People and Events

Things did not look terrific for Joseph Ouzts 3 1/2 years ago. After being addicted to heroin for 17 years, he was sleeping on the beach, homeless and jobless. His music career was shot and so was his marriage. Death, he says, “looked good to me.”

A self-taught guitarist and pianist who dropped out of school in the eighth grade, Ouzts began drinking when he was 13. He grew up in the housing projects of Greer, S.C., where he was beaten by an alcoholic stepfather.

He performed with rock groups, then joined the Marine Corps at 17. It was in the Marines, he says, that he became hooked on heroin. He left the service in 1971 and came to Southern California to go back into music. He got married. But seven years ago, his world fell apart.

After one short-lived attempt to clean up his act, he overdosed a second time three years ago and went into a treatment program. Since then, Ouzts has been clean and sober. He decided to go back to school.

In June, he was graduated from Los Angeles City College with an associate of arts degree and high honors. He earned a couple of scholarships and became active in student government, serving as vice president and president of the associated student organization.

Los Angeles Community College District Chancellor Thomas Fallo has named him the district’s outstanding student leader for 1988.

Ouzts has been accepted to Cal State Los Angeles for the fall term. He plans to become a lawyer.

“I’ve exceeded anything I ever expected to do,” he says. “At the time, you go to work, to class, you study and it doesn’t seem like any big deal. But you look back on it and it’s a big change in your life.”

Los Angeles police, as they have during seven previous summers, are again passing out Dodger baseball cards. Each day of the 15-week summer program, they give away nearly 50,000 cards bearing photographs of Dodger players and warning kids to stay away from drugs and gangs.

Youngsters love the cards so much, says Steve Hatfield of the Police Department’s public affairs office, that they go to police stations or stop officers on the street to ask for the week’s card.

Several years ago, according to Hatfield, officers searching for a car thief got no help from the suspect’s kid brother until they gave him some cards featuring the Dodgers’ then-first baseman.

“He turned in his brother for six Steve Garvey cards,” Hatfield says.

Like most men whose wives are giving birth, Victor Ruiz did not have an easy time of it. In his case, the experience was more unsettling than usual.

With his wife, Marian, about to deliver their second child Monday afternoon, Ruiz’s brother-in-law was driving them to El Monte Community hospital. As they hurried through Monterey Park on the Pomona Freeway, it became apparent that the baby’s arrival was imminent.

Ruiz, 27, a Huntington Park warehouse worker, told his brother to pull over to the freeway shoulder while he went to a call box to summon an ambulance. When he reached the call box and looked back, the car was gone. To add to his distress, a highway patrolman arrived and wanted to know what a pedestrian was doing at the edge of the freeway.

Meantime, however, the brother-in-law had pulled into a supermarket parking lot and someone had dialed 911. While Ruiz and the highway patrolman searched for the car, the baby was being born in a paramedic ambulance.

“I thought I had lost my wife, my baby, my brother-in-law and my car,” Ruiz said.

It took a while, but a towing company finally managed to pull a truck carrying 40,000 pounds of frozen food out of the Los Angeles River, where it plunged as the result of a 5:11 a.m. accident on the Golden State Freeway in the Griffith Park area.

Truck driver Julius Sherfield, 55, of La Puente came out of it with minor injuries. Before the truck was hauled out of the river nearly eight hours later, two other trucks collided on the freeway as traffic backed up because of gawkers.

It wasn’t as though the frozen food truck sank from sight or anything like that. Nevertheless, there were a couple of feet of water flowing through the usually dry concrete ditch. A county Public Works Department spokeswoman said most of it was reclaimed water released by a city water reclamation plant. The rest of it, she said, was apparently coming from people’s lawns and other normal sources.

And you thought there was a drought on.