It Was an Ice Day for Some

It was a good day for the North Hollywood Ice Co., which sold more than 60 tons of ice Wednesday, including an emergency shipment to a pet cemetery.

It was a good day for Los Angeles Kings hockey players, who avoided the 101-degree heat with clear consciences by working out in the Culver City Ice Rink.

It wasn’t a good day for the children at Roscoe Elementary School in Sun Valley, many of whom sweltered in classroom temperatures of 90 degrees that left them, in the words of one teacher, “frustrated, irritable, nauseous and lethargic.”

But good or bad, the oppressive weather was there--”the mute placidity of nature, indifferent to the great city,” as novelist John Fante described it--and the question was how to cope.

One county lifeguard, Scott Linkletter, estimated the whopping crowd that turned out at South Bay beaches alone at 100,000 and joked that any non-beachgoers were “at a mall.” Indeed, Wendy Nobilie, a spokesman for the air-conditioned Glendale Galleria mall, said, “Our crowd was much bigger than the usual Wednesday. We had a lot of seniors and mothers with children trying to get cool.”

Al Ricco of the Midnight Mission noted that the building’s television room was packed at midday, the homeless attracted as much by the sound of the three fans whirring inside as the dialogue on the screen.

Perhaps, after a mild August and a downright cool July--remember that 70-degree high July 16?--a pair of 101-degree days was inevitable in Los Angeles where, it’s been said, the seasons really do change. You just don’t know what season each day will bring.

Temperatures reached 109 in Monrovia, 107 in Woodland Hills and 106 in Burbank. Plus it was muggy and smoggy--both the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys were hit with first-stage alerts.

Yet some took comfort in the fact that in disaster-prone Southern California, things could have been worse.

“The hot, kinda still air . . . those rain clouds we had for a while--looked to me like earthquake weather,” said news vendor Roy Johnson.

A Bit Cooler

And there was the consolation that temperatures were expected to plunge to around 98 downtown today.

For most of the city, it was business as usual. No power outages or heat-related deaths were reported.

Even the City Council, which had adjourned for lack of a quorum Tuesday on the first 101-degree day, got enough members to show up for a session Wednesday.

It was, in fact, an appropriate day for the California Bicentennial Foundation to announce plans for a Centennial Sandcastle Competition.

And heat or no heat, Frances Moreland, 69 and legally blind, said she wanted to see the church where Pope John Paul II will spend the night later this month--St. Vibiana’s Cathedral. So she rode the bus from Granada Hills to downtown Los Angeles, and then wearily hiked the steaming sidewalks past sleeping derelicts who had written off the day.

“I had to come see it because my parents were born in Poland,” she said. “I’m very religious; I go to the church where Pat Boone goes.”

Show Doesn’t Go On

One place where it wasn’t quite business as usual was the Los Angeles County Zoo where the cat and bird demonstrations were canceled when temperatures on their stage reached 120 degrees.

No one welcomed the heat at Roscoe Elementary School. Air-conditioning of the classrooms was approved in 1983. But, after numerous delays, half the school still has no relief.

“We kept the lights off, and I brought water to class,” said Kathy Binnie, a fifth-grade teacher, “but it was still terrible. It makes everyone irritable, including the teachers.”

Some irritability was inevitable on the streets of the city as well.

“A lot more people were honking at each other,” said news vendor Leon Blow from his corner at Temple and Broadway.

But no serious freeway violence was reported.