‘Tis the season to return presents, not...

‘Tis the season to return presents, not the favorite time of many merchants. But Artesia store manager Ron Pandelli was delighted to see one item brought back: His coat, which contained his wallet.

“I keep my jacket on a chair next to the room where we were gift-wrapping for the customers,” Pandelli said. “I guess what happened was that in all the excitement someone picked up my coat and wrapped it, too.”

The next day a woman called to say that she and her husband were the unknowing recipients.

“She brought the stuff in, including my wallet, and I feel kind of guilty because I didn’t get her name,” Pandelli said.

He wasn’t insulted that she didn’t keep the jacket.

“I think it’s about four sizes too small for her husband,” said the 160-pound manager of the Mr. Man Big and Tall Store.

It didn’t seem like the kind of event that you’d advertise, anyway. But obviously someone left something off the marquee at Chatsworth High recently. The event was not a “Vice Dance,” as it stated, but a girl-asks-boy “Vice Versa” hop.

Strange things have been happening at the Downey Cemetery lately, what with 19th-Century headstones disappearing and then turning up.

The first absentee to be noticed was Indian Joe’s marker.

Indian Joe--that’s how everyone knew him--was a local character whose headstone inscription said:

“He was a good Indian while he lived. He belonged to the Kaweah. He lived in Downey 22 years and died November 22, 1895.”

Cemetery superintendent Hank Spears says that Indian Joe’s 2-foot-tall marker vanished about the time a woman claiming to be a reporter inquired about its whereabouts.

Spears also discovered two other stones missing, one that said, “Caroline Skidmore, 1814-1897,” and another for “Mary J. Morse, 1876.”

“It’s about the lowest thing I can imagine, stealing from a cemetery,” Spears remarked.

Downey police began an investigation and received a tip that the Skidmore marker was in Cypress.

“They found it in a family’s back yard,” Spears said. “The people had it set up next to a fish pond. They said their 14-year-old son found it by the railroad tracks.”

But the stones for Indian Joe and Mary Morse are still unaccounted for.

“I wonder about that woman,” said Spears of the alleged reporter who visited. “She may have been the last one to see Indian Joe, so to speak.”

Someone was inspired by the Skid Row Santa who drove up to the downtown Midnight Mission in a Cadillac last week and handed out $500 in $10 bills to street people.

A few days later, another anonymous man stopped there in a Mercedes and also distributed about $500 in small bills, mission director Clancy Imislund said.

Imislund voiced the hope that “perhaps we’ll have a competition among benefactors driving other makes of cars.”

Look for someone to be gunned down in City Hall this afternoon--but it’s only make-believe.

The makers of the television show “Matlock” have rented the third-floor rotunda in City Hall to shoot a shooting.

“If the scene is not completed on Thursday,” Viacom Productions’ press release announced matter-of-factly, “additional blank-gun shots will be fired on Friday between the hours of 7 and 10 a.m.”

Some footage of a mythical mayor’s office has to be filmed, too. It might have been a nice birthday gesture to choose the headquarters of Los Angeles’ real mayor, Tom Bradley, who turns 71 today. After all, Bradley held his office party Wednesday.

Instead, the movie-makers chose Councilman Gilbert Lindsay’s office.

Actually, it’s an improvement of sorts from the casting of a couple of weeks ago when a crew from a PBS television show slapped up an “Office of the Mayor” sign on the door of a mop-shed in the building.