People and Events

The earth and sea around us are of some concern to Nancy Taylor, former Sierra Club official and one of the clean-water advocates pushing the City of Los Angeles to clean up its act in Santa Monica Bay.

So it got her attention last week when a mother opossum showed up dead in her West Hollywood back yard with eight live babies--four of them scattered on the ground and the others in the mother’s pouch. Taylor had heard a scurrying in the trees the night before and concluded that the animal had fallen in an attempt to escape attacking squirrels.

Taylor put the babies in a towel-lined box, found someone to take care of four and has been minding the others--which means feeding them every couple of hours with a baby bottle.

She didn’t, however, want to miss a U.S. District Court session in which Judge Harry Pregerson ruled against Los Angeles in its attempt to block distribution of federal Clean Water Act funds to four other cities pending resolution of L.A.’s complaint that it has been shorted.

Taylor slipped her four baby opossums into court and surreptitiously fed them during a recess. The judge apparently didn’t know about it. “I didn’t tell anybody what I was doing,” Taylor said. “I didn’t take them out and wave them around.”

The runt of the litter is at the vet, but Taylor plans to release all of them in the wilds when they’re ready.

The FBI released a couple of bank camera photos of the “Miss America Bandit,” who has robbed at least 10 local banks but who got showered with red dye Thursday when a $3,300 packet she took from a Culver City bank was rigged to explode before she got out of there.

The FBI’s Jim Neilson said bandit nicknames usually originate with agents on the bank robbery squad. In this case, Neilson said, “one teller has described her as being fairly good-looking.”

Attractive as she is, she has been quoted as threatening tellers in pretty direct language.

She’s big on wigs. And has this nifty red-spattered outfit.

James Arthur Pugh, 33, surrendered to the FBI on Friday. He is suspected, said Special Agent-in-Charge Lawrence G. Lawler, of being the man who held up nine banks in the San Fernando Valley during the last couple of months. On one job, the holdup man wore two pair of glasses as a disguise.

He was known as the “Two Pair of Glasses Bandit.”

Another passenger has had something nice to say about the Southern California Rapid Transit District. (It was only last week that partially blind Michael Winston Churchill of Whittier praised the RTD for finding and returning to him the talking watch he lost on a bus.)

Now we have a lady named Sadie Cohen, who says she was trying to hail a Wilshire Boulevard bus at 1:30 a.m. but that it passed her by.

“About four minutes later,” Cohen said, “the bus pulls up in front of me. The driver said, ‘I heard you, so I turned around and came back.’ ”

She thought that was so remarkable she wrote down his name: Alton Williams. The RTD said he has been with the company for 20 years, working the Owl Service.

Everybody wants into the act, as the late Jimmy Durante was fond of observing, but breaking into show business did not go well for an apparently drunk man who saw a film crew shooting a TV spot at Pico Boulevard and La Brea Avenue on Thursday.

Photographer Nick Sebastian, who was hired to shoot stills on the set, said the unidentified spectator “came across the street yelling.”

To his probable regret, Los Angeles Police Sgt. Bruce Wilson was present as a technical adviser. The intruder was told by the cop to lose himself, but refused and, according to the log entry at the Wilshire Division, “said he would fight before he left.”

There was a scuffle as Wilson tried to handcuff him. Sebastian said the man tried to grab the officer’s gun but failed and was taken into custody.

Being filmed was a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services television spot on the dangers of drugs and alcohol.