People and Events

The irony probably was not lost on some of those sleeping or whiling away bleak lives on the Los Angeles City Hall lawn when City Councilman Joel Wachs launched a move to rename the 1st Street steps and a square of concrete at the bottom.

The proposed name: The Plaza of Champions.

Wachs pushed the suggestion Monday morning during a press conference he conducted with Jerry West, general manager of the NBA champion Lakers, and Dodger publicity man Tommy Hawkins. West and Hawkins are former Laker players.

“Every time Los Angeles wins a major world championship, it brings an extraordinary amount of pride to the city,” Wachs said. He gave credit for the idea to television reporter Jim Murphy.

Championships also bring thousands of fans and an army of souvenir T-shirt hawkers to the Civic Center.

It is not exactly Christmas weather around here, but that doesn’t have much to do with the mood of buyers from all over the country who are dropping in on the California Giftware Show at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

The show, which is not open to the public, began Sunday and will run through Thursday. It is, said show official Debra Gold, “a sneak preview of what Christmas will be like.”

Gold said 40,000 to 45,000 buyers from department store chains and other retail outlets are expected to comb the 3,000 exhibition booths looking for items that might sell in the upcoming season.

Among new products attracting attention: a “Stress Ball,” which emits the sound of shattered glass when thrown against the wall, thereby satisfying that need for at least a sense of destructive relief.

It is a sort of natural follow-up, Gold said, to last season’s automobile accessory that issued the sound of machine-gun fire and other effects to fulfill the fantasy of a motorist who has nearly been run off the freeway by another driver.

Mark Brashear of Long Beach may need a Stress Ball himself after running into what he says is a wall of “summer interns” answering the telephones at government offices.

Brashear, who is 36, says he was trying to protest a Los Angeles Police Department requirement that applicants be 35 or younger. In his attempt to talk to somebody official about it--at either the municipal, county or state level--Brashear says he made 118 calls.

He claims that he was transferred to other offices 95 times--mostly by what sounded to him like young people working temporarily and without “even knowing where they are.” Someone who took his call at the state attorney general’s office, he insists, did not recognize the name John Van de Kamp.

In Sacramento, however, Alan Ashby of the attorney general’s press staff said it was unlikely that an intern would be handling calls from the public. “I can’t imagine anyone who answers phones for us not knowing who John Van de Kamp is,” Ashby said.

Brashear presumably recognizes that government officials can’t talk personally to every caller. Nevertheless, he was struck by the way the young lady in Gov. George Deukmejian’s office responded when he asked to talk to the governor.

“He’s not receiving calls,” he recalls her saying. “Nor is he intending to.”

Airport commissioners plan to consider on Wednesday whether Los Angeles International Airport should be as arty as some other aerodromes around the country. They seem to be on the verge of picking an “airport art consultant” to organize rotating art exhibits.

These will go a little beyond the schoolroom stuff passengers have been accustomed to seeing on the walls en route to the boarding gates and probably will begin with a pilot program of displays by professional artists in the Tom Bradley International Terminal.

So far, said Virginia Black, of the Department of Airports, “We have one piece of sculpture that now is inside Terminal One.” That, she said, is Tony DeLap’s “Floating Lady IV,” a tall, rectangular work of steel.

The metallic lady used to stand outside the administration building, Black said, but the only people who saw it were those motorists who had to make another turn around the airport.

You can guess how interested they were.