People and Events

It looked for a while like the Kiss a Cloud was going to kiss the intersection of the San Gabriel River and Foothill freeways instead. It got down safely--but not without giving thousands of work-bound motorists a thrill.

The Kiss A Cloud is a bright-striped hot air balloon operated by an outfit that will take you up for half an hour for $85 (including “post-flight ceremonies and champagne brunch”). It rose out of the Duarte foothills Thursday morning on a short training flight so Greg Szymanski, 44, could prepare for his pilot’s license final.

When the balloon was over a bowling alley and shopping center near the freeway intersection, however, the wind suddenly died. Pilot Dean Davies, 35, figured he had better land in a vacant lot rather than hover and sink onto structures or into heavy traffic.

He and Szymanski managed to work the balloon down toward a vacant lot near Mount Olive and Huntington drives, where they dropped the anchor bag to a waiting colleague, Wanda Nesser. The balloon was deflated, grounded and trucked away. No injuries. No damage.

Szymanski said they had been headed for an unpopulated quarry area in Irwindale when it ran into trouble.

Like the Raiders.

Timothy Leary, 67, who during the 1960s urged young people to “tune in, turn on and drop out” with LSD and other mind-benders, reportedly has made arrangements with the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Riverside to have his head removed after death and frozen for possible resurrection.

Leary’s agent, Eric Gardner, said in Los Angeles that Leary has been “interested the last 30 years in any cutting-edge technology, and this, if you’ll pardon the expression, is cutting-edge technology.”

Los Angeles management consultant David K. Carlisle remembers the old neighborhood in Seoul where the flashy new stadium stands ready for the world’s Olympians.

“That was the site,” says Carlisle, “from which the all-black 24th Regimental Combat Team made its historic crossing of the Han River on March 7, 1951. It led to the recapturing of Seoul.”

Carlisle, one of the first blacks to

graduate from West Point, was a 1st lieutenant at the time of the operation and temporarily commanded an engineer combat company.

“Gen. (Matthew) Ridgeway,” Carlisle remembers, “called it the most successful single action involving troops under his command during either World War II or Korea.”

Newspaper photographer Mike Meadows was tooling down the Harbor Freeway about midnight when he spotted smoke. He headed for Hoover Street, just north of Vernon Avenue, where he came across a small row of abandoned stores on fire.

They were next door to Los Angeles Fire Station 46.

“I parked my car and pounded like anything on the fire station door to wake them up,” said Meadows. Then he started taking pictures.

Eight engine companies were in on it before the blaze was controlled at 12:42 a.m. Thursday. Damage was estimated at $120,000.

The city Fire Department got its ambulance back, by the way, after it was found abandoned in South Gate--presumably by whoever stole it while paramedics were on an emergency call in the Westlake area Wednesday morning.

Fire Inspector Ed Reed said policy is to leave an ambulance locked--but with the engine running--while the emergency crew is off tending to a patient. Was this one locked?

“That’s the word we have,” Reed said. “There is an investigation going on.”

The lock-it policy was laid down several years ago when someone swiped an ambulance here and drove it all the way to San Francisco.

In Wednesday’s incident, a second ambulance had to be dispatched to carry an ill person to a hospital. It was almost five hours later that a resident reported the red-and-white vehicle parked on Calden Avenue near Firestone Boulevard with red lights flashing.

Reed said witnesses told of two youths departing from the scene.

None of the $30,000 worth of equipment appeared to have been damaged.