People and Events

The big birthday party thrown for Sybil Brand at the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration was such a surprise, she almost didn’t show up.

Brand, who chairs the commission overseeing County Jail facilities and has served the county for more than four decades, will be 85 on Sunday. She called her secretary early Wednesday morning to say she had some meetings scheduled and wouldn’t be in.

“You gotta come in,” Paul Byrne insisted.

She did, to be congratulated by a crowd of well-wishers ranging from county supervisors and file clerks to Indian actor Iron Eyes Cody. She was also confronted by a 3 by 2-foot birthday cake. “I almost dropped dead,” she said later. “I thought it was a casket.”

If Sybil Brand rings a bell, she should. She was the moving force behind the county women’s jail that bears her name.

Five inmates baked the cake.

This, the Los Angeles Department of Animal Regulation reminds us, is Be Kind to Animals Week. Which is not to say that one should behave otherwise the rest of the year.

Robert Rush, general manager of the department, is once again trying to get people to adopt spayed or neutered pets from one of the city animal shelters. He notes that during the 1987-88 fiscal year, the city took in more than 45,000 dogs and 34,000 cats as well as about 25,000 other animals. He said 27,000 of the dogs and 25,000 of the cats had to be “put to sleep.”

That doesn’t mean, he stresses, that all the destroyed animals were desirable pets. People bring in a lot of animals that are old or blind or too sick for adoption. However, he estimates that 25,000 to 30,000 of the animals handled by the department are “salable or placeable.”

“We need more homes for these guys,” he says.

As for Rush, he currently has a cat, two tortoises (which his daughter is licensed by the state to possess) and a salamander named Killer.

“Not everybody wants a salamander,” he admits, “but it would bust my family up if we lost him.”

Radio traffic overheard:

A Los Angeles city paramedic unit put out a call late Tuesday evening for a task force (two fire companies) to assist with a “man down” situation in Highland Park.

“Man down” usually means someone sick or disabled or simply drunk on the sidewalk. An incredulous woman dispatcher snapped, “You need a task force just for a man down?”

To which the paramedic replied, “I’ve got 400 pounds of man down.”

He got his task force.

The latest from the If at First You Don’t Succeed Department: Air Force Col. Ronald Grabe and Maj. Mark Lee, of the astronaut shuttle team scheduled to launch the Magellan Project Venus probe from outer space a year hence, were to be at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena this week to confer with the Magellan Project folks there.

They never made it.

Their T-38 military jet had hydraulic trouble en route from Houston and they had to land at El Paso, of all places, finally returning to Houston.

JPL spokesman Jim Doyle said they will make another attempt to reach California one of these days.

Mickey, Donald and Goofy’s best friend told a packed house at the Beverly Hilton that he was “nervous” appearing on the same forum that has seen the likes of Henry Kissinger and other high-profile statesmen and government officials.

“I suffer from chronic anxiety,” Michael Eisner, the Walt Disney Co.’s chief executive, told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. Still, said the 46-year-old Eisner, who is given much of the credit for the dramatic financial turnaround of the entertainment conglomerate, “I am proud to come here as a spokesman for a mouse.”