Charles Donald Lowrie (1875-1925) left his Massachusetts home as a young man and hopscotched westward working as a stenographer, construction camp timekeeper, bookkeeper, railroad laborer, and traveling salesman before finding himself in Los Angeles starving and broke save for a vandalized nickel in his pocket - a nickel that would decide his fate: "heads" meant crime, "tails" meant suicide. What he couldn't know as he flipped...