People and Events

When employees at a U.S. Postal Service mail processing center in the City of Industry heard ticking from a parcel being sent to San Jose, they didn’t waste much time removing it to the far corner of the parking lot.

They then summoned sheriff’s explosives experts who, being no fools, opened it with care.

What the detectives found was a combination AM-FM radio-flashlight equipped with a siren alarm, batteries included. A local woman, presumably feeling he needed one, was sending it to her dad for Father’s Day.

The device ultimately was sent along to San Jose, where somebody is going to really come awake every morning.

Long Beach advertising artist Jeff Hartmann knew just what to do with the billboard he won for a month. He put up a reproduction of one of his paintings.

Hartmann, 29, who works for a department store, won temporary use of the billboard on the east side of the Long Beach Freeway just south of Firestone Boulevard when his name was drawn at an outdoor display company’s open house.

The painting he asked the billboard folks to reproduce depicts a couple of old Pacific Electric red cars (dating back to the days when we already had a rail transit system around here). The sign says “Track Down an Artist” and carries his phone number.

“It struck me as a good way to get a little publicity,” Hartmann said.

He’s had a few calls from ad agencies and others expressing interest in his talent. One call was from a company “that puts things on mugs.”

Although he hasn’t received the nut calls he feared, one man telephoned to congratulate him for offering a respite from “all the booze and cigarette ads.”

It was too much for H. Wendell Smith, who taught English at Santa Monica College for 34 years.

There on the back of a Lotto ticket, in tiny letters, were the words, “Until it is signed, this ticket belongs to whomever has it.”

That was last December. An appalled Smith fired off a letter to California Lottery Director Chon Gutierrez, pointing out that the word should be whoever. For five months he heard nothing, so he wrote again.

The other day he heard from Lottery marketing director Susan S. Clark, who promised that the error would be corrected.

Nothing could be done right away, she told him, because a year’s worth of tickets were already on hand. But the fix is in for the new batch being ordered.

Smith, who has written several English textbooks, retired from the college in 1984 and now teaches a few classes at Oxnard College. He says he has bought Lotto tickets regularly and the word “just popped out at me” because, in addition to being an English teacher, he worked as an editor for the Palisades Post. “Teaching and newspaper work don’t pay much,” he observed.

Nor has the Lottery so far, he admitted.

It might be excessive for someplace like Webster Groves, Mo., but probably not in Beverly Hills, which plans to celebrate 75 years of existence in a kind of 14-month-long Diamond Jubilee party beginning the night of July 3 at Beverly Hills High School Stadium.

As announced Tuesday, the big Independence Day Eve kickoff show will, of course, include cheerleaders--80 of them. Then there will be Mexican charro riders, 100 square dancers, 40 “high-fashion” runway models, 20 tuxedo-clad “champagne bottle poppers” and a small army of waiters, bellmen, maids, chefs, doormen, cabana girls and an elephant.

There’ll be other events every so often, concluding on Labor Day, 1989, with what the organizers say will be the world’s largest fashion show--more than 1,000 classy models strutting along a three-block runway on famed, old Rodeo Drive.

That, said publicist Brett Holmes, “will be a sight in itself.”

When Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley went along with the cops on a couple of rock house bust-ins the night before last, he was treated to a touch of LAPD public relations as well as the tough stuff.

A crowbar was used to pry open the door of a fortified coke store on 105th Street only three blocks from the Southeast Division police station. Five suspects were arrested. The crowbar bore a message:

“Have a Nice Day.”