Odds & Ends Around the Valley

Two-Wheeling Women

Kitty Rourke, 39, of Sherman Oaks feels like a pioneer. She bought her Harley 1100 Sportster in 1987 after her boyfriend didn’t like her riding on the back of his all the time.

She got her own bike after passing a motorcycle safety-training course. Then she asked each man in the group of riders she knew if they would mind her company. “I knew I was breaking into very dangerous ground--it’s sort of the last frontier for women. They said yes, they’d be proud to have me,” Rourke recalls.

Now she rides on weekends with several groups, including an informal all-woman group.

Several motorcycle dealers in the San Fernando Valley report a recent increase of women customers.

“I’ve really noticed it change a lot this year. We’ve probably had 50 women buy motorcycles for themselves,” comments Derrick Bernard, manager of Burbank Yamaha. “The image of a biker has changed. It’s no longer the dirty scummy guy with grease all over him--although those people still ride them. It’s kind of a yuppie thing now.”

Adds Steven Best, owner of Van Nuys Harley, who sells about 140 bikes a year: “About three years ago very few--if any--women bought Harleys. Now we sell probably an average of 20 a year to women.”

Now This Is Student Life

Some students remember their college dorm rooms as grimy rat holes, where the chief amenity was an electrical outlet within extension-cord reach of a built-in desk. Yet students living on campus at California State University, Northridge will be in for a rude awakening when they leave the schools’s deluxe apartments for housing in the real world.

The school has just completed the second phase of its housing-construction project, called University Park Apartments. “We call them apartment suites or residential units rather than dormitories because that word has such a negative connotation,” says Diana Gruendler, director of housing services.

Each of the 186 apartments houses four students and includes two bedrooms, a living room (without a television set), a kitchen (without a microwave), a fairly good-sized bathroom and enough closet and storage space to prevent arguments. A swimming pool, basketball courts and volleyball courts are shared with the housing units finished in the first phase.

The price? Only $3,255 for the academic school year--roughly $361 per month. Kind of makes you want to go back to school again, doesn’t it?

Dog-Gone Scams

After spending about $2,500 and countless hours in his search, Les Rodin of Sherman Oaks still hasn’t found his 8-year-old Maltese male dog, Rocky, whom he suspects was abducted July 8.

What he did find, though, is that there are a few unscrupulous people who make a living through “I-found-your-dog” scams.

Rocky was wearing a name tag with his phone number on it. That Saturday morning, two doors and a gate separating him from the street were left open. “Rocky doesn’t just take off,” says Rodin, who is in real estate management. “I’ve since learned that people steal other people’s dogs all the time.”

Rodin called Sherlock Bones (1-800-94-BONES) for advice on how to go about his search, and also ordered 2,000 reward posters from them.

He took other extraordinary measures--mailing out 700 of the posters and hiring the Pet Finders in Van Nuys to call everyone within a three-mile radius of his home. He also placed ads in every newspaper--and that’s when he received the scam calls.

The first was from a woman in Georgia who claimed that she had unwittingly bought his dog for $175 while on vacation here. She promised to ship Rocky back to Rodin if he would just reimburse her the $175.

“I was excited and suspicious at the same time,” Rodin recalls. “Naturally, I would not release the money without getting the dog first, and offered all these various proposals to her, which she didn’t like. She called collect on top of it!”

Rodin alerted Sherlock Bones, who called others with newspaper ads and discovered that the woman in Georgia had preyed on them, too.

Then, last week, a trucker called, claiming that he picked up the dog while driving through the area. He promised to send the dog back if Rodin would pay for the shipping charges. When Rodin questioned him further about Rocky, the man hung up.

Last week Rodin bought a new Maltese. “But Rocky was like my right arm,” he says. “I still haven’t given up the search. I can’t get myself to stop running the ads. It would be too emotional.”

Surplus History

You’ll find the usual array of government-issue merchandise at Surplus City Retail Co. in Sun Valley: tents, backpacks, boots, flags and dehydrated foods. But you’ll also notice the unusual: World War II 105-mm cannons and messenger bikes, a Nike missile, a radio-controlled target Drone airplane, an old astronaut’s suit.

“We plan on building a museum next door for this stuff,” says owner Jack Stebles. “But we’re not in too much of a hurry, because everything is already out right now, in the store or across the street in the yard.”

Movie and television companies have rented the store’s wartime trailers and water tanks, as well as their “mules”--four-wheel-drive flatbed wagons used for transporting bulky items.

“A few people have wanted to buy the missile,” salesperson Dan McDougall points out. “They’ve wanted to put it in their neighbor’s yard--either as a joke or to let them know they mean business about some squabble.”

Overheard

“Instead of helping me solve my problem, the women’s magazines keep pointing out new ones that I never knew I had before.”

--Woman under hair dryer at Studio in Van Nuys