city is depicted in various Raymond Chandler novels, where Santa Monica is thinly disguised as Bay City. A sequence in Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely was inspired by the true story of the S.S. Rex. Beginning in 1928, gambling ships started anchoring in Santa Monica Bay just beyond the 3-mile (5.6 km) limit. Water taxis ferried patrons from Santa Monica and Venice. The largest such ship was the S.S. Rex, launched in 1938 and capable of holding up to 3,000 gamblers at a time. The Rex was a red flag to anti-gambling interests. After state Attorney General Earl Warren got a court order to shut the ships down as a nuisance, the crew of the Rex initially fought off police by using water cannons and brandishing sub-machine guns. The engine-less ship surrendered after nine days in what newspapers called The Battle of Santa Monica Bay. Its owner, Anthony Cornero, went on to build the Stardust casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. The greatest benefit to the city came from the Douglas Corporation when it built the DC-3 commercial aircraft. The DC-3, which first flew from Clover Field, was a terrifically successful airliner that transformed the air transportation business and brought needed jobs to the city. In a more modest show of entrepreneurship, Merle Norman founded her cosmetic business, Merle Norman Cosmetics in 1931 by making creams and cosmetics on her kitchen stove. Both her former house and her 1933 Streamline-styled business headquarters are well maintained. The federal Works Project Administration helped build several buildings in the city, most notably City Hall. The 1938 Art Deco structure was designed by Donald Parkinson and features terrazzo mosaics by Stanton Macdonald-Wright. The main Post Office and Barnum Hall (Santa Monica High School auditorium) were among several other WPA projects. 1940s Douglas's business grew astronomically with the onset of World War II, employing as many as 44,000 people in 1943. To defend against air attack set designers from the Warner Brothers Studios prepared elaborate camouflage that disguised the factory and airfield. In 1945, Santa Monica City College started the Community Radio Workshop (CRW) to teach returning GIs broadcasting and used the call letters KCRW. (Later KCRW became a popular and innovative NPR affiliate.) The Sears building was built in 1947 at the south end of the retail district and has retained architect Rowland Crawford's original late-Moderne styling. The RAND Corporation began as a project of the