People and Events

Members of the largest graduating class of traffic control officers in Los Angeles history are ready to hit the streets with their ticket pads.

Mayor Tom Bradley on Tuesday addressed the 102 women and 63 men in the class, calling them “good will ambassadors” and “roadway good Samaritans” who frequently provide the first impressions visitors have of Los Angeles.

It was emphasized by the city’s Department of Transportation that the officers (who do not carry weapons or make arrests) can do more than simply cite illegal parkers or put large clamps on the cars of scofflaws. They can offer rides or tows for stranded drivers.

The event was held in Griffith Park’s Friendship Auditorium.

Old-time performers continue to show up. When 102-year-old Edwina Barry injured herself in a fall several weeks ago, just before she was to be honored as the oldest vaudevillian, it was reported that George Burns was the second oldest at 92.

Barry died of her injury a few days later, which would have made Burns the oldest. But Burns apparently had to take second place to Allan Cross, who recently turned 94. Cross, who played the Keith-Orpheum Circuit as early as 1920 as half of the singing duo Cross and Dunn, lives in North Hollywood.

Now we have David Mack, who at 93 drops Burns to the third spot age-wise.

Mack, who worked as a driver for 20th Century Fox for 30 years after the collapse of vaudeville, lives in retirement in the Camarillo area.

He, his first wife (Hazel) and her sister (Isabel) made up an act called the O’Brien Sisters and Mack. “I did a soft shoe,” he recalls. “My wife was a piano player. We also did a tango. We played in New York, Chicago and all over the United States and Canada. We even toured Australia.”

Hazel died about 20 years ago. Mack remarried and his second wife, Laura, died last month.

Mack missed vaudeville for a while and tried to stay in show business by teaching dancing. But that, he says, “wasn’t so hot.”

With heat melting much of the nation, the county’s Museum of Natural History is about to dispatch a specially constructed exhibit of Ice Age fossils to remind folks that things could be worse.

“Treasures of the Tar Pits” will be on display at the museum in Exposition Park here until Sept. 18, then will take off for a five-year tour of the United States and Canada. It will be the first time that examples from the world’s largest fossil deposits have gone traveling, according to Rancho La Brea curator George Jefferson.

In the display are six large skeletons of 20,000-year-old mammals--a 15-foot-long giant sloth, an American lion, a sabre tooth cat, two dire wolves and an Ice Age coyote.

There is also a bucket of tar, to show everyone what those luckless creatures stumbled into in the days when the stuff was about the consistency that the streets of New York have now.

Neither radio station KRLA-AM nor its parent company seemed worried that someone would show up to collect a $1-million check.

Station program director Mike Wagner decided it would be a terrific idea to play nothing but Elvis Presley records from 5 a.m. to midnight on Tuesday, the 11th anniversary of the rock star’s death. Then Greater Media Inc. President Frank Kabela thought it would be even better to pay a million to anyone who could show up with Elvis in person.

It was, said Wagner, a way to put to rest all those rumors that Presley lives. Other stations around the country have made similar offers--all with the same result. No Elvis.

The promotion was staged at a 1950s-style cafe on La Cienega Boulevard, where a bunch of fans collected. Just in case . . .

Canoga Park sixth-grader Sacha Comden, 11, was praised by Los Angeles city police commissioners Tuesday for her courage and presence of mind a couple of months ago when she took a golf-ball-sized chunk of cocaine away from her younger schoolmates.

Sacha said at the time she didn’t know what it was, only that she saw it being passed around among some of the children, who thought it might be sugar or candy. Her 7-year-old sister tasted it and spit it out. “I didn’t think it was drugs,” Sacha said then. “Why would a little kid have drugs?”

Nevertheless, she confiscated it and turned in to the school office. A mother was later arrested for allegedly putting the cocaine into her child’s backpack.

The police commissioners gave Sacha a plaque.