Peirson Mitchell Hall

Peirson Mitchell Hall, known as Peirson M. Hall, (1894–1979) was a member of the Los Angeles City Council from 1925 to 1929, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California from 1933 to 1937, a judge in the Los Angeles Superior Court from 1939 to 1940, head of the U.S. Selective Service System for Los Angeles in 1941 and a federal District Court judge from 1942 to 1979. He was considered the foremost authority of aviation law among the nation's 500 federal judges.

Hall was born in Armour, South Dakota, on July 31, 1894, and attended two years of high school in Tecumseh, Nebraska. He lived in a Nebraska orphanage for a time before moving to Los Angeles to study law. He took a one-year course at Polytechnic High School (Los Angeles), then attended the University of Southern California Law School at night in 1912–16. He began his legal practice in 1916.

Hall was married five times. He and his first wife were divorced in 1929, and Hall sued journalist Fred H. Girnau for libel when Girnau printed a two-column article asserting that testimony at the divorce proceedings showed that Hall "used the pretty face of his wife for a punching bag." Hall's attorney declared the statement untrue and Mrs. Hall said the report was false and malicious.

The longest marriage was to Gertrude May Engel, beginning in 1930. They had two daughters, Mary and Suzanne, and were divorced in 1956 after court battles that lasted several years. She died in 1964. His fourth wife was Kathryn Kyle Black, whom he married in Kansas City, Kansas, in November 1956. She died in 1970. Next he married Mari Bahn, who died in February 1973.

Hall, who had been a Mason and an Elk, died on December 8, 1979.

See also List of Los Angeles municipal election returns, 1925, 1927 and 1929

Hall was elected to the Los Angeles City Council to represent District 11 in 1925 and was reelected in 1927. The 11th District originally encompassed an area south of Downtown, bounded on the north by Sixth Street, on the south by Pico Boulevard, on the west by Hoover Avenue and on the east approximately by San Pedro Street].

...
Wikipedia