Before William Wrigley Jr. died in his sleep on the morning of Jan. 26, 1932, his long grey-brown mountain in the sea off Southern California (purchase price $3,000,000, improvements $20,000,000) had become a profitable combination of poor man's Nassau and rich man's Coney Island. Last week, when the U.S. Maritime Service opened its second largest training station for merchant seamen on Catalina's crescent-shored Avalon bay, only the shape of the island remained as William Wrigley left it.
For thrill-loving tourists, for the great, near-great and notorious, Catalina had been nepenthe. President Harding was enroute there when he died in San Francisco....