Three Alhambra Men Witness (and Make) History

By Glenn Barnett

Ron Phillips grew up in the Airport Tract. After graduating from Mark Keppel, he joined the LAPD and became a Detective. On the night of June 12, 1994, he and his partner, Detective Mark Fuhrman arrived at the murder scene of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. After consulting with other officers, Phillips and Fuhrman left for the home of O.J. Simpson to inform him that his wife had been killed.

However, O.J. was in Chicago. While Fuhrman was finding a bloody glove, Phillips called O.J. to give him the bad news. Later, when he testified in court, Phillips noted that O.J. never asked a question about his wife’s murder or how it happened. Ron Phillips was a participant-witness to history.

An Almansor Park area resident was also a witness to history. Hibbard “Hib” Lamkin, whose two sons, Tim and David, attended Alhambra High School, worked for the State Department. His job was to provide security for foreign heads of state when they visited the west coast.

When President Kennedy was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, it was all hands on deck at the State Department, and Lamkin was ordered to Washington, D.C. He flew there on the 23rd to help with security for the heads of state that would attend the funeral of the President. By Sunday evening, his team had prepared a list of every nation that was sending a delegation to the funeral, the head of the delegation, how many people were in the delegation, what flight and airport they would be arriving at, and where they would be staying. When Hib arrived home two weeks later, he showed me that list.

Frank Onstine also deserves a footnote in history. Following World War II, Onstine settled in Alhambra in the Midwick Tract. There, he lived quietly working as an actuary. He and his wife Alice raised four children, Frank Jr. (Tom), Roger, John, and Martha, all of whom graduated from Alhambra High School.

As an actuary, he was a numbers man, and during the war, he had put his skills to good use. In 1942, he joined the US Army Signal Corps and served as a cryptographer in North Africa and Italy. By 1944, he broke the German weather code using a technique he developed and which British Code Breakers at Bletchley Park dubbed "Onstineing" in his honor. The Nazis never found out. For this, he was awarded the Legion of Merit medal.