People and Events

Reporters and cameras were on hand Tuesday as Agustin Garcia-Lopez Santaolalla, Mexico’s consul general here, was confronted in the consulate just off Olvera Street by a group of Mexican political activists protesting the murders of two aides to Mexican presidential candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas.

After hearing them out, Santaolalla assured them in Spanish that the government of President Miguel de la Madrid would fully investigate the killings of Francisco Xavier Obando and Roman Gil Heraldez last Saturday night in Mexico City.

When he finished, some non-Spanish-speaking reporters asked him to repeat his remarks in English.

“I don’t speak English,” he replied in perfect, unaccented English.

Aides later explained that he does, but not inside the consulate.

Jean Postel, 74, and her husband, Marion, 75, got a small taste of fame when educational television station KCET took note of two tablecloths she fashioned from string he has been saving since World War II, when such things were considered helpful.

With the war long over, Marion Postel still could not bring himself to ditch the string he took from around the newspaper every morning. He added it to the big ball on his desk. Finally, Jean Postel says she told him, “Either I’m going to do something with it or I’m going to throw it out.”

It took her a year and a half to weave the first tablecloth. That seemed easy enough, so she made another one. KCET’s Huell Howser interviewed the couple on his Videolog show, asking if the folks at the newspaper knew about it.

They soon did. The Postels were invited to dinner and presented with a plaque as well as a free one-year subscription. In return, they gave one of the tablecloths to the publisher.

Now, says Mrs. Postel, “I am experimenting with making place mats.”

There should be enough string. All their friends and relatives are offering.

Good taste precludes naming the newspaper.

Glendale amateur race driver Michael Leum, 26, did not win his 16-lap formula Ford event at Riverside Raceway on Sunday. In fact, he admits, “I was very close to last. I had a long pit stop.”

Leum was already running far behind on the 11th lap when he drifted into the pit, jumped out of his car, took off his helmet and proposed to a member of his pit crew, Nancy O’Neill, who was responsible for his safety belts and lap time checking.

She was stunned, Leum reports, but said yes. The public address announcer, clued in ahead of time, informed the crowd.

Leum then climbed back in his car and finished the race.

He and O’Neill met five years ago at Pepperdine University.

Tom Chislock has had a lot of trouble with the City of Long Beach over the construction fence he erected around a home remodeling project in the 500 block of Termino Avenue. Now he’s got a young artist decorating the fence with caricatures of the Lakers.

“Maybe they’ll let me leave it up,” he says.

Chislock concedes that he originally built his “notorious fence” without a permit and that his attorney “has to go to court every two months to explain that I’m doing some construction.”

Eugene Zeller, the city’s superintendent of building, says the problem goes back two years and stems from the fact that Chislock erected his high wooden barrier on the property line, although it was many months before he had permits to do any construction.

Chislock now has his permits, Zeller says, and construction “is slow, but being done.”

Legal entanglements aside, Chislock says he initially planned to hire 18-year-old Lance Simpson “as a grunt on a shovel” until he saw him do an airbrush portrait of Magic Johnson on a plaster wall and thought, ‘What a waste.’ He told Simpson to do the Lakers on the fence.

Simpson was a basketball player and a prize-winning artist at Wilson High School. He says he plans to study computer and graphic arts at Cal State Long Beach, as well as go out for basketball.

He is not particularly a Lakers fan, he confides.

It remains to be seen whether Long Beach city officials are.