His Olympics Gold Was Only for Laughs

When you laugh it up with Len Wayne, 47, of Costa Mesa, the subject most likely will get around to the “Olympic” gold medal he won in the comedy finals against what he called championship-caliber opponents.

And most likely you’ll get a crash course on how he happened to win.

This is the way it was:

“We were asked to pick a celebrity, imagine she was 100 years old and have her comment on men,” Wayne explained. He picked sexy superstar Joan Collins and gave this one-word answer: “Next.”

“That put me over the top--because I was nip and tuck with some other really good opponents,” said Wayne, who writes with humor for advertising agencies and with seriousness for radio commercials for the American Heart Assn. and about the dangers of using drugs.

Wayne and about 35 others, ranging in age from 17 to 81 , paid $175 each for a humor writers seminar that had the “Olympic” comedy competition as part of the weekend program.

He said his classmates came up with one-liners such as “she thought of becoming a nun but couldn’t get into the habit” and a gag about Bob Hope telling President Reagan at a Washington performance: “You should have been here sooner because we’ve been getting as many laughs as you got from Congress on your budget.”

The seminar was Wayne’s way of honing the humor skills he plans to sell to business people in Orange County. “They need humor, especially in speeches, presentations and commercials,” he said. “Executives need to laugh, too.”

And he parted with a tale about the new churchwoman who thought the Holy Trinity was Visa, MasterCard and American Express.

Back in 1965, when Ronald Fournier, 47, was hired as a postman to deliver mail in Buena Park, “I would dream that it would be wonderful if I was the postmaster,” he said, “but I knew it was just a thought.”

No longer. “Dreams with effort do come true,” he said after being installed as Buena Park postmaster.

Humor has been a mainstay in their 60 years of marriage, so when 150 friends put together a party to celebrate the silver anniversary of 84-year-olds Florence and Archie Arnold of Fullerton, they announced it with humor.

The invitation read: “No gifts under $3,000.” They did get a lot of cash, “but it was all in fake paper money,” she sighed.

People like to keep statistics, and La Habra Heights free-lance writer Marian Bond is no different, claiming 1.5 million of her words have been published in 17 years. She got that figure by multiplying 1,000 articles by about 1,500 words each. And that’s not counting rejected stories.

“The problem with lungs,” said Pearl Jemison-Smith of Garden Grove, “is they’re not a very attractive part of the body and they don’t get romantic diseases or have transplants like the heart does.”

That makes it difficult to raise money, said Jemison-Smith, the new president of the American Lung Assn. of California, despite the fact that lung disease is the fifth leading cause of death in the state--behind heart disease, cancer, stroke and accidents.

One of her objectives is to give the lung association better name identification “to make it easier to deliver our message,” said Jemison-Smith, an epidemiologist at UCI Medical Center. “That takes money.”

The message, among many, is the association’s goal to create a smoke-free environment by the year 2000. “We’ve already got that in many work places, so we’re on our way,” she said.

Acknowledgments--Brea Mayor Pro Tem Sam Cooper named chairman of the new Orange County Sanitation District 13, which monitors sewage and industrial chemical waste flow through Brea, Yorba Linda, Anaheim and Orange.