People and Events

Downtown Los Angeles law clerk Rafael Martinez Jr. doesn’t eat as much as he once did. But several years ago he weighed so much that attorney Bill Pratt offered him $1,000 if he would lose 20 pounds.

He couldn’t do it. Pratt and others in the office saw to that with a steady barrage of cakes, pies, cookies, fudge and other attractions that Martinez admits he “couldn’t resist.” They taped large color photographs of food to his office door.

His family photographs were replaced with pictures of pigs and he became the recipient of innumerable toy pigs, candy pigs and stuffed pigs. A client with Japanese television station connections got interested and Martinez became famous in Tokyo and elsewhere.

Martinez claims he only weighed about 220 pounds. Pratt says it was more like 245--although “the legend grew so that we had him up to 492.1 pounds.”

These days, however, Martinez has become a marathon runner and has lost between 50 and 60 pounds. On Thursday, his 32nd birthday, Pratt and the rest of the Civic Center law firm surprised him with a party--and a pig-shaped cake.

They still didn’t give him the $1,000.

Talk about your chutzpah.

“Unbelievable,” Jerry Chester, executive vice president of the company that produces TV’s “Super Password,” said Thursday after he received a Mailgram from Kerry Ketchem demanding his $58,600.

That was the amount that made Ketchem one of the show’s biggest winners until a viewer in Anchorage recognized him as being wanted for fraud in Indiana and Alaska. Ketchem, 36, who called himself Patrick Quinn on “Super Password,” was arrested when he went to pick up his winnings at the Sunset Boulevard offices of Mark Goodson Productions.

Ketchem conceded in his Mailgram that “I wasn’t exactly whom I said I was,” but pointed out he won the TV game “on my own skills and merits” and that “ ‘Super Password’ has received priceless free publicity because of me.”

Ketchem also told Chester that he had been approached by NBC for a miniseries and by Columbia Pictures for a film. He added, “My attorney would prefer that this be settled immediately as to avoid bad press for ‘Super Password.’ ”

Because NBC-TV puts up the prize money, Chester said, the matter has been turned over to the network. NBC spokeswoman Merry Aronson said attorneys are reviewing the tape and that although “there appear to have been no irregularities in the playing of the game, it is very clear this contestant misrepresented himself.”

Goodson officials contended last week that Ketchem should not be paid because he misrepresented his identity, but NBC observed then that it may be legally forced to pay up anyway.

About the miniseries and movie offers: Aronson said, “I have no knowledge of that and it sounds very unlikely.”

A nearly blind mountain lion who stumbled into a Chatsworth neighborhood and was promptly chased up a tree by dogs with more courage than sense lay around the hospital at the Wildlife Waystation on Thursday, waiting for veterinarians to decide whether her cataracts are curable.

“If she is going to be permanently blind, I would recommend euthanasia,” said Martine Colette, director of the private animal refuge in Little Tujunga Canyon. “You can’t set it free and it’s inhumane to keep it in an enclosure bumping its head against the wall.”

The 90-pound animal was captured Wednesday after a lively scrap with Los Angeles city animal control officers called to Chatsworth Street when the dogs treed what they probably viewed as the beginning of the end for the neighborhood.

Colette said the errant lion did not appear to be more than 8 or 9 years old--”about middle-aged”--and that not many wild animals that young are seen with cataracts. On the other hand, she pointed out, such creatures normally don’t wander into residential areas and those who go blind in the wild “generally starve to death.”

Pothole update:

County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn reported Thursday that he is out only $3 as a result of his recent offer to pay $1 for every pothole reported in unincorporated areas of his district. Of 32 potholes reported, Hahn said, 16 were in the city of Los Angeles and three were in incorporated areas. Of the remaining 11, he said, an inspection by the county Road Department showed that only three were anything more than minor cracks.