People and Events

G-o-o-o-d morning, Ventura FREEWAY!

Caltrans says it will soon take to the airwaves on two low-frequency radio channels in the San Fernando Valley and Orange County, broadcasting intermittent roadway reports and explanations of how it spends taxpayer money.

Motorists on the Ventura Freeway will be able to find out why they’re stalled by tuning in to 1610 AM beginning in April. Caltrans will start serenading drivers crawling along in the vicinity of the Santa Ana and Costa Mesa freeways on 530 AM next month. The two areas were chosen because they’re the sites of construction projects.

No auditions for professional deejays are planned, said Albert Miranda, a Caltrans spokesman in Orange, but he is searching for employees with pleasant voices. “I’ve got a little recorder I’ve been carrying around to see how they come across,” he disclosed.

Caltrans isn’t expecting to set any ratings records but is conscious of the broadcasts’ competition. Noted Miranda: “We hope to make them more light-hearted than LAX’s mundane messages,” referring to the take-the-upper-level, take-the-lower-level commentary broadcast on 530 AM near the airport.

There it was, $400,000 in coins lying on the Pomona Freeway. And you were home asleep.

Brinks, however, was no doubt thankful that the cleanup of its inadvertent deposit near the Azusa Avenue overpass could be conducted in the early hours Thursday morning when traffic was sparse.

The trouble began when the truck blew a tire and flipped over. Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters and half dollars, all packaged in cartons, flew through the truck’s damaged roof and spread over a 100-foot stretch of roadway. “It’s now a convertible,” California Highway Patrol spokesman Lyle Whitten said of the truck.

He added that “some drivers started to pull over when they saw it was a Brinks truck.” But they were deterred by Brinks guards who, though they had suffered minor injuries, emerged from the wreck brandishing shotguns.

The massive coin return took more than four hours before the last of the loot was swept up at 3 a.m. Witnesses figure that $399,990 or so was recovered.

“That doesn’t mean that . . . there aren’t going to be some people sneaking around in the bushes looking for some coins,” predicted Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Gary Decew.

Students were firing paper gliders at Don Bosco Technical Institute Thursday, but the teachers weren’t the targets this time.

It was a flight competition as part of National Engineers Week. To guard against cost overruns, the glider manufacturers were limited to one piece of stationery, two inches of tape and one paper clip or two staples.

Sophomore electronics major Fred Nacino had the best hang time, 5.12 seconds, while electronics instructor Ricardo Mireles, proving that he hadn’t lost his touch since his student days, achieved the greatest distance, 52 feet, 6 1/2 inches.

Overnight delivery, it ain’t.

Forty-four years ago, while he was serving in Africa, Pvt. Robert Chase wrote a letter to his wife, Lois. It will be delivered to her at noon today in Alhambra by U.S. Postal Service officials.

But you can’t blame the post office for this one.

Chase’s letter was one of 235 written by the men aboard the S.S. Caleb Strong and handed to a soldier who was sailing back to the States. He was supposed to mail them. He didn’t.

“Two years ago, a man exterminating an attic in North Carolina found them in a duffel bag,” said Postal Service spokesman Paul Griffo.

Since then, the Postal Service has tracked down all but three of the 92 families. Chase’s family read of the hunt in a magazine article and contacted postal authorities.

Chase won’t attend the presentation, however. “He and Lois have since divorced,” Griffo said.

A Los Angeles man traveling via United Airlines was arrested and charged with cocaine possession in Lansing, Mich., after a suspicious ticket agent at Los Angeles International Airport alerted authorities. The suspect was carrying about $11 million worth of cocaine, Lansing Detective Gene Wrigglesworth said.

Why was the ticket agent suspicious? The unidentified man had bought a ticket to return to Los Angeles three hours after arriving in Michigan. And he was carrying three bags.