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How, wondered Harry Perry, the roller-skating musician,...

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<i> From staff and wire reports</i>

How, wondered Harry Perry, the roller-skating musician, could the authorities take away Venice’s main claim to fame?

He was one of the first to spot the no-roller-skating, no-skateboarding signs that the city posted along Ocean Front Walk earlier this week.

“Harry called me and so did dozens of others,” said activist Jerry Rubin, the director of SHARE--Save the Healers, Artists, Politicos and Entertainers. “They were very upset. After all, ‘Sixty Minutes’ once called us the Roller Skating Capital of the World.”

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The controversy came screeching into view because the city Transportation Department decided to take down the old signs along the walk that forbade bicycling. Then, in reviewing the local regulations, the agency noticed that a little-known, never-enforced ordinance had prohibited skating and skateboarding since 1980. New signs were made, adding the skating and skateboarding taboos.

Rubin promptly sent out fliers announcing that a massive Ban-the-Ban rally would be held on Ocean Front Walk on Sunday at noon. He and other Venetians phoned City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter.

And, suddenly Friday, the signs disappeared.

Galanter’s office said that she would introduce a resolution next week “assuring that roller skating on the walk would be legal”--meaning, among other things, that Harry Perry would be able to strum his guitar on wheels.

Rubin called it a “guarded victory” but added that the demonstration would proceed. After all, Galanter is still undecided about skateboarding.

You never know when Halloween’s coming to West Hollywood. Members of a hotel and restaurant employees union protested their working conditions by demonstrating outside a hotel on Sunset Boulevard on Friday. They wore rat masks.

Not only have authorities rejected a suggestion by a conservative magazine to add Ronald Reagan’s likeness to Mt. Rushmore, but Duarte’s school board has apparently decided not to name a local junior high school after the former President.

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Robert Ortega, the principal of Northview Middle School in the San Gabriel Valley, had proposed renaming it after Century City’s best-known current tenant “in order to honor a former President and get us some attention.”

But Ortega said he’s heard objections ranging from the possibility of Reagan being damaged by the Iran-Contra hearings to a reluctance to naming the school after a living person.

Ortega hopes it’s renamed something . After all, there’s already a Northview High in Covina.

“It’s bad enough not being known,” Ortega said. “But we even get their calls.”

But, more on Duarte. . . .

John Hitt, the city’s mayor, admitted at the first annual Clean Air Awards banquet of the Air Quality Management District that there’s still work to be done, to put it mildly.

“One of my table guests thought all intelligent life ends within five miles of the beach,” Hitt said. “It’s not that all intelligent life ends. It’s just that all visible life ends.”

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