People and Events

If Hollywood Division homicide detectives don’t track down a fast-moving suspect named Herman and put him away for keeps, their secretary may quit. Herman is a gray field mouse who has taken up residence in the station and has been making lickety-split appearances far too often to suit Martha Chacon.

Although Chacon has a stuffed mouse on her desk, she says she doesn’t want a live one around. About a week ago, one of the detectives told her Herman was on the loose again--just as someone else sneaked up from behind and touched her ankle with a ruler.

Not surprising, she jumped from her chair, shrieked and threatened to quit.

“She didn’t really mean that,” Detective Russ Kuster said Thursday. “She was just excited. She’s sort of settled down now.”

That’s not the way Chacon told it. “They scared the you-know-what out of me,” she said. “My stomach got all in knots. They all thought it was cute.”

Then on Thursday morning, Herman shot past as she was bending down to get a bag of coffee from a cabinet.

Did she mean it about quitting?

“Yes. If they don’t get rid of this mouse.”

It’s not clear whether the unidentified passenger turned in his questionnaire when he arrived in Los Angeles on an American Airlines plane the other day. The survey form, given to everyone boarding the plane at Sacramento, asked such questions as how the service was and . . . well, you know.

The man took his seat in the front of the airplane and was looking over the questions when a flight attendant opened an overhead luggage rack--out of which tumbled a stainless steel coffee pot. It hit him on the head.

Most of the flight, say fellow passengers, the victim sat, holding ice to his wound and being checked on by apologetic attendants.

“Well,” said state Sen. William Campbell (R-Hacienda Heights), who was aboard, “there goes his survey.”

That big painting of John McEnroe on the side of the old Equitable Building at Hollywood and Vine is about to be painted over, says muralist Ramiro Fauve, who with fellow artist David Larks has been hired to do the job.

Larks and another muralist put up the 100-by-60-foot depiction of McEnroe in casual clothes and Nike shoes some time back as one of a series of portraits of famous jocks (Pedro Guerrero, Lester Hayes, et al.) advertising the athletic footwear. McEnroe’s replacement?

Bo Jackson.

And will Jackson be portrayed as a football player or a baseball player?

Actually, says Fauve, the black-and-white photograph from which he and Larks will be working shows Royal-Raider Jackson with his shirt off, wearing football shoulder pads and holding a baseball bat across the back of his neck.

The Caltech dining hall reopened Thursday after health officials decided that it wasn’t food poisoning that sent about 100 students and staff members to the campus health center and Huntington Memorial Hospital during the past week.

The victims complained of vomiting, nausea, severe stomach cramps and temperatures up to 104 degrees.

Apparently, doctors concluded, it was just a concentrated flu attack.

Betty-Jean Prosser, public health nursing director for the Pasadena Department of Health, said that none of the food samples from the dining hall showed evidence of food poisoning. “For now,” she said, “it looks like a virus.”