People and Events

Perhaps it was inevitable, but tensions on the increasingly congested local roadways seem to be spilling over into a new arena: parking lots.

Score cards ready? Boxer Mike Tyson is accused of cuffing an attendant who tried to prevent Tyson’s party from docking in a reserved spot at a Hollywood night club . . . two limousine drivers vying for the same spot at a Lucky supermarket in Redondo Beach draw guns on each other . . . two Palos Verdes Estates women are hauled off to jail after allegedly erasing the meter-maid’s chalk marks on their tires.

And now. . . .

Actor Clint Eastwood has been sued for $101,000 by a woman who says the actor ruined her day by allegedly ramming her parked car with his used pickup truck on the Burbank Studios lot. The plaintiff, Stacy McLaughlin, an executive with an animation company, made the mistake of leaving her car in Eastwood’s spot while making a delivery. She also claims that the celluloid cowboy threatened to break the car’s windows with a hammer if it wasn’t moved.

Eastwood, who is already a defendant in a palimony suit filed by actress Sondra Locke, “is not available for comment,” a spokesman said Tuesday.

The renaming of the Skyline Equestrian Trail in the San Gabriel Valley for County Supervisor Pete Schabarum is a reminder of Schabarum’s interest in transit. He did, after all, unsuccessfully seek the secretary of transportation post in President Bush’s cabinet.

And the christening also follows the recent trend of naming geographical spots for politicians while they’re still alive--and even still in office.

Such was not always the case. The fountain bearing the likeness of early-century U.S. Sen. Frank Flint on the south lawn of City Hall was a posthumous tribute. (The fountain has since been turned off after the body of a transient was found floating there.) Fletcher Bowron Square, named in honor of the Los Angeles’ mayor from 1938 to 1953, was installed in the Los Angeles City Mall years after Bowron’s death.

But nowadays, more and more politicians are living to see their tributes. Mayor Tom Bradley’s name graces a terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. A Century City businessman will soon have his name on a skyscraper: the Ronald Reagan State Office Building. And the Century Freeway has been renamed for Rep. Glenn M. Anderson (D-Harbor City), a nice honor if the freeway is ever completed.

Who started the trend locally? It may have been San Pedro Assemblyman Vincent Thomas, who consented to having a site--the bridge connecting San Pedro and Terminal Island--named in his honor while he was still in office in the early 1960s. Ironically, Thomas was later defeated for reelection. And, now 25 years after it was built, visitors sometimes confuse the span with a religious order and call it the “St. Vincent Thomas Bridge.”

If the streets around Sunset and Gower are more jammed up than usual on the evening of May 17, the news figures to get out over the air waves quickly. KNX radio is hosting a Traffic Tipsters Party at the station.

Why kick it off at 6 p.m., right in the middle of what KNX traffic reporter Bill Keene calls the “rush-hour rodeo?” Make it more of a challenge for the invitees?

“We thought of having it on a weekend,” said Keene, “but the tipsters told us they preferred a weekday evening because they didn’t know if they’d be in town on a weekend.”

Invitations have been sent out to actors Chevy Chase and Angie Dickinson and about 400 other car-phone commandos who have called in traffic bulletins regularly for at least a year.

Keene isn’t sure whether to invite another sometime KNX correspondent, Roman Catholic Archbishop Roger Mahony. Mahony was invited last year but “sent us back a very nice letter saying he was booked up solid,” Keene said. “I’m not sure this is the sort of thing he’d attend.”