People and Events

It may have been the busiest phone in town during rush hour. At least California Highway Patrol officers thought it very strange when they began to receive call after call after call from one emergency call box. Finally, they realized what was happening on the Golden State Freeway at Glendale Boulevard shortly before 9 a.m. An RTD bus en route from Van Nuys to downtown stalled in the southbound lane, and many of the 35 worried passengers were frantically trying to call their bosses to tell them they’d be late.

The CHP dispatcher refused the calls and instead sent a patrolman out to explain life in the slow lane: Motorists who use the call boxes can only make one call, and that has to be to someone who can help them get their vehicle back in action. If all 35 calls had gone through, it would have tied up the emergency lines.

“The only time we ever make an exception for is if there’s a surgeon supposed to be in the operating room or something like that,” Officer Mark Lunn said later.

The RTD driver didn’t have any such phone problems. He simply used the bus radio to call the RTD dispatcher, who sent a bus to rescue the passengers an hour later.

Some of the angry passengers in the RTD bus could have made good use of The Revenger. One push of a button and they could have pretended to machine gun the call box, the stalled bus or both. The James Bond-like item, which looks like a radar detector and sits on a car dashboard, has flashing lights and makes sounds like machine guns, grenade launchers and something called death rays, which sound sort of like flying saucers landing. (And even better, the sounds can’t be heard outside the car.)

Some sociologists say that such an item might promote more driver unrest, but David McMahan, who invented the item for Charlotte, North Carolina-based Express Yourself Inc., says it gives a little comic relief to freeway madness, as well as help vent anger safely. McMahan said his frequent trips to Los Angeles gave him the idea for The Revenger last spring (before the rash of real freeway shootings.) He’s sold nearly 100,000 of the $20 items in the past six weeks, with stores in Los Angeles reporting brisk business.

McMahan says he especially likes to zap motorists who refuse to turn left when the light goes yellow. He explains: “For pedestrians, the death ray is enough. The machine gun takes care of autos, but for a tractor trailer, you need the grenade launcher.”

In a sort of life imitates art incident, Freddie Johns, 32, of Los Angeles was shot in the back early Monday at a Marina del Rey shopping center movie theater while watching the film “Nuts,” which stars Barbra Streisand as a woman on trial for murder. The gunman escaped by running through another theater, where the movie “The Running Man,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was showing, police said. The victim is in good condition at a local hospital. A suspect has been arrested.

The trendy Gumps store in San Francisco has decorated its holiday windows with live dogs and cats supplied by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The stray animals live in $12,000 air-conditioned “display rooms,” which each have a different theme: circus, attic nursery and toy store. Nearly a hundred of the lucky animals have been adopted by shoppers. Shelton Ellis, manager of the Gumps store in Beverly Hills, says his display is more appropriate for Los Angeles--a tribute to Hollywood. Hundreds of glittering stars, with pictures of actors and actresses, hang in the windows. But it’s just not the same. Shoppers can’t adopt them. “Actually, we’ve got plenty of the real kind,” Ellis said, “But they just come in the store to buy.”