the Matson luxury liner. The SS Matsonia, at the Port of Honolulu, bound for Los Angeles. It appears that she maneuvered her way into staying with an unknown male passenger in his stateroom for the duration of the trip and so she traveled in style for the week-long voyage.

On the third day out from Honolulu, Teresa took a nocturnal tour through the ship. She walked past a stateroom and noticed that the door was open. She peeked inside the room. She could see two sleeping women and an expensive leather handbag beckoning her from atop a dresser. We already know that Teresa was a girl of action, not one to miss any opportunity in the furtherance her goals.

She tiptoed into the room, grabbed the purse, and made her way back to her own stateroom. The purse contained $2000 in hundred-dollar bills which she pocketed before getting rid the evidence. She later told police she didn’t steal the engraved sterling silver cigaret case or the jewelry or any of the other items she found in the purse. She claimed she had simply tossed the purse from the porthole of her cabin into the deep waters of the blue Pacific.

The minute the Matsonia docked at the Port, Teresa ditched her high-seas sugar-daddy and went on a shopping spree in Los Angeles

She bought some clothes and some luggage, some jewelry and a watch, and a first-class train ticket to Oakland.

Arriving in Oakland she immediately tried to make contact with her errant lover. Newspapers were by now covering and reporting her every move. Johnny’s love life had become international news ever since Marguerite had followed him to Honolulu, only to be jilted.

San Francisco Examiner headlines shouted: She May See A Lawyer Johnny Ochsner Rebuffs Stowaway Again.

The article began  

"Oh, Johnny don" wanna see her "No, Johnny don' wanna see her.

… and then continued …

So yesterday, lush-lipped Teresa Briston, 16 year old Honolulu girl who stow-awayed here on the Matsonia to see Johnny Ochsner, sailor and oil heir, said if she couldn't see him, she might change her mind and see a lawyer, instead. Teresa, rebuffed Thursday night at the Ochsner home, vesterday tried there again-with even less success, because nobody answered. 

Then she went to Camp Shoemaker, where young Ochsner is stationed. The guards stopped her, telephoned Johnny inside the camp. "He don't wanna see ya, and that's that." they told her. The girl claims she is the one involved with the young heir in a Honolulu episode when Ochsner was arrested on a charge of rape, The girl also says she loves him.”

As an aside, can you imagine a newspaper describing a sixteen-year-old girl as lush-lipped today?

The reason Teresa mentioned seeing a lawyer was that she was now claiming that she was two months pregnant with Johnny’s child.

However, Johnny’s mother was not sitting idly by. Remember that she had inherited a large fortune just a couple year before and was quite adept at wielding her wealth and power to protect her fickle son from all the wily women in his cockeyed orbit.

Teresa had first paid a visit to Johnny’s house at 802 York Street, where his mother refused to speak to her and now Mom was alerted to the fact that Teresa had arrived in town.

The next day, Teresa took a bus out to Camp Shoemaker in Livermore and was able to speak to Johnny on the phone.

The Oakland Tribune published this report on June 8 of 1946:

The headline read:

LAW TAKES HAND IN OIL HEIR 'PURSUIT' 

Oakland police interrupted the campaign of Teresa Briston versus Johnny Ochsner and took her into custody for questioning as a possible juvenile delinquent, 

Her detention came shortly after the 16-year-old girl from Hawaii won honors for a minor skirmish. 

She got to speak to Johnny. 

The conversation, in terse mono syllables, might have been discouraging to some. It brightened a long day of discouragement for the indefatigable Terry, more determined than ever to break down the new "resistance" of the young oil heir. She won her first small success. after a chase across the ocean and a fruitless journey to Camp Shoemaker, with a telephone call last night Johnny answered the phone. 

JOHNNY LACONIC 

"Are you angry, with me for all this?” she quickly asked. . , 

“No,” Johnny said.

“When may I see you? she then inquired. 

“You can’t,” he answered. 

“But you will see me?" she continued. 

“No," said Johnny, and bang went the telephone. 

Undaunted, Terry announced that she "knew" Johnny would talk to her if she could just see him face to face. "! think he's scared," she explained. Miss Briston, who admitted she was the girl involved when Johnny was arrested in Honolulu, then telephoned twice to Mrs. Hilda Ochsner, Johnny's mother. 

These conversations were even briefer. 

SHE'S DETERMINED '. 

Still resolved, in spite of two futile attempts to see Johnny at Camp Shoemaker Naval Station during the day, Terry took up her stand outside the Ochsner home at 802 York Street in the evening, determined to intercept the handsome hero of several escapades when he came out. 

He spent the evening at home. 

Terry, who stowed away on a mainland-hound boat from Honolulu to see her sailor hero, finally abandoned her post at the firmly closed door and took in a late movie entitled: "The Woman Came Back." 

[soundtrack]

Her next step, she said, will be to get a lawyer.

We can only surmise from these stories that newspaper reporters were following Teresa around at this point.

Hilda Ochsner, Johnny’s mother, correctly saw a looming paternity suit or, worse, a shotgun marriage. She had her lawyer contact the Oakland police department. At her behest, the police brought Teresa in for questioning.

It was then that they discovered over $900 in cash in her hotel room, the equivalent of over $14,000 today. They asked her where she had gotten the money. She made up a story about stealing it from a Honolulu taxicab driver. As they pushed her for more details, she finally broke down and admitted that she had stolen the money while crossing the Pacific on the SS Matsonia. At first she claimed she had rolled a passenger on the ship, but later admitted to stealing the purse belonging to Mrs. Dorothy Munson, 40, the wife of a retired Navy man and a resident of Honolulu.

Since it was now an interstate crime, the FBI was brought in. After correspondence between the FBI and juvenile authorities in Oakland and Honolulu, Teresa was sentenced to serve three years in the Utah State Industrial Home for Girls. 

She told reporters: "Johnny is the only boy I've ever loved. He never proposed to me, but I sure wish he had.' 

Johnny stayed behind the sheltering walls of the Navy's Camp Shoemaker for two more months, and then was given his discharge. 

With Marguerite still in Honolulu and Teresa shipped off to Utah, Johnny was free to revert to his old tomcat prowl.

He went home to mother, but was soon back in the news. A month after Teresa was sent to Utah, Johnny met Beth Galley, a pretty blond divorcée. Five weeks later, they eloped, taking the 200-mile drive to Reno with friends and got married.

[intermezzo]

The Examiner reported it thusly:

His past loves blithely forgotten, Johnny yesterday turned his attention to the more complicated problem of finding a home. “I’m in the real estate busIness and can't find an apartment," Johnny moaned, He said he met Mrs. Ochsner in Oakland and motored with friends to Reno where they were married. 

They returned to Oakland on Sunday and obtained the approval of Johnny's mother, Mrs. Hilda Carling Ochsner, widow of the late George Washington Ochsner. 

Johnny made romantic news on two previous occasions while in the Navy. He was followed from Oakland to moon-bathed Waikiki by Margaret Faye Human, 21 year old former Oakland entertainer, and later by Teresa Briston, 15, who followed him from Hawaii to California and is now in Federal reformatory on theft charges. 

Johnny's bride is a divorcee of Ogden, Utah.

Mama Ochsner, aka Hilda, understandably weary from her efforts to keep women away from her son, and vice versa, didn't react immediately. 

It wasn't until April, seven months after the marriage, that Hilda asked the courts to have it annulled. She claimed Beth was legally married to another man at the time and that son Johnny was still a minor at the time. 

A cross complaint filed by Beth in May and including fat figures in the way of alimony and attorney fees, was dropped in November. 

Johnny’s escapades were still news.

On December 7, 1947, the Oakland Tribune reported:

JOHNNY OCHSNER IS FREE AGAIN ON ANNULMENT 

Johnny Ochsner, Oakland's come hither boy whose charms include two million dollars was free again today of romantic (the kind that binds) ties. Johnny, -who inherited his share of an oil fortune on his 21st birthday last May, received an annulment yesterday from his marriage to a Utah beauty shop operator, Beth Gailey Foley Ochsner, 24, who now lives at 418 49th Street. 

Of course, the papers mentioned Marguerite Human and Teresa Briston, Johnny’s stowaway lovers. How could they not?

So Johnny was free once again, a twenty-one-and-a-half year old newly minted millionaire.

I can find no further stories about any of these three women after December, 1947,  but Johnny continued to make news over the next few years. 

At the end of this news cycle where Johnny was just warming up, one newspaper ended a feature story on his romantic odyssey: 

“On one point. his two discarded loves and the woman he married agree. "He sure talks sweet," they sighed.”

[intermezzo]

I really wanted to focus more on Teresa Briston, the sixteen year old temptress Johnny met in Hawaii, in this episode. She was a girl who knew what she wanted and was clearly aware at this very young age what kind of power she could hold over men. A true femme fatale and a gorgeous grifter in the making. I know she was just a child, but some people get started early.

  Her mistake was getting involved with a spoiled rich kid whose mother brought in the police. I can find nothing about her after her being sentenced to the Utah girls’ reformatory for a year. It’s possible she learned the error of her ways, but I doubt it.

Sometime in 1948, Johnny got married again, this time to a woman named Mildred. Their marriage appears to have been somewhat tumultuous.

On September 7, the Examiner reported this story, headlined, Ochsner Heir Jailed in Spat With Wife; Aunt Bails Him Out.”

The story went on:

The roller coaster marriage of Johnny Ochsner, with its ups and downs, hit both a low and a high within a few hours early yesterday, The down grade came for the 22 year old Oakland oil heir when a resident at the rear of the Ochsner home, 5621 Roberts Avenue, phoned police that the loud arguments of Ochsner and his wife, Mildred, also 22, made sleep impossible, The complainant was Donald Meinzen, who, police said, insist-ed that Ochsner be arrested. 

The oil heir was hustled off to Oakland's eastern police station and booked for disturbing the peace. Then marital matters began to look up for him. He phoned his wife and she sped an aunt on the way to the police station with the $50 bail. When Johnny returned home, he happily told reporters: "Everything is fine." 

By the time for his court appearance yesterday, Meinzen had not been located to sign the complaint. The case was delayed until today. 

Police Sgt. Joseph Murphy said the Ochsners' quarrel started when Mrs. Ochsner returned home late.

Johnny and Mildred had two children, but their rocky relationship finally came to an end. On March 30, 1951, their divorce was finalized. 

Not one to wait, in January, two months before the divorce decree was final, Johnny had already remarried. As reported in the Examiner with the strange headline, “Oil Heir Johnny Ochsner and Wife No. 3 Remarried,” the article read.

Oil heir Johnny Ochsner and the red haired, green-eyed former cocktail waitress who is wife No. 3 on Johnny's marital merry-go- round, have been remarried. This was disclosed yesterday when Johnny, 24, appeared in superior court in Oakland to answer claims by wife No. 2 that he is behind on alimony payments. 

Ochsner's second marriage to No. 3—the former Mrs. Rosemarie Powell, once the wife of an Oakland refinery worker—took place Monday at the First Methodist Church at Twenty fourth Street and Broadway in Oakland. It was performed by Dr. George Warmer under a section of the civil code permitting a couple to publicly declare themselves man and wife. It requires no registration or license, 

The marriage had the effect of validating in California the original marriage of Johnny and wife No. 3 at Reno last January 30. This was two months before a divorce decree awarded wife No. 2, Mrs. Mildred Ochsner. 24. of 1940 Fourteenth Avenue, Oakland. became final.

And that’s the last news I can find of Johnny Ochsner, Oakland oil heir.

[intermezzo]

I just did one last search for “Ochsner” and found this article in the Examiner, date November 10, 1964. You won’t be surprised.

The headline was Ochsner Loses Wife No. 4

Kettleman oil heir John Ochsner's third marriage didn't end soon enough-and that's why wife No. 4 won an annulment yesterday in Ala-meda County Superior Court. Judge Lionel Wilson granted the annulment, by default, to Betty Jo Ochsner, 32. They were married nine years ago. Ochsner, 38, was also ordered to pay $75 monthly for support of daughter Cheryl Dawn, 7, and to sell his home at 15861 Corte Francisca, San Lorenzo Village, to set up an education trust fund for the girl. Mrs. Ochsner charged that Ochsner married her Oct. 2, 1955, while his marriage to wife No. 3, Rosemary Ochsner. did not end officially un- til Dec. 19, 1956. During the divorce proceedings (which lasted several years) with wife No. 3, Ochsner went to jail for five days because of contempt of court in failure to meet payments won by wife No. 2. 

I want to take a break and go back to an earlier part of this story. Do you remember that, after the oil was found on the Kettleman Ranch and the former wives came out of the woodwork, Ex-wife number one, Mrs. Frances Ochsner claimed she didn’t even realize that she was divorced from Henry until after his death? I’m not sure what the actual story was, but she did receive one million dollars from the estate, twice what ex-wife number two received.

Like father like son. Okay, back to the story

Ochsner and wife No. 3 also made a stir in Oakland social circles when a six-weeks' old daughter accompanied them on their honeymoon. 

Ochsner's entanglements began when he inherited $2,000,000; and as a sailor of 18, he was followed to Hawaii by a stow-away taxi-dancer, and back to the states again by a stowaway dusky-eyed Island girl.

Ochsner once pleaded to a judge he had to make so many alimony payments that his inheritance allowance wouldn't cover everything, and he had to go to work as a $205 a month employee at the Naval Supply Depot in Oakland. He is now sales manager for a beverage company.

This was 1964. I can’t find any further information about Johnny, his mother Hilda, or  his later wives. No further marriages, no divorces, no obituaries, which is strange.

Johnny cut a wide swath across the garden of eros and the affections of women, but so did Mike Prisco, wall-plasterer,  bigamist and wife seducer. I have feeling that none of Mike’s women would have stowed-away to follow him across the ocean, so, in a sense, this a tale in part about wealth and privilege. 

But let’s face it, Johnny went to jail for disturbing the peace when the neighbors called the police in the Oakland Hills and he did get a job to make ends meet to keep up with alimony and support payments, although that was much later. It’s hard to believe he blew through his inheritance, but perhaps he had. 

I have a feeling alcohol is a factor in this story, just a hunch.

I still wonder whatever happened to Teresa Briston. I thought the way newspaper portrayed her when she arrived in California to meet with Johnny and failed at first was a little unfair, somewhat mocking. Whatever else you can say about Teresa, the girl had chutzpah. I think she and Bob Patterson, aka Freddie Francisco, whom we met in an earlier episode of the secret history of Frisco , could have made some serious music together.

And I guess we can leave it there. 

[intermezzo]

The Secret History of Frisco is a listener supported podcast. Main episodes will always be free. Our website is www.thesecrethistoryoffrisco.com. Please join us on Patreon at www.Patreon.com/Frisco.  Visit the website for show notes, references, and bibliographies. Please take advantage of our free membership option on Patreon. Paid tier members, starting at as little as $1 a month, will receive ad-free and bonus episodes and other perks of membership.

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Once again, I’m your host, Knox Bronson. Thank you for listening. Until next time, please get a little crazy and call it Frisco.