People and Events

It’s happened to more than one shopper: You delay paying those credit cards, and the late fees pile up.

It’s also happened to the City Council of Hawaiian Gardens, a burg plagued with financial problems lately.

During the last fiscal year, the five members ran up about $400 in late fees and interest on the city’s plastic, Mayor Kathleen Navejas said the other day.

What to do? Navejas made a proposal, and the council grudgingly approved it by a 3-2 vote. They’re cutting up their cards.

Traffic update: The Freeway Singles Club will soon be motoring into Los Angeles County.

So says Ruth Guillou, founder of the Huntington Beach-based group that sells $12 memberships to motorists, entitling them to display numbered stickers on their jalopies. The club acts as a receiving house for the lovelorn of the lanes.

Guillou, then single, started the organization four years ago after she pulled up to a stoplight and saw “an attractive man in a yellow Cadillac” next to her, but couldn’t think of how to strike up a conversation.

The club hit its peak in 1985, growing to 1,000 members, most in Los Angeles and Orange counties (and one in Manhattan). But it’s since leveled off to around 500 due in part, she thinks, to AIDS concerns.

Now, Guillou, a 60-year-old realtor who drives a gray Mercedes, says she’s going to “really start promoting” the group and establish offices in other counties.

And she still hopes to find Mr. Right Driver.

Guillou never found the man in the yellow Cadillac, leading her to speculate: “Perhaps I’ve been too particular.” She’s currently dating a man who drives a red one.

A service that paints residential street numbers on curbs sent Mark LaBonge a flyer, dutifully listing its city permit number. But the notice misspelled the city’s name as “Los Angles.” LaBonge isn’t going to hire the service. “I’m going to trust this guy to get my address right?” he said.

The posh, 49-unit development along the ocean was approved by the Rancho Palos Verdes City Council on the condition that 10 of the townhouses be offered at prices that are “affordable” by local standards.

So, the low-income dwellings just went on sale for a bargain-basement price of $135,000 each.

More than 1,200 people quickly offered to buy.

Perhaps worrying that all the volunteers might feel crowded living together in the condos, the city is holding a drawing Jan.16 to select 10 buyers. The horde of applicants would have been even larger, but in order to keep the riffraff out, the city also stipulated that only residents of Rancho Palos Verdes were eligible.

Kooky car dealers are synonymous with Southern California, dating back to such characters as Les (“Get off your couch and come on down to Hermosa Beach”) Bacon, Frank (“No Sunday selling”) Taylor, Ralph (“Hi, Friends”) Williams, and, of course, Cal Worthington and his non-dogs named Spot.

So Steve Mooney, the manager of a Chevy dealership on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, was only upholding the tradition when he ascended a 45-foot-high platform this week and vowed to stay there until he peddled 125 models.

Looney Mooney, as he calls himself, brings to mind Madman Muntz, the pioneer of the genre who came on the scene here in the 1940s. Times change, though, and no matter how loudly Mooney shouts into his bullhorn, he won’t make the impact Muntz did.

The Madman’s showroom at 11th and Figueroa streets was a regular stop for tour buses, which would pull up in front of a billboard that said: “I buy ‘em retail and sell ‘em wholesale. It’s more fun that way!” A running joke with comics, he was mentioned on Bob Hope’s show 35 of 37 weeks one season.

Muntz died last year, but his name lives on in his stereo stores. The Madman got into that line of work in 1947 when he began hawking new-fangled machines known as television sets and coined perhaps his most memorable slogan:

“Stop staring at your radio!”