Times 125th Anniversary

Eighty years ago, during the first live radio broadcast of the Rose Parade, tragedy struck when a wooden grandstand collapsed, killing 11 people and injuring 200. In separate incidents, a woman watching the event lost her balance and plunged to her death from a two-story building, and a police officer was thrown from his horse and trampled, suffering spinal injuries. The day remains the deadliest in Rose Parade history.

USC's fourth-string quarterback, Doyle Nave, who had logged 28 minutes all season, was called upon to save the Rose Bowl game against Duke University. Nave completed four consecutive passes, the last a 19-yard scoring strike in the final minute that wrecked Duke's undefeated season. USC won, 7-3, in one of college football's greatest finishes.

Declining business along once-thriving Wilshire Boulevard forced the 68-year-old Ambassador Hotel to shut its doors. The majestic hotel had played host to six Academy Awards ceremonies as well as countless movie stars and other dignitaries, including Charlie Chaplin and Winston Churchill. But it is perhaps best known as the site of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's assassination in 1968.

Teary-eyed jockeys, trainers and grooms gathered at the Santa Anita racetrack winner's circle and 24,000 spectators choked back emotions as taps were played for racing immortal George Woolf, 36, who died two days earlier after being thrown from his mount, Please Me. Woolf won the first three Hollywood Gold Cups on Seabiscuit, Kayak II and Challedon. He also won the first Santa Anita Handicap aboard Azucar.

The Southland was hit by the first in a wave of storms that dumped 11.4 inches of rain. The resulting floods killed 20 people and sparked a flurry of lawsuits, many of them aimed at rainmaker Charles Mallory Hatfield, who billed himself as a "Moisture Accelerator." The city of San Diego had hired Hatfield to coax precipitation from the clouds. His career inspired a Broadway play that became the 1956 film "The Rainmaker," starring Burt Lancaster.

Six members of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul stepped off a dusty stagecoach and embarked on a mission to help the sick and the poor. They established the city's first hospital, the Los Angeles Infirmary (later known as St. Vincent Medical Center), and the city's first private school and orphanage (now called Maryvale and located in the city of Rosemead). The Daughters also brought charitable fundraising to the sleepy pueblo. It went well beyond passing the plate at church.

The Los Angeles Mirror, an afternoon newspaper since 1948 that Times Mirror Co. owned, ceased publication. The Mirror consolidated with The Times on Jan. 8. The paper had been renamed in 1954, being briefly called the Mirror-Daily News, but it was again known as the Mirror at the time it folded.

Convicted Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss tells a federal judge in a letter at her sentencing hearing that she was "young and stupid and

Flaunting the mild winter weather the way the Rose Parade carriages did, California staged the nation's first air show at Dominguez Field, now the site of Cal State Dominguez Hills. Thousands of flight enthusiasts gathered to gawk at Glenn Hammond Curtiss, who broke the world air speed record by whizzing along at 55 mph. They also watched the first bombing experiment, a passenger in a biplane dropping 2-pound sandbags on target.

The sunny Southern California sales pitch that sold train tickets, bungalows and vacant lots by the millions was buried under a blanket of white. In the middle of Los Angeles' worst housing shortage, more than half an inch of snow covered the Civic Center. In the San Fernando Valley, almost a foot of snow accumulated over three days. The Rose Bowl was transformed into "a dishpan full of milk," according to one account. An Alhambra hardware store put up a sign: "Snowplows for Rent -- Hurry!"