People and Events

Dutch tourist Leo Koewe canceled his return ticket to the Netherlands Monday afternoon. Then he settled down at the Trans World Airlines terminal to wait for his dog. “I start my hunger fast now,” said Koewe, “until I get my dog back.”

Koewe, 50, a singer and composer, hasn’t seen Loekie, who is part terrier and part poodle, since putting her in a cage and booking her on a TWA flight from Dallas last Thursday. After a Christmas visit with his sister in the Texas city, Koewe was on his way to see a friend in Huntington Beach.

Koewe arrived in Los Angeles. Loekie didn’t.

“I pray to God that wherever she is and if she is alive, I will not get back a ruined dog mentally,” Koewe said. “She hated to go in that cage.”

TWA spokesman Don Morrison said in St. Louis, “This is highly unusual. I don’t remember the last time a dog didn’t show up, and we just don’t know what happened.”

He said TWA was doing everything it could to find Loekie.

Attorney Melvin Belli said he does not know the Los Angeles belly dancer by any name other than the one she uses: Little Egypt. Nevertheless, he is planning to meet with her today to file suit seeking to prevent anyone else from calling herself (or possibly himself) Little Egypt.

The so-called King of Torts said that his client has legally registered the appellation as her own and that she is upset over its use by a woman mud wrestler “who has besmirched it.”

Asked what effect that might have on Catherine Devine, who shimmied her way to fame as “Little Egypt” at the Chicago World’s fair in 1893, Belli replied:

“The original Little Egypt has gone to the tombs of the Pharaohs a long time ago.”

Belli’s Little Egypt presumably is the one who has performed in Las Vegas and elsewhere and who says she is the granddaughter of the original.

Long Beach police have been offered an armored truck by a company that has donated several others to various law enforcement agencies as it replaces its vehicles with new diesel-powered ones. But first, the cops have to declare what they plan to use it for.

It’s not that Armored Transport Inc. is afraid the officers will use it for something controversial like smashing into rock houses, says John Cassotta, ATI corporate director of security. But “there are some cities where you donate it to the police and along comes the street department and takes it away from them.”

The 88-year-old Massachusetts sister of Amelia Earhart admitted to a longstanding gripe when she showed up in Burbank on Monday to help promote a book about the famed aviator who disappeared over the Pacific while trying to fly around the world in 1937.

“It’s always annoying and frustrating to have stories going around about her that she was a spy,” said Muriel Earhart Morrissey. “You don’t like to have names like that thrown around.”

The theory that Amelia Earhart crashed while attempting to help the U.S. Navy gather intelligence about Japanese-held islands in the Pacific before World War II was the subject of a novel and a 1943 Rosalind Russell film, “Flight for Freedom.”

Other contentions include one that the flier is living in Japan.

“Personally,” said the new book’s author, Carol L. Osborne, “I believe she’s at the bottom of the ocean.”

Longtime Miss Universe emcee Bob Barker, who is an animal activist, let it be known in Hollywood Monday that he has quit because show officials plan to award a fur coat once again--despite what he says was a promise to the contrary.

“For years I have urged them to stop giving away a fur coat to the winner of the pageant,” Barker said. “Now I have been told that they are going to use a fur coat as an award on the March 1 show from El Paso, Tex.”

Pageant official George Honchar, who has been discussing the issue with Barker, reportedly left for Taiwan on Monday and could not be reached for comment.