People and Events

Few efforts launched during the 1960s to help solve the deep problems of Watts are still around. Remarkably, Project Jordan is.

Project Jordan began in 1963--two years before the Watts rioting--when Margaret and Arthur Williams and other parents of Jordan High School students began to take youngsters to cultural events such as the Ramona Pageant and the Laguna Arts Festival. Unheard of treats for most kids in that neighborhood.

After a while, Project Jordan members also began helping send to college those students who showed promise, supplying each of them with $75 a month. Over the past two decades, Mrs. Williams estimates, 100 students have been so helped.

“At least half of them made it through college,” she says. “One of them is now an attorney, one is a minister and another works in government service.”

The parents raised funds by selling aprons and candy. About 1965, they began staging fashion shows to raise funds. They still do. A Pacific Palisades man read about them and started contributing $1,000 a year. He still does.

Most of the original Project Jordan members remain active--although their own children have long since graduated from high school. They have gone through eight or nine Jordan High principals, none of whom can quite believe their persistence.

On Sept. 24, at Ports O’ Call Restaurant in San Pedro, they will celebrate their 25th anniversary.

Margaret Williams may or may not recall that in 1965 she said:

“This thing grows on you. When you see that the kids are so eager for someone to take an interest in them and their excitement over the places they see, you just can’t stop.”

There was no word Monday on whether a Panorama City optometrist is heeding the advice of a vandal who trashed his office.

Police said they were called early Sunday by a janitor after he discovered that someone had defaced wall posters and tossed eyeglasses around the place on Nordhoff Street.

The intruder or intruders also left a handwritten note that read:

“You’re pretty dumb to leave your back door open. Please in the future, don’t leave it open. In a world like today, you can’t trust anyone. So don’t be dumb.”

Officers did not immediately disclose the name of the optometrist.

Priscilla Cabrera of Canyon Country says she and her husband are “very satisfied” with the way their jaywalking case came out.

The Cabreras were cited a few days ago when they crossed 6th Street in the middle of the block outside the downtown Los Angeles Greyhound bus station. She said they felt threatened by some young men following them around inside the terminal, so they didn’t waste time going to the crosswalk to get to a couple of policemen writing tickets on the far side of the street. They were promptly cited.

But Municipal Court Judge Joseph Shane dismissed the ticket. Cabrera says the judge also dismissed one for a runner who said he was ticketed for jaywalking in another part of town while training for the Olympics.

References here to surviving performers from the long-gone days of vaudeville have brought word of still others who rank up there in age with George Burns.

Of course you remember the three Beale Sisters, who as little girls had a song-and-dance act that played mostly on the West Coast--Fresno, Bakersfield and like that. Bella is dead now, but Anna Veprin, 95, and Martha Kaufman, 89, live together in a Culver City retirement home.

“Grandmother,” says Helene Braunstein of Veprin, “is still full of hell, to put it mildly. My aunt (Kaufman) still gets up and sings--and not just at family parties.”

“Until two years ago,” Veprin says, “we used to still entertain but we’ve kind of slowed down.”

Kaufman was the one with the real singing voice, Veprin says, going on to work in Singapore and other non-Fresno-like places after the first two sisters married.

“I still have my marbles,” Veprin says. “I’m all together, all right.”

On the political front, National Nihilist Party presidential candidate Elisha Shapiro doesn’t anticipate any real problems picking a running mate. The party’s vice presidential hopeful, he says, will be chosen by “a random national lottery, so everybody has an equal chance.”

Shapiro’s opinion is that he has “a lot better way of choosing my vice president than the Republicans. I’ll have someone the people can really relate to, who is more stable.”

As for the 34-year-old Shapiro’s own Vietnam War record:

“I wish I could say I dodged the draft by going to Canada or something, but I’m afraid I just happened to get a good lottery number and was never called.”