People and Events

First, Redondo Beach City Manager Tim Casey had to change the site of his “State of the City” address--last week’s storms nearly destroyed the harbor restaurant where he was to deliver the speech today.

Now, he says, “I’m thinking of revising the title, from ‘State of the City’ to ‘Where is the City?’ ”

The gentleman who hands out the Nobel Prizes is coming to call.

King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden and his wife, Queen Silvia, will wind up a 17-day U.S. tour in Los Angeles. They arrive April 25 for a Swedish banquet and reception, a technology symposium called “Salute to Sweden” at Disneyland and a tribute by the movie industry to Swedish films.

Their American sojourn--and first Los Angeles visit since the 1984 Olympics--commemorates “New Sweden ‘88,” the 350th anniversary of the founding of the first Swedish settlement in the New World, along the Delaware River. And California, which skews most demographic charts already, is now home to more Swedish-Americans than any other state, says a consular spokeswoman.

The trip was deemed too taxing for the couple’s children--Victoria, 10, Carl Philip, 8, and Madeleine, 5. Victoria is heiress to the throne after the Swedish Parliament, a few years back, approved a law giving princesses equal rights to the crown.

As traffic jams go, this one qualified as a full-scale PigAlert.

A truck toting 44,000 pounds of Kansas pig carcasses destined for Los Angeles smacked into another truck and overturned in the Cajon Pass late Sunday night, scattering the porkers and closing southbound lanes for hours. “We had pigs all over the freeway,” said California Highway Patrol Officer John Savage.

No one was injured in the accident. The pigs, of course, were already dead.

Mourned Savage: “These little piggies didn’t make it to market.”

You can’t keep a good pilot down.

Last October, Dan Rogers was ferrying a medical team and supplies to a village deep in Suriname, once a Dutch colony in South America. He was met by the Jungle Commandos, a renegade army fighting a civil war.

They wanted something from Rogers, a volunteer with the Mission Aviation Fellowship. They wanted . . . flying lessons.

Last week, three months after he was Cessna-napped and held for a week while he taught the Jungle Commandos’ leader to fly, Rogers and his wife and three children flew out of Los Angeles International Airport to return to Suriname, said Jack Walker of the Redlands-based evangelical Christian group.

“They had come to know and love the people, regardless of the political conflict that was swirling around them,” said Walker, and villagers “depended upon the air service as their lifeline.”

The Rogers family, like the other two U.S. Fellowship families in Suriname, will stick to safer territory--but in another airplane. The rebels kept the Cessna.

It isn’t Landis’ building . . . but it’s still Landis.

A while back, many people misread a Times article and concluded that the folksy Larchmont-area Landis Department Store had been sold.

The store building has been sold, all right, but Bob Landis says he is still open for business--and will be, thanks to a long-term lease.

And a good thing, too. As a community newspaper noted, “Larchmont without Landis is like chocolate chip cookies without the chips.”