People and Events

“Outrageous” and “demeaning,” employees represented by the Los Angeles County Chicano Employees Assn. charged Tuesday as they filed a Superior Court lawsuit seeking to ban strip teases from county buildings.

They displayed color snapshots of Richard Collins, an executive with the county Department of Health Services, purportedly celebrating his birthday in his office by helping a hired dancer strip down to black bra, panties and stockings.

Another photo showed Collins wearing a garter for a hat.

Collins, whose wife reportedly hired the lady, could not be reached for comment.

Superior Court Judge Miriam Vogel later refused to issue a temporary restraining order, declaring that the county should not be forced to waste its time defending such a suit. Such things, she suggested, are better handled by counseling county executives.

She noted that she had seen office stripteases presented as gifts to the honorees and “I’ve yet to see anyone take offense at it.”

The Chicano group and two of the plaintiffs previously accused Collins’ contracts and grants division of discrimination, winning a cease and desist order from the county Civil Service Commission.

It was frenetic as more than 50 Japanese reporters scrambled to question Japanese and local investigators about Kazuyoshi Miura. The Japanese businessman, already imprisoned in Japan for the attempted murder of his wife, now has been charged by the Los Angeles County district attorney with having her killed here seven years ago.

But Tuesday’s press conference was a stroll on the Ginza, said D.A.’s investigator Jimmy Sakoda, compared to the reception he got from the press in Tokyo when he went there last August in connection with the case.

He said he was confronted by at least 10 times that many reporters at the airport and that he was trampled by them on the way to a car. He was hospitalized for a week with a herniated disc.

For several decades, Mike Ward’s service station and garage at the Pasadena end of the Arroyo Seco has caught the notice of motorists heading into the Pasadena Freeway by leaving one demolished car or another parked out front.

It’s been going on as long as he can remember, says manager Andy Soulanille, who went to work there in 1949. The business, he adds, has been in the Ward family since 1923.

Why are the wrecks placed on display?

“We’re just trying to get people to slow down,” explains Soulanille.

Ward’s garage does towing for both the California Highway Patrol and the Pasadena Police Department. The current wreckage is all that remains of a very compact car that met its demise on the Foothill Freeway.

No one is certain whether the displays actually get people to slow down, but the manager says, “An awful lot of people stop and look.”

Pasadena Police Sgt. Michael Vandergrift says he hears plenty of comments from motorists, “but I don’t know if it changes their driving habits.”

Soon, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce promises, all the names along the Walk of Fame will be spelled correctly.

First came the replacement of “Maurice Diller” with a sidewalk star properly saluting Swedish film pioneer Mauritz Stiller. Then lighting designer Fred Perry noticed that Greek actress Katina Paxinou (who won an Oscar as best supporting actress of 1943 for her part in “For Whom the Bell Tolls”) was identified on her star as “Katrina.”

Now comes longtime Hollywood publicist Frank Liberman, who noticed upon coming out of the Hamburger Hamlet on Hollywood Boulevard that the famed late director Ernst Lubitsch has been enshrined as Ernest.

“We’re going to fix that one too,” vowed the chamber’s Anna Martinez.

Before leaving Hollywood, one notes that the American Coalition for Traffic Safety plans to string a 449-foot red, white and blue seat belt across the face of the HOLLYWOOD sign next Monday to open the national “Buckle Up America” campaign.

The nonprofit group is contributing $2,500 to a fund to maintain the sign. Which is more than various pranksters have paid to make it read HOLLYWEED or RAFFEYSOD and several other things.

Co-sponsor of the event is the not-all-that-familiar Entertainment Industry Council’s Safety Belt Awareness Committee.