While it does boast of a public...

While it does boast of a public facility named after a cartoon character--Dennis the Menace Park--Downey has never been considered particularly eccentric.

Sure, a developer built a controversial pink Embassy Suites hotel there a few years ago, but when it comes to the offbeat, Downey just doesn’t compare to, say, Venice.

Still . . .

In recent months, the city has been hit by a number of strange thefts.

First, someone broke into the Downey Cemetery and stole the headstones of three 19th-Century residents, including one known only as Indian Joe.

Next came burglaries of some lava rocks from a tropical fish store, a ton of petrified wood and 30 pounds of dinosaur bones from a carnival supply store, and purple ceramic tile from a resident’s back yard.

“Someone must be building themselves a shrine,” joked Downey Police Lt. John Finch.

One item has been recovered, a headstone that a Cypress resident found in a vacant lot.

But the two-foot-tall marker for Indian Joe still hasn’t popped up.

Just to restore some balance to the universe, one item filched elsewhere is being returned.

It’s a school bell that was taken from USC by Sigma Chi fraternity on Halloween night--1890.

“We’ve had one hundred years’ use of it,” said alumnus Richard C. Econn, explaining the surrender. (Plus, USC has no plans to prosecute.)

No surprise that Econn’s old house was behind the prank. A rowdy frat whose members have included countless athletes, USC’s Sigma Chis could have been the model for the movie, “Animal House.”

The ringleader in the bell caper was one Elger Reed, who helped snatch it off the top of Widney Hall (now Widney Alumni House) and then sped off in his buckboard.

This being USC, it was a late-model buckboard.

But let’s get back to the matter of Dennis the Menace Park in Downey. Why is it so named?

Simple, says Bonnie Kehoe, the city’s recreation manager:

“The city came up with the idea in the late 1950s because it was going to be a children’s playground and because ‘Dennis the Menace’ was a very popular program on television then.”

Too bad for you if you failed to take advantage of the moment when the clock struck 45 seconds past 1:23 Wednesday morning or afternoon. The time and date lined up in order at those two instants as 1:23:45 6-7-89.

Averi, Malibu’s Psychic to the Stars, said it was “a time to meditate, to make decisions” because it felt as though everything were “aligned.”

Today, things are back to their old, unaligned selves.

Just a smidgen of bitterness was evident in the headquarters of Lyle Hall after it became obvious that he would fail in his bid to unseat Los Angeles City Councilman Ernani Bernardi.

Lyle’s consultant Harvey Englander growled:

“The people have spoken--the bastards.”