People and Events

UCLA’s engineering students were at it again Tuesday, building bridges out of Popsicle sticks in Westwood Plaza to celebrate Engineers Week. “They come up with some pretty good ones,” observed engineering department spokesman Steve Gutierrez.

They are expected to turn to more dependable materials once they graduate.

The week is sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers--the same outfit behind last week’s cement canoe competition at Cal State Northridge and elsewhere.

On Monday, Westwood Plaza was the scene of other Engineers Week activities. For one, Assistant Prof. Hans-Uno Bengtsson stripped to his underwear and lay on a bed of nails to show the effects of distributing mass over a greater field.

Lecturer Art Huffman placed concrete blocks on his chest and smashed them with a sledgehammer, something he does every year to demonstrate something or another. Except for a few marks on his back, he suffered no ill effects.

Junior engineering student Jeff Echt won in the bridge contest aesthetics category. Bill Nicoloff was the winner in the brute strength and most-weight-carried-per-weight-of-bridge divisions.

Nicoloff, Gutierrez admitted, is a political science major.

Veronica (Ronnie) McKeen, 49, sets out today on her long-planned, 640-mile Glendora-to-Sacramento bicycle ride. A tough enough jaunt for anyone. In the case of McKeen, it is even more remarkable. She is a one-time stroke victim.

After she collapsed at the age of 23, she could not move or speak. The mother of a month-old baby, she was in a coma for five days and then spent a dozen years fighting to walk and talk and to emerge from deep depression.

It wasn’t until a former brain surgeon-turned-psychiatrist who had suffered a stroke of his own took her off drugs and helped her build herself up with vitamins and proper diet that she began to improve.

She is taking the ride on behalf of the Organization for After-Stroke Resocialization, McKeen says, “to convince other strokers that there is life after stroke.” Along the way, she will visit stroke groups.

She is married to Joseph McKeen in Ontario and has two grown daughters.

Metallic balloons continue to cause sparks.

Southern California Edison Co., which complained several weeks ago that the problem of runaway balloons hitting power lines is “skyrocketing,” is on the subject again. Edison executive Ed Jones says there “have been a number of close calls.”

For example, he says, several children were playing in their front yard in Montclair recently when a metallic balloon struck a transformer and caused a power line to fall near them. “They were lucky,” observes Jones. “The wire missed them. They might not be as lucky the next time.”

The latest Edison anti-balloon blast came because of the recent contention by Debra Paulk, co-founder of the National Assn. of Balloon Artists, that power companys have not offered comparative figures to show how many outages are caused by falling tree branches, squirrels and whatever.

Edison comes back with a review of its 1987 Car-Hits-Pole statistics, noting that--except for storm-related activity--car crashes are among the most common causes of outages. “Even with millions of cars traveling the highways in Edison’s service territory,” a company spokesman said, “there were 270 circuit outages from car-hit-pole incidents and 229 outages caused by metallic balloons.”

Retired Superior Court Judge William B. Keene, who four years ago went from the courtroom to a TV studio as the judge in “Divorce Court,” has been invited to speak to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers conference in Tampa on May 6.

He said he plans to tell them about some of the interesting things that happened to him during his 20 years as a jurist. He presided at the trials of Charles Manson, “Alphabet Bomber” Muharen Kurbegovic and “Freeway Killer” William Bonin, among others.

It may be that the divorce lawyers will be more interested in the difference between real judging and TV judging. The answer:

“I don’t have control of my courtroom in television. I have to abide by what directors are yelling out. There are more cameras around. And we do in a half an hour what it takes five or six days to do in a real courtroom.”

Next case.