LAOOC--70,000 Dwindles to 10 : ‘Rear Guard’ Busy Tying Up Loose Ends of ’84 Summer Games

Once an army of 70,000 workers and volunteers, the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee has dwindled to a rear guard of 10, occupied with such leftovers as the legality of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Olympic pins and the disposition of everything from documents to surplus panty hose.

“It’s a bit of a letdown,” Carol Daniels, LAOOC general counsel, admitted the other day.

The organizing committee, which formerly occupied entire office buildings in Westwood and Culver City, is now squirreled away in converted living quarters above a garage that sits behind a three-story brick mansion on West Adams Boulevard.

“(Senior vice president) Ed Smith’s office is in the living room,” Daniels said with a laugh, “the file cabinets are in the kitchen, the Xerox machine is in the bathroom, and I work in the bedroom with (accounts supervisor) Pat (Morrow).”

One of the committee’s major tasks is to catalogue which papers will be made public, which will be put into storage and which will be destroyed.

“The paper work we’ve got would sink a battleship,” said Morrow, a former actress and television news writer.

The LAOOC is scheduled to shut down operations Jan. 1. A separately staffed LAOC Amateur Athletic Foundation, which is handling the distribution of surplus Olympic funds, will remain in business in the house in front.

LAOC?

“The USOC (U.S. Olympic Committee) only wants one Olympic committee now, so one ‘O’ was taken out,” Daniels said.

“But I’m not really sure which ‘O’ it was,” she joked.

Meanwhile, most Olympic equipment and furnishings that were stored in the LAOOC warehouse in Bell have been given away or auctioned off--but not 40 tall, tubular signposts made of heavy cardboard.

“We can’t give them away,” Morrow said. “Poor Jeff (Fick, the property manager). He thought there were only about 20 of them (when they arrived), and he lifted one up and there was a baby underneath--a smaller one packed inside. They were all packed that way. Jeff tried a sledge hammer on them, but that didn’t do anything. Now he’s looking for a buzz saw.”

Other remnants include two costumes from the Opening Ceremonies, which were utilized as Halloween costumes by LAOOC workers.

On this day, the office shared by Daniels and Morrow housed such leftovers as stacks of panty hose, a box of stockings, an electrocardiogram monitor, boxes of documents and two wooden, hand-held fans, all bound for as-yet undetermined destinations.

A few of the stockings have already been distributed.

“We wore some when it got cold in here,” Daniels admitted.

Also nearby was a copy of the 1,500-page, two-volume illustrated history of the Los Angeles Games. About 100 sets are still available to the public at $100 apiece.

One cupboard in the office contained several bags of counterfeit Olympic pins, some manufactured so sloppily that they contained misspellings such as caneoing and syncronize. Other pins got high marks for their spelling but bore pornographic scenes testifying to their suspicious origins.

“We’re turning the pins over to the USOC to see if they want to investigate,” Daniels said. “We had a lot of complaints about counterfeiting for a while, but lately there have been fewer.”

The last days of the LAOOC have also been marked by the U.S. Customs Service’s recent seizure of an incoming shipment of LAPD pins that showed the likeness of Sam the Eagle.

The pins were ordered released this week after it was determined that the Los Angeles Police Memorial Foundation, a support group of the LAPD, had previously secured permission to print them.

Lt. Dan Cooke, a police spokesman, joked: “It’s not Sam on those pins, anyway. It’s Officer Byrd (the LAPD’s macaw mascot).”

Lawsuits Pending

Other unfinished LAOOC business includes “less than two dozen” lawsuits still pending against the committee, according to Daniels, such as one relating to the ouster of a Jews for Jesus group that was passing out literature in the gymnastics venue. A bank account will be set up in case the committee has to pay any claims after Jan. 1.

Numerous other complaints have been resolved more or less amicably, including a questionable accusation by one man that the moon was actually a surveillance helicopter in disguise.

Sam the Olympic Eagle is the subject of a good percentage of the numerous phone calls the committee receives.

“People ask, ‘Can we have Sam in a parade?’ and we have to tell them no,” Morrow said.

“Sam was officially retired in September,” Daniels explained, but added, “Some sponsors still have Sams, so it’s always possible that one will get loose.”

Sam almost met a grimmer fate in Japan. A video game in which the Olympic Eagle was the target of gunfire was introduced there. But the manufacturer removed the game from the market after the LAOOC protested. “We said, ‘Let Sam live,’ and they agreed,” Morrow recalled.

The Los Angeles Olympics drew so many compliments for its smooth operation that the LAOOC still receives telephone inquiries about the most minute phases of the Games.

“A theater owner asked us where we got the portable showers used in the Games,” Daniels related. “Apparently he wanted to have a scene in a play with portable showers on stage. We looked through our records and never could figure out where we got them.

Requests for Advice

“We also get a lot of requests for advice from cities in other games, like the Pan-American Games, and from bid cities.”

Life after the LAOOC has been an adventure for some workers, a disappointment for others.

Morrow noted that some who could have returned to their former jobs declined.

“For example, we had attorneys not going back to their firms,” she said. “Dan Greenwood, a banker, becomes president of Riverside Raceway.” And, referring to the LAOOC’s former No. 1 and 2 people, she said: “Then, of course you have Peter (Ueberroth, now major league baseball commissioner) and Harry (Usher, now commissioner of the United States Football League).”

But some LAOOC people accepted positions too quickly--perhaps to fill the void left by the passing of the Olympics.

“A lot of people moved into a new job right away and are now on their second or third job since the Games,” Morrow said. “There just wasn’t the same excitement.”

Daniels and Morrow say they will take their time finding employment after Jan. 1.

“I want to find another cause or organization that I can believe in in the same way,” Daniels said. “It won’t be easy.”