People and Events

Adventurous is the word for Kathleen and Curtis Saville, a Vermont couple who plan to pull out of San Pedro today in a 25-foot rowboat to circumnavigate North America.

With them will be their 2-year-old son, Christopher.

“I think it tends to strengthen you,” the 40-year-old Curtis said when asked about the effect of the rigorous trip on his son. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with learning to cope with hardships of any kind. It makes you tougher, more adaptable.”

Long-distance rowing is nothing new to the Savilles, who once took their boat 2,400 miles down the Mississippi River, have rowed across the Atlantic and three years ago spent 392 days rowing from Peru to Australia.

If Canadian and Alaskan waterways are frozen when they get there, the Savilles say, they will cross land by dog sled and have their boat flown to where they can put it in the water again.

Kathleen Saville said they took up rowing because “we didn’t want a 9-to-5 life.”

One little-known aspect of the Century Freeway project, which for years has been working its way with something less than all deliberate speed from Norwalk to the Los Angeles International Airport area, has been the discovery of about a dozen bodies along the way.

“Some were found in abandoned houses, and some were just lying out there in the corridor,” said Lee Morgan, who handles maintenance for Caltrans in the area. Most were discovered from 1972 to 1979, while a federal court injunction held up work on the $1.7-billion job. With razing of structures halted, much of the 17-mile strip became a wasteland that drew drug addicts and packs of wild dogs.

Only two or three bodies have been found in the past couple of years, according to officials. Supervising Inspector John Kincaid of the county Department of Agriculture, which clears weeds and debris from the corridor for Caltrans, said the last he heard of were children burned to death in an abandoned house that was set ablaze by a candle.

Kincaid suggested that there are a couple of reasons for the decline in discovered bodies:

Once work on the freeway resumed, abandoned structures were again being razed or hauled away. And there are a lot of workers milling around the area now, making it less attractive for addicts and homeless people looking for places to camp.

It was about time, officials at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory decided, to let the media see some of the latest wrinkles in telerobotics, the technology to help astronauts repair faulty outside space station equipment or to send a mechanical rock hound meandering around the surface of some nifty place like Mars.

Bob French, deputy manager of the JPL telerobotics program, and telerobotics engineer Brian Wilcox showed reporters and television cameras how computer-operated and TV-guided robot arms can be utilized to--for example--extract a malfunctioning instrument box from a spinning satellite and bring it inside a manned shuttle for a fix.

Finally, a television crewman wanted to know whether all this was classified. “Aren’t you afraid,” he asked, “that somebody is going to come in here and give this stuff to the Russians?”

No, spokesman Bob MacMillin assured him. It was all part of the civilian space program and unclassified.

Otherwise JPL wouldn’t have called the press conference.

When 500 students at the Twentieth Street Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles released balloons bearing their names and school address a couple of weeks ago, they probably didn’t realize that the upper-level winds were so strong.

The balloon released by kindergartner Juan Rodriguez drifted all the way to Batesville, Ark., where it was found by a teacher. The one sent up by second-grader Elizabeth Sandoval got to Big Lake, Tex., where a woman discovered it in the snow on her farm.

Both finders got in touch with the senders. The Texas lady sent Elizabeth pictures of her own small children. “I was flabbergasted,” said program adviser Mary Harris at the Los Angeles school. “The kids are very excited.”

Some of the other balloons were not so adventurous, however, settling to earth in less exotic places like Hacienda Heights, Downey and Long Beach.