People and Events

The Carnac of the Courts?

When an attorney remarked during a recent settlement conference that he couldn’t envision what the final dollar figure would be because he didn’t have a crystal ball, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge R. William Schoettler Jr. was ready to oblige him.

Schoettler pulled a shot glass out of his desk, spread a black scarf over it and then placed a 2-inch-diameter crystal ball on top. Everyone broke into laughter.

“I use it as an element of humor,” Schoettler said later.

“It relieves the tension and helps get the parties focusing on a settlement,” he added, forgetting to pardon the pun.

The judge was given the crystal ball by his secretary when he was in private practice--and was prone to using the “if-I-had-a-crystal-ball” line. “My secretary told me, ‘Now you can’t say that anymore,’ ” he recalled.

Schoettler, by the way, employs the crystal ball only during settlement conferences in his private chamber. So far he hasn’t used it during a trial.

If Schoettler is Carnac, then Superior Court Judge Tom Murphy is the Clyde Beatty of Burbank.

He’s been known to crack a whip during settlement conferences in the Valley--literally.

“I use any gimmick I can,” Murphy explained. “It (the whip) is a way to keep the tension down and get people to talking.”

Murphy said he sometimes tells visitors that the whip, which he keeps hanging in his chamber, dates to his days as a law clerk when he moonlighted as a lion tamer to help make ends meet. Actually, he confessed, a friend bought it in Mexico and gave it to him as a gift.

“A lot of times an attorney will say, ‘What’s the whip for?’ ” Murphy said. “I just say I use it if I have to. Sometimes they actually ask me to snap it. I can snap it like a lion tamer.”

Added Murphy: “We’re kind of informal out here.”

One person who could have some business in a courtroom soon is a 15-year-old Denver boy arrested at Los Angeles International Airport after police found him carrying a zip gun.

The unidentified youth told police he’d been making the single-shot, metal-and-rubber-band pistol as part of a “project he was working on” while spending his summer break in Montebello with his father and brother. But he reportedly admitted that the gun concept hadn’t been assigned by a teacher or other adult.

He was booked for possession of a zip gun, Los Angeles police spokesman Fred Nixon said Thursday. The youth, whose parents are divorced, was taken to the juvenile detention center in Sylmar, pending possible charges or release to a responsible guardian.

“It would appear to be a science project gone too far,” summed up Lt. Jim Cameron said.

A statue of Amelia Earhart has been absent from North Hollywood Park for a month. But, unlike the famed aviator who disappeared on a flight in July of 1937, the statue’s whereabouts have never been a mystery.

The steel-and-fiberglass likeness, sculpted by Ernest Shelton, was removed from the corner of Tujunga Avenue and Magnolia Boulevard so he could refurbish it with gold leafing.

Today, at noon, civic leaders will rededicate the statue of Earhart, a one-time North Hollywood resident.

When City Council aide Tom La Bonge visited Berlin recently, he met some distant relatives who showed him a letter that his great-grandfather had written shortly after coming to America in 1885.

Alexander La Bonge, a barber who later worked at the Alexandria Hotel, told the folks back home in Germany that he was “going to a resort in Long Beach, about 22 miles from here. This is a new development. My wife and I bought a little lot there.”

His temporary home address was 210 N. Main St. in Los Angeles.

“That’s now the address of City Hall East,” said his great-grandson, who’s an aide to Councilman John Ferraro. “Imagine that--I work where my great-grandfather lived. It’s amazing how the world turns.”