People and Events

One trademark of the 3-year-old Los Angeles Marathon has been a 7-foot-tall “L A” sign carried by a group of runners during the first quarter-mile.

The red cardboard sign--”L A” the first year, followed by “L A II” and L A III”--popped up in so many newspaper photos that the race committee wanted to honor the carriers. But no one knew who they were. Nor were they identifiable in crowd shots.

So, the committee blew up a photo of the last race, found their bib numbers and traced them to Elaine Herfert, 56, and her son Stephen, 33, of West Covina.

Elaine said the sign was originally devised so that her ailing husband Robert could see them on television. He died after the second race, but the family continued the tradition as a memorial.

“My son carried the ‘L’ and my running buddies helped me carry the ‘A’ and the ‘III’ this year,” she said.

The Herferts, who were honored by Mayor Tom Bradley on Friday at City Hall, now are training and sign-painting in preparation for “L A IV” March 5. She said they don’t even want to think about how they’ll manage “L A VIII.”

It was Palmless Friday on Skid Row.

A few days ago, the street people in front of the defunct Linda Lea Theater on Main Street set out Los Angeles’ most recognizable symbol, a palm tree in a pot, to decorate their sidewalk encampment. Someone had “found it,” one man said.

A symbol is a luxury on Main, however. On Friday, the somewhat scraggly plant was gone. One of the inhabitants explained: “Guy drove up and bought it for $5.”

Some war heroes acquire macho nicknames, like Ol’ Blood and Guts. Not Gail Halvorsen, an Air Force colonel who flew more than 100 missions into Berlin 40 years ago.

On Friday, on behalf of the Air Force Assn., Halvorsen accepted a resolution from Los Angeles, the sister city of Berlin, commemorating the anniversary of the breaking of the Soviet blockade.

Halvorsen was well known to the children of Berlin for his practice of dropping candy from his B-52 while tilting the plane’s wings up and down. Hence, his two nicknames: “The Candy Bomber” and “Captain Wiggle Wings.”

The Case of the $200,000 Public Nuisance (cont.): When last we heard from David Spellerberg, a judge was telling him he could no longer park his vintage Rolls-Royce in the one-hour parking spot in front of his art gallery even if he poured quarters into the meter all day.

So Spellerberg is rotating a fleet of five Rolls in that spot.

The public is responding to his plight, by the way. He’s received about $20 in quarters in the mail. “Just today I got 40 cents from a guy in Santa Ana,” Spellerberg said.

The controversy over whether Mulholland Drive should be designated a scenic parkway is the subject of a press release issued by resident Vanessa Brown, a former actress. But this may be one press release that discourages the media from revealing the author’s position.

It warns that the contents are “copyrighted from the forthcoming book by Vanessa Brown, ‘How I Fought the City off My Land.’ ”