People and Events

Gary Rewal of Long Beach not only does windows--store windows--he does them while dancing and twirling his mop like an entrant in the Tournament of Roses Parade. Or at least the Doo Dah.

“He’s fantastic,” spectator Toni Tindell said Tuesday at noontime as Rewal massaged the glass of a jewelry shop in his home city. “I come down here on Tuesdays just to see him.”

Rewal, 34, who performs while listening to rock music through a head-set, said later that he enjoys attracting an audience, “and the places where I work like it, too, because it calls attention to their businesses.”

But the dancing window-washer, who wears a shirt that says, “We do glass with class,” emphasized he’s more than just glitter. “Anyone can slap water and soap on the glass,” he said. “But I take care of the edges and the ledges, which a lot of washers miss.”

Rewal also has clients in Norwalk, Manhattan Beach and Lomita but dreams of making it to the top--high-rises, such as the hotels on Ocean Boulevard.

“I fantasize about doing the Sheraton,” he said. “All that beautiful glass. . . .”

A weekend reunion of employees of the old Los Angeles Mirror led former reporter Cliff Dektar to recall the time in the early 1950s when his city editor sent him out to Los Angeles Municipal (now International) Airport to see about a ticking suitcase that had been impounded.

The editor had received a tip that the suitcase actually contained an electric massage machine and instructed Dektar to open the suitcase himself--it’d make a good photo. But when Dektar asked, the police bomb squad turned him down. As it turned out, the ticking did come from a massage machine.

Dektar phoned his editor to tell him that the tip had been correct but that he’d been refused permission to open the suitcase.

“Coward,” the editor said, and hung up.

A garage-sale recall?

One of Fredric Arnold’s most prized possessions from World War II was a collection of foreign currencies taped together and covered with the signatures of fellow pilots and other characters he’d encountered during the campaign in North Africa. It was a custom of American pilots to make such strips.

Arnold kept the memento stuffed inside a Moroccan-made packet and intended to give it to his grandchildren. But when he went looking for it the other day he found out that his wife had inadvertently sold it at a garage sale near the Beverly Center mall on Oct. 2.

Arnold wants to buy it back, pointing out that the currency itself is worth just a few dollars. His family has put up posters in the neighborhood appealing for its return.

“My wife said I hadn’t moved it in 40 years so how was she to know,” Arnold said. “She has a point.”

Postal Leap Year: Hal Wignall, a sales rep for a local paper manufacturer, recently received a letter that was postmarked Sept. 32, 1988.

Muralists have special problems. Kent Twitchell has filed one lawsuit against a property owner who painted over his “Old Woman of the Freeway” mural near the Hollywood Freeway. And now he’s offering a $500 reward in connection with the theft of one of his students’ murals in Pasadena.

The artwork was painted on a temporary fence surrounding a building site at Huntington Memorial Hospital. It’s a depiction of the Great Sphinx of Pasadena, which stands (with nose still intact) in front of the Scottish Rite Temple. Adding a note of mystery, the Sphinx portrait was the only one taken among several murals on the fence.

The fence posts have since been reinforced with strong bolts, hospital spokeswoman Maggie McPhilips said. It was either that or build a second fence around the first fence.

A City Council aide, asked if he would be available Tuesday afternoon, said, “No, I’ve got to go out to 1000 Elysian Park Ave. to check out a complaint.”

That’s bureaucratic code for attending a game at Dodger Stadium.