People and Events
Amtrak and GTE Railfone Inc. are putting on a big PR push today for a new telephone service provided aboard the San Diegan passenger train so that riders can make credit card calls. There will be press conferences in Los Angeles and San Diego as well as ride-along demonstrations for the media.
With any luck, reporters will complete their trips soon enough to make their deadlines.
The new service was not in time to help commuters on Monday morning’s 573, which arrived in Los Angeles nearly an hour and a half late because of signal problems in San Diego County.
The phone was installed, however, by the time Tuesday evening’s 582 out of L.A. broke down in the wilds of Camp Pendleton and played dead for more than an hour.
While several passengers got off and hitchhiked home, plenty of others lined up in the cafe car to inaugurate the new phone and notify wives, husbands and whomever that they would be late.
Railfone has provided cellular telephone service on Amtrak’s East Coast Metroliner for a couple of years and says it “has proven invaluable in helping rail passengers increase productivity and make better use of travel time.”
Smokey finally got his diamond-studded gold crown. The 7-year-old German shepherd owned by Azusa pawn shop proprietors Bob and Patricia Fletcher went in for the work a month ago but reacted badly to a calming injection and the procedure was postponed.
On Wednesday, however, things went well at the Duarte Animal Hospital, where the crown was installed by Covina dentist Steven Marteney, with veterinarian Carey Ellsworth assisting. “He’s OK,” a receptionist said of Smokey a couple of hours later. “He’s coming around now.”
The Fletchers decided to fit Smokey with a crown because the former warehouse guard dog chipped the tooth chewing his way off the job to find their home and adopt them. They say he has been a faithful pawn shop and house watcher. “He’s earned it,” Mrs. Fletcher said.
A couple of diamonds far bigger than the one in Smokey’s mouth went on display at the county’s Natural History Museum as part of that institution’s Diamond Jubilee celebration.
One was the uncut Oppenheimer Diamond, a pale-yellow, transparent 253.7-carat stone. The other was the Portuguese Diamond, a flawless, fluorescent, 127-carat beauty. The Portuguese, say museum officials, is the biggest cut diamond on display in the western world.
Both are on loan from the Smithsonian Institution, to which they were donated by gem merchant Harry Winston. They will be on display in the museum’s Hixon Gem Vault until Sept. 11.
Los Angeles Urban League President John W. Mack, who just returned from a trip to the Soviet Union with Jewish Federation Council leaders, said he was struck both by the plight of Jewish refuseniks and by the inefficiency of the Soviet way of life.
He reported that the food was monotonous, lines at shops were overwhelming and “it was very difficult to hail a taxicab.”
He thought about that for a moment, then conceded, “It’s not easy to hail one in Los Angeles either.”
Tourists outside Mann’s Chinese Theatre didn’t seem at all sure of what they were looking at Wednesday.
A 20-ton, 20-foot-long chunk of Wisconsin Cheddar cheese was given the keys to the city by honorary Hollywood Mayor Johnny Grant. About a dozen people dressed as mice were on hand, pretending on cue to act ravenous.
The cheese, said by the Wisconsin milk people to be the largest in the world, is on its way around the country for a year in a special refrigerated “Cheesemobile” to help push the product.
A lot of Southern California restaurants and coffee shops will start serving pictures of a glass of water instead of the real thing in a few days.
Because two years of lower-than-normal snowfall in the mountains has dropped the level of the state’s water supply, Los Angeles and other cities have begun requiring that diners in restaurants not be served water unless they request it.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the California Restaurant Assn. will begin distributing the water-glass pictures next week. The cards will remind customers of the problem and of what water looks like. It will suggest, “If you would like a glass of water, just ask.”
