People and Events

Have a blue Christmas.

Procrastinators who are still looking for the uncommon gift can deck their friends like L.A.’s Finest: T-shirts, baseball caps and more adorned in blue with “LAPD.”

The force can be with anyone who chooses from among such cop novelties as LAPD mugs (the coffee variety, not mug shots), and 50 styles of sweat shirts and T-shirts, at a nonprofit shop at the Police Academy in Elysian Park.

Not to be outgunned, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has “The Emporium” at its Whittier academy, with items like silk-screened T-shirts or chic handcuff cases.

None of the LAPD wares is serious police gear--no bulletproof vests, for example--but “we’re probably as close to the LAPD as you can get,” says manager Curt Hartman, who notes this is a record Christmas for law-and-order orders.

It was even a seller’s market for four custom-made teddy bears, fitted out like motorcycle officers--helmet, sunglasses, gun, the whole bit, at $125 each. “We sold every one of them.”

Still no word on the fate of another bear in blue, Billy (Club) Bear, purloined from the LAPD’s Foothill Division, with only a ransom note and a chilling photo left behind of Billy with a pistol muzzle at his head.

But someone has stepped in with a plainclothes substitute, a bare bear left at the front desk with a bunch of roses and a tag that said, “We Love You.”

“I just came in and saw a little bear there,” Lt. Maurice Rubio said. “I don’t know who replaced it.” Billy, says Officer John Damascus, is “still outstanding.”

After the slide, he was called safe.

Michael Macumber, a 19-year-old Pasadena City College student, was hiking around Mt. Wilson on Sunday when he and two friends accidentally slipped down a 1,000-foot ice chute, an ice-paved crevice coursing at a 60-degree angle down the mountainside.

After 5 or 10 feet, his friends managed to grab something and stop.

But what happened to Macumber, they give Olympic gold medals for. Except the medalists are usually in bobsleds.

Sheriff’s deputies say Macumber, wearing ski pants and jacket, hit the steep, 1,000-foot chute feet-first, and when he landed at the bottom, his injuries totalled a few bruises and a missing left boot.

It took perhaps a minute or so to get down, but it took six hours to get back up--three hours for deputies to find him by following his cries, and another three to extricate him with ropes and pulleys--”cold, and a little scared,” said Deputy Roger Hom, but otherwise fine.

Maybe they were too busy rescuing Macumber to consult a dictionary. . . .

The Sheriff’s Department’s acid-green 1988 press pass stickers were being handed out to local news media on schedule until Monday, when one reporter pointed out a tiny error.

It isn’t that the lawmen were unlettered; there were, in fact, too many letters. They had spelled it “sherriff. “

“There’s a little problem with the stickers. . . . “ acknowledged one of the sheriff’s men. “What we’re gonna have to do is recall those.”

Trade in the sleigh and put the reindeer out to pasture.

Eight merchants on Gin Ling Way in Chinatown decided in the interests of “ethnic honesty” that an Asian St. Nick should arrive in appropriate fashion at the Castellar School on Monday. About 20 schoolchildren were waiting when Santa-actor Richard Lee Sung, who played an itinerant Korean peddler in the “M*A*S*H” TV series, rolled up to distribute candy and toys to a growing crowd of neighborhood kids--and adults--who eventually numbered more than 100.

Santa’s conveyance: a coolie-powered rickshaw.