Grandma

CRIME Grandma

One morning last October a mild-mannered, grey-haired little woman walked into the California Bank on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, quietly approached a teller's window, and laid a note on the counter. This done, she raised a paper bag in which she seemed to be holding a pistol, and waited patiently. The teller read the message: "This gun will talk and don't think I can't use it," and handed over $1,212 in currency.

Delighted Los Angeles headline writers immediately christened the old lady "Grandma" and waited for her to "strike again." She did. On Nov. 26 she hit the Citizens National Trust & Savings Bank for $257. The cops were, confident that Grandma was the little old lady who got $2,600 from the Union Bank & Trust Co.

Her getaways were wonderful--Grandma just seemed to vanish like smoke. But last week, when she tried to heist a bank in suburban Arcadia, her luck failed.

On being held up, Mrs. Lorene McGehee, the teller, just called the bank manager, who hustled out and took Grandma's toy gun away from her. "I'm not Grandma," cried Grandma. But when the cops questioned her, she broke down.

Grandma said her name was Ethel--Mrs. Ethel Arata, 52, four times married, four times divorced, and never a grandmother at all.

Grandma, it turned out, had gone from riches to rags; she was the only daughter of the late Robert M. Catts, a New York and Philadelphia financier who made a fast fortune in real estate and lost it in the crash of 1929. As a rich girl, Ethel traveled in Europe; afterward she turned to whisky, husbands and psychiatrists. As a holdup artist she was just an inspired, though eminently successful, amateur--she said she never planned her jobs, pulled them only on impulse and gave the money away. But she seemed to be enjoying her career in retrospect.

"You know," she said, "I've never been complimented for the many good things I have done. But here now -- in jail, mind you -- I'm a hero. All the girls are so sorry I was caught."

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