People and Events

A guide published for travel agents by the Anaheim Convention Center is not the favorite reading of the people over at the Greater Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau, who complain that it makes it seem that everything in Southern California is clustered around the Orange County city.

“All the Los Angeles attractions look like they’re right in Anaheim,” complains Bill Arey of the Los Angeles bureau.

Arey was talking basically about the cover on the 67-page guide. It is decorated with a montage of logos and symbols representing such Southland tourist favorites as the Queen Mary, Sea World, Universal Studio Tours and even Glen Ivy Hot Springs--encircling Disneyland and Anaheim Stadium.

Responded Elaine Cali, a spokeswoman for the Anaheim agency: “I think most people realize it obviously is not a geographical map, just a collage showing what is there.”

But Arey and others in the Los Angeles bureau have a few more complaints about the Anaheim presentation. For instance: the claim that the NBC studio tour in Burbank is a mere 45-minute drive from Anaheim.

Try it, they suggest.

“We came up with what we felt were fair (travel) times,” said Cali. “Traffic patterns vary. Most sightseeing tours don’t leave during rush hour.”

Anyway, she says, the Los Angeles bureau does basically the same sort of thing in the stuff it puts out.

Well, said Arey, “Los Angeles is the true hub of all Southern California and certainly the gateway to the West.”

It’s not that she has anything against the organizers of the annual May Day parade, insists Estela Lopez, it’s just that she and numerous merchants along Broadway in downtown Los Angeles think parades along their street on weekends are bad for business.

“Saturday and Sunday are the busiest times of the week,” says Lopez, executive director of Miracle on Broadway, a year-old community redevelopment agency trying to revitalize the area. “When you throw a parade then, the shops feel the impact immediately.”

“I think that’s ridiculous,” retorts Barbara Hertz, People’s Liberation Party organizer for the parade. “We’ve been having these marches for 15 years, and just because a couple of merchants don’t like it, we’re not going to stop.”

If President Reagan came to town and wanted to march up Broadway, Hertz observes, “they’d probably love it.”

Maybe, Lopez indicated, if he wanted to do it on a weekday. After all, the Pope and the Lakers had their parades along Broadway. But not on the big weekend shopping days.

Lopez and Morton Bowman, a Broadway jeweler, pleaded their case before the city’s Police Commission on Tuesday. The commissioners then decided to route the parade along Spring Street.

The Original Pantry at 9th and Figueroa streets in downtown Los Angeles has operated around the clock and on holidays for 64 years, never missing a meal. Even when the restaurant moved from a couple of doors away in 1951, says manager Mario Frisan, “we served breakfast in one place and lunch in the other.”

It came close to shutting down early Tuesday, however, when a faulty switch at a Department of Water and Power distribution station triggered a blackout from 12:53 to 5:30 a.m. over a 20-block area bordered by 7th Street, Venice Boulevard, Hill Street and the Harbor Freeway.

That made it impossible for the Pantry cooks to turn out any hot food, but patrons already in the place finished their meals by candlelight and others dropped in for free coffee. (The gas coffee maker was working.)

He couldn’t have closed if he wanted to, Frisan says. “We don’t have locks on our doors.”

Attorney Marvin Mitchelson denied a report that the only thing preventing actress Carrie Leigh from dropping her $35-million palimony suit against Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner is the fact that Hefner has refused to return her cat.

“I’m sure she’ll get her cat back,” Mitchelson says. “That isn’t the stumbling block.”

He didn’t say what the block was but predicted that Leigh, 24, and Hefner, 61, will agree next week to drop their suits against each other.

The sea gulls that plagued the Narbonne High School campus in Harbor City at lunch hours and nutrition breaks still have not gotten over their fear of the inflated owl she carries around to frighten them away, says Administrative Dean Cardriner Bowden.

But after she was away for several days to attend a conference, they apparently concluded that she and her blow-up bird were gone for good. A few of the braver ones flapped in for scraps on Tuesday when, as it happened, she was back--but was not carrying the owl around.

“I’ll have it out there tomorrow,” she promised.