History Is Written in the City’s Streets

There are 100,000 manhole covers in the potholed city--and now some of them are official municipal historic artifacts.

The Los Angeles City Council has unanimously adopted the Cultural Affairs Commission recommendation “that certain manhole covers be designated as historic artifacts and that city agencies be instructed to preserve and protect these covers during street maintenance or urban renewal.”

Mimi Melnick is the inspiration for this unusual bit of municipal pride, having devoted the last 13 years to fighting to save manhole covers from the scrap heap when they are no longer needed or streets are repaved. Melnick said she has found manhole covers here dated 1882, but she won’t say where for fear that some collector may steal them.

And Los Angeles isn’t the only city preserving its historic manhole covers, according to Melnick, who published a book on the subject in 1974 titled “Manhole Covers of Los Angeles.” The Sacramento Museum and History Commission has adopted Melnick’s manhole cover preservation plan.

Melnick said she now has visions of saving Seattle’s manhole covers.

To see Los Angeles manhole covers, just drive down any street. But to see those officially judged historic artifacts, drop by the Heritage Square Museum.

Women Come to Her Rescue

It’s tough for women doing business with Saudi Arabians, who don’t share American notions of sexual equality. Raising money is even tougher.

Sheila Grether, a fund-raising consultant in Los Angeles, stopped by the Saudi embassy in Washington recently to pitch their director of medicine for a donation to one of her clients.

Just as Grether stepped forward to be introduced her high heel caught the hem of her dress, ripping it open to the waist.

Not to worry. Immediately women embassy employees ringed Grether, concealing her predicament and then quickly patching her dress with pins and tape.

Grether made her pitch. But she hasn’t heard yet whether her clients get a donation.

In the Relief Organization

At 47, French-born entrepreneur Yvette Pierpauli said she needed to “turn a page in my life.” So, three months ago she turned over direction of her Bangkok-based export-import firm to her partner and moved to Antigua, Guatemala, to establish project Tomorrow to assist Cakchiquel Indians displaced from their villages by political violence.

Pierpauli, in Los Angeles recently on a fund-raising expedition, said her new role “gives me much more satisfaction. When you are young, you sign a (business) contract for a couple of million and you are happy. When you have all of this nothing makes you more happy than seeing you can make a kid smile.”

Pierpauli went to Guatemala with $20,000--half from Operation California, the relief organization, and half from Fondation de France--and with in-kind donations of food and medicine. Tomorrow volunteers established self-help and medical care programs in Zaculeu and Agua Escondida, villages burned but now being rebuilt by about 1,000 Indians who have returned.

That population, Pierpauli said, is about half children, and there are many widows among the adults. Tomorrow distributed food, bought school equipment, supplied fertilizer for farms and shoes for children, opened a clinic and instructed women in the production and sale of native handicrafts.

Now, Pierpauli plans a health and education project in Puerto Barrios, a Caribbean port, to assist the city’s prostitutes and their children. She wants also to find “a nonconventional way to help 2,000 children living in Guatemala City--some orphans, some abandoned, some who have run away because their families cannot feed them.”

Pierpauli, who is paying administrative costs out of pocket, said she has used $20,000 of her own money, a small price, she figures, for what she terms the fulfillment of her “spiritual evolution.”

“The idea,” she said, “is to do relief business the same way I do my business, putting together money, ideas and people and leaving it in the hands of someone capable to run it, someplace where there is a need.”