People and Events

Miguel Sanchez, 19, was pulled to the surface in the El Sereno area of Los Angeles late Tuesday morning after, he told Hollenbeck Division police, he had been walking back and forth in a storm drain shouting for help since about 9 o’clock the night before.

He said he had been delivering handbills door to door and had fallen into an open manhole at Huntington Drive and Monterey Road.

Police said they did not see how that could be because the lid did not appear to have been off the hole in a year or two.

Sanchez, who declined to be taken to a hospital for an injured arm, was wearing only trousers and shoes. He told officers he had left his socks, shirt and I.D. down in the storm drain--along with his bag of advertising circulars.

Mystified, police let him go.

When a citizen saw a bloody body wrapped in plastic and stuffed into the back seat of a car parked beneath an overpass on Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica, he called the cops.

“It was very realistic,” reports Santa Monica Homicide Detective Ray Cooper. “You could see a head, some open wounds, matted hair and blood. There was a dripping liquid.”

The “body,” however, turned out to be a fiberglass and papier-mache mannequin.

Investigators quickly ran the license number and came up with the name of a nearby resident, Ron Magid, 26. He explained that the fright dummy was loaned to him by an actor who had performed in the film, “The Beast Within,” and that it had been a prop for a Halloween party.

He had never bothered to take it out of his car.

“He thought it was real funny that all the police were out there,” Cooper said. “I think we got the gravity of the situation over to him. He placed himself in a very precarious position. I’d hate to think if he had been stopped by a traffic officer and had made the wrong move.”

The fact that movie people and the like hang out at his Spago restaurant does not seem to impress the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is giving celebrated chef Wolfgang Puck a little trouble over the labeling of his about-to-be-released line of frozen pizzas.

For one thing, the department said, pizza must be made with tomato sauce and his wasn’t.

For another, complained the feds, the sausage in his Country Sausage pizza isn’t made in the country, but in the City of Commerce.

“Ridiculous,” Puck exclaimed Tuesday, wondering why “some bureaucrat in Washington” can tell him what should go into pizza. But he said he is adding tomato chunks to qualify his product as pizza.

As for the “Country Sausage” pizza, that’s now going to be “Spago’s Original Sausage and Herbs.”

“I just didn’t have time to go to court,” Puck explained. “I think I’m going to send them some pizzas in Washington to taste.”

Shortly after Lorraine Medina bought her new car from the agency where she is a clerk, it was rear-ended by another motorist. That was only a forerunner of trouble to come.

A pit bull terrier attacked it, doing nearly $1,000 worth of damage.

That did it for Medina, who decided to sell the car because “it’s bad luck.”

Her decision, she conceded Tuesday, does not elate her employers at Torrance Acura, but her mind is made up.

It was last week that her sister, Lucy, looked out the window of their Wilmington home and saw the pit bull on the hood, scratching and growling as a smaller dog cowered under the car.

The pit bull finally gave up its attempt to get at the other dog and ran away, leaving deep scratches on the hood and a lot of chewed-up metal in the wheel well. Insurance adjusters said they had never before seen dog damage like that.

Philippine Unity Pride (PUP), one of its officers points out, is the correct name of the organization that has become a principal sponsor of the California Bicentennial Foundation for the U.S. Constitution float planned for the Rose Parade on Jan. 1.

Not Filipino Unity Pride (FUP), as reported here Tuesday.