People and Events

California Highway Patrol officers could hardly have found a grimmer illustration of the merits of seat belts:

A 31-year-old Los Angeles man was killed when he was thrown from his car as it struck a guardrail on the Long Beach Freeway in Commerce. The vehicle plunged into a chain-link fence about 35 feet below. The driver had failed to buckle his seat belt. Paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene.

His name was withheld until relatives could be told.

A CHP officer discovered a teddy bear still in the wreckage, intact.

It had been strapped into the seat next to the driver.

Robert Pollock says that he is a proper English butler and that he was appalled Thursday to see the photograph in this space of a butler pouring tea for a Duchess of York look-alike.

“No proper butler would ever serve tea or any other drink from the left,” sniffed Pollock, 56, who explained that he is here for a while to help his employer set up a home in Palm Springs. “It must appear to anybody that it is very clumsy to pass (the teapot) across a person to reach a cup.”

Not only that, said Pollock, “the duchess look-alike has her cup poised. That would be very bad form indeed.”

Pollock, who claimed to have served royalty and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, but who declined to identify his employer, said he would soon be returning to his normal place of employment in the Channel Islands.

Not soon enough, his tone said.

What, Whittier Daily News Managing Editor Bill Bell wondered in print, has happened to the gold (actually bronze) fireplug in front of Larry Haendiges’ plumbing firm at Philadelphia Street and Friends Avenue?

The beautiful plug had suddenly been replaced by one of the standard baby blue fireplugs that dot most of Whittier. Bell was concerned because the plug originally was a gift to him from the manufacturer. He, in turn, presented it to Haendiges nearly two years ago as a trophy for giving the most money in a local charity drive.

The switch was a mystery--until someone asked Haendiges himself. He said the bronze plug, one of only several in the Southland, had been removed temporarily so it could be returned to gleaming, golden beauty after a blue paint job administered by vandals. Efforts to restore it in place had failed.

He declined to point in any direction, but he confirmed Bell’s information that Whittier College is just across the street. “They were having a homecoming that weekend,” said Haendiges. “That might have had something to do with it.”

It’s not always easy to remember somebody that one has met at a party. Even the night before. So it can only be surmised that either Beverly Hills realtor Mike Silverman or former actress-turned-business tycoon Bonita Granville Wrather has terrific powers of recall.

Silverman and Wrather recently were introduced at a gathering and decided that they knew each other from somewhere.

It turned out that during World War II, Silverman was making his first visit to Los Angeles as a member of the Army Air Corps. Of course he dropped into the Hollywood Canteen, where actresses, starlets and would-bes tried to keep servicemen from feeling lonely.

A young actress asked him to dance.

Well, you know.

Another world-girdling motorcyclist is in town, but he got here a few weeks ahead of his motorcycle. Billy Shaw, 37, a former Northern Ireland cash register salesman who sold his house in Belfast to take off on his trip, said he expects his mount to get here from Sydney (his last stop) within a few weeks.

Shaw is taking his lengthy ride to call attention to hunger and other problems in the Third World. Specifically, he is trying to stir support for the We Care organization in Belfast, which he said is setting up an aid project for poor children in Nairobi.

So far on his jaunt, he said, he has crashed on his bike in Sudan, has been arrested in the same country for photographing hungry children and has had the motorcycle stolen by police in Egypt. (He managed to get it back by signing a paper in Arabic “which they assured me was OK.”)

The crash, he said, was “a blessing in disguise” because he was taken for treatment to a clinic at a refugee camp where he saw for himself some of the problems he is trying to alleviate.

One can’t be right every time.

Ernesto A. Montgomery, who calls himself a British-Jamaican-Caribbean-Jewish psychic, recently predicted that the big earthquake was finally going to hit and that California “will fall into the ocean. . . .”

He said it was going to happen at 3:30 p.m. on March 2, which was Wednesday.