A Chip Off the Old Typewriter

It is the stuff of fairy tales: A father wins a prestigious award for a book he has written. Two years later, his son wins the identical prize for a book he has written. And they all live happily ever after.

The citation is the Newbery Award, given to the author of the year’s best children’s book. The father is Sid Fleischman, 68, Santa Monica writer who won the ’87 Newbery for “The Whipping Boy.” (“They had them, you know,” Fleischman says, “boys who took spankings for a naughty prince who couldn’t be punished physically. They had whipping girls, too.”) The son is Paul Fleischman, 36, now of Pacific Grove, ’89 laureate for “Joyful Noise”--read-aloud poems about insects. “Astonishing,” Sid says. “A father-son first.”

“It was about 12 years ago,” Sid recalls. “Paul was home from college. One day he came downstairs, threw some pages on the couch and said, ‘I’ve written a story.’ He’d never written before. It was good. He sent it to Harper & Row. They published it! He’s been writing ever since.”

Is writing in the genes? Sid has no idea, but “I never pushed him. My father was appalled at my decision to become a writer. He was afraid I’d starve. I knew Paul had a gift, though. For my birthday, he’d give me original similes. Once he made me a little ‘plotting board’: You’d spin the arrow and get a character or a problem or a plot.

“Often, at dinner, I’d say, ‘Kids, I have this character in a spot and I can’t figure how to get him out,’ and they’d make suggestions. And, of course, Paul had been around writers all his life, heard writers’ talk, and I guess he had to feel, ‘This is kind of a nice life.’ His father never had to get up in the morning and shave and go to work; just sit at a typewriter in his robe.” And write prize-winners.

He’s a Man of True Grit

At 32, eight years on the road including some really tough gigs, Dave Hutson qualifies as a genuine rock star. You can catch his act in South America, Europe, all over America. This spring Hutson opens in Los Angeles. At the zoo.

Hutson works out of Tucson, for the Larson Co. He has been here since May, creating the framework for the new $8.3-million Children’s Zoo, to open in late April. Hutson and a crew of 21 have built a rather splendid mini-mountain, a kingdom of caves, waterfalls, tidal pools, the works. Stone by stone. As in nature, no two alike.

“We work either from molds, taken from actual rocks from all over the world,” Hutson says, “or from scratch.” Either way, it’s painstaking work, duplicating textures, colors, veins; using dental tools, tiny chisels, mineral-colored paints. “Then we put ‘em together like a puzzle. After a while you get a feel for the flow. You have to be artistic, know your geology, your

zoology,” Hutson says.

“It’s not so much for the kids--how many are going to say, ‘Look, Mom, there’s a South African kudu on a North Dakota rock’?--as it is for ourselves, mostly for the animals. When you first make the model, you think, ‘How can I contain the animal, yet make it interesting, exciting enough so he doesn’t get bored in the exhibit?’

“Studies show that animals do a lot more reproducing in a more natural environment. Hopefully, what we create is close enough that they’ll still go for it.”

Hutson--”I didn’t exactly grow up wanting to make rocks; I just kind of fell into it”--enjoys the work, loves the animals.

“It’s hard to get a high esteem for an animal when it’s behind bars, like a prisoner,” he says. “In their own habitats you feel more comfortable with our partners on Earth.”

A Hot Time in the Old Town

They started building the fire truck--the one Nora Page is going to ride on--in 1943. The war interrupted delivery. Finally, the flaming-red engine--”a Peter Pirsch, one of Culver City’s first pumpers,” driver-chief mechanic Bob Lewis says--was finished in 1947, the year Nora turned 53. Both fire engine and Nora are still going strong, one putting out fires and the other starting them.

On Thursday, Lewis and crew will pick Nora up at Country Villa South, a West Los Angeles nursing facility for the elderly; pop a helmet on her head and siren her down to Culver City for a bit of a celebration and a citation as one of the city’s oldest residents. Or at least Nora hopes so. “You never know,” she says, “but if I make it to Jan. 26, that’ll be 95 years of hell-raising.”

Has Nora ever ridden on a fire engine? “Are you kidding? I was born on one. Dad was a fireman in Springfield, Ohio, then in Culver City. He’d be home for dinner, the bell would ring and off he’d run, me right behind him. Never missed a good fire in those days.”

“The fire wagons were pulled by horses. Nothing to hold onto either. I’ll never forget one day: I’m up with the firemen and starting down the pole to go home when the bell goes off and here come the horses. Me still on the pole. I almost lost my (backside) . . .

“I tell you, I haven’t missed much in my life, nothing worth doing.”

And after the ride to Culver City? “We’re having a little party,” she says. “Going to Chippendale’s.”