Tales From the Freeway : Babies Are Born. Pianists Perform. Kangaroos Cruise. And Stuff Spills.

It is 5:56 a.m. on a Tuesday, and the freeway situation map that covers one wall of the Caltrans Traffic Operations Center in downtown Los Angeles already glows with a gaudy necklace of red lights. They show that top speeds on the inbound San Bernardino Freeway have slowed to less than 20 m.p.h. Other freeways are starting to go amber, indicating speeds of 20 to 35, but most are still largely green. Over 35. Not bad, considering the hour. The center monitors the freeway system around the clock, relaying problems to radio and TV stations and flashing warnings to motorists via electronic signboards. This morning, the National Weather Service has predicted showers, and it won’t take much rain to harden these arteries into a mad tangle of jackknifed semis, rippled fenders, spilled loads, cursing drivers and overworked paramedics.

California Highway Patrol Officer Robert Polzin shows up to share the dayside watch with three or four Caltrans traffic engineers in the center . The small computer screen bringing incident reports from the CHP’s dispatch center on Vermont Avenue is getting a little cluttered as more drivers head for work. Polzin, an affable 20-year veteran of the CHP, scans the Freeway Status Display mural, which covers Los Angeles County as well as adjacent chunks of Ventura and Orange counties. I-5 is bright red in the Irvine area as electronic pavement sensors transmit the speeds and number of vehicles on the move--or, in spots, not moving at all. “About normal,” Polzin observes.

“If we get some rain,” remarks Caltrans traffic engineer Richard Droullard, “things will happen.”

They always do. WHEN A YOUNG MAN RAN OUT OF gas one night in 1985 on Interstate 10 in Covina, he used the dubious method of sticking his finger into the tank to assure himself the gas was gone. The spring-loaded flap snapped shut on his hand, pinning him to his car.

He had to wait an hour before a man in a pickup stopped and offered to help. The young man asked his would-be rescuer to go get him some gas while he continued to try to free his finger. As he took out his wallet to give the man some money, the Good Samaritan grabbed the wallet and sped away.

With his free arm, the hapless fellow finally hailed a highway patrol car. “He was really embarrassed,” says Officer Mark Roe, adding that he and his partner, Reuben Rios, “would take turns going back to our patrol car to giggle.”

Using a coat hanger, Roe and Rios worked for 20 minutes to loosen the finger. Finally, they called the fire department and, with the help of a lubricant, the young man was freed two hours after he got stuck.

While the firefighters were working in the glow of their truck’s flashing emergency lights, a car pulled up behind. When the highway patrolmen asked if he needed help, the inebriated driver replied: “No, I’m just stopping for the traffic lights.”

Roe and Rios swear the whole story is true.

HOVSEP TATEOSIAN REMEMBERS thinking it was going to be a “lucky day.” The 38-year-old former welder had just started driving a taxi in January of last year when he decided to get in some extra work on a Sunday morning. He hoped to pick up a fare for Disneyland at one of the downtown Los Angeles hotels.

He was stopped for a red light at Beaudry Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard when he noticed a bearded man in a blue dress sitting on the curb of the Harbor Freeway overpass. As Tateosian watched, the man suddenly jumped up and grabbed a passing pedestrian, 61-year-old Lilla Joy, first throwing her down, then picking her up and dangling her over the guardrail above the roaring freeway traffic. “Look down there,” Tateosian heard the bearded man yell. “That’s where you’re going to go.” Joy clung to the rail in terror.

Several drivers stopped and honked their horns in a futile effort to frighten the man away. Only Tateosian took action. He ran the red light, swerved around the corner and screeched to a halt on the bridge. Jumping from his cab, he shouted at the man to let the woman go. That got him nothing but an angry glare, which Tateosian later described as “eyes like an eagle when he’s trying to get his prey.” Tateosian grabbed a tire iron from his cab and promised, “If you throw her over, you’re going after her.”

The man screamed a few obscenities, dropped Joy on the sidewalk and ran. He was caught by police a short distance away.

Tateosian, who was born in Armenia and grew up in Afghanistan, was cited by Caltrans for bravery. “My dad always told me,” he said then, “that if you watch out for kids and women, then God will protect you.”

CHP OFFICER LYLE WHITTEN, 54, will never forget what happened one night in 1970, when he had been in the CHP less than a year. At about midnight, he and his partner were trying to move stalled traffic past a non-injury collision on the southbound San Diego Freeway near Wilmington. Suddenly, a drunk driver going 60 m.p.h. plowed into the rear of a dead-still Cadillac. The two officers, a quarter of a mile away, heard the explosion of the Cadillac’s gas tank and turned to see the bright orange glow. They jumped into their car and worked back along the edge of the jam. It took, Whitten estimates, a minute and a half.

When they got there, flaming gasoline had spread across several lanes. A man, a woman and a little girl of about 3 were rolling on the ground, screaming. Motorists were out of their cars, staring in horror. The parents were so badly burned, it looked as if they didn’t have a chance. Whitten grabbed the child, his partner got behind the wheel and the patrol car took off with red lights flashing and siren screaming. Whitten clutched the little girl, smothering the flames that had burned off most of her hair and clothing. Her skin was falling off in his hands. She kept shrieking, “I want my daddy!” They made it to Harbor General Hospital in three minutes.

By the next day she was dead, as were her parents. After her grandmother called the CHP to ask about the fate of a second granddaughter, an infant’s body was found in the charred wreckage.

“It stuck with me all of these years,” Whitten says. “I had a 3-year-old girl at that time. That’s all I could think of. We just couldn’t work the rest of the night. We called the sergeant and said we couldn’t go back in the field. We were done in.”

DURING HIS 11 YEARS AS A PARAMEDIC, Jim May saved a lot of people and saw many die, but he was called upon only twice to deliver babies. “I had one partner who claimed to have had about 30 deliveries, and another had 18 or 20,” May, 39, says. “But I was rarely in the right place at the right time.” Then, last summer, soon after he was promoted to captain in the Long Beach Fire Department and thought he was out of the baby-delivery business for good, he got his chance for one more.

Anna and George Tu of Garden Grove, who had come here from Vietnam seven years earlier, were speeding toward the hospital for the birth of their sixth child when it became clear the baby was not going to wait. The father saw CHP Officer John Chilcot on the side of the San Gabriel Freeway near Wardlow Road, pulled his minivan over and asked for help. May heard the call in his fire station, which had no paramedic team, and though it was no longer in his job description, he jumped at the chance. He reached the couple first.

May misunderstood from their rudimentary English that this was their first child and assumed that it would be a protracted birth, that paramedics, who would have also heard the call, would arrive in time to actually make the delivery. He was astonished when a 7-pound, 13-ounce boy dropped into his hands just as reinforcements pulled up. “All I had to do was catch,” May said afterward.

PEEVISH BEES, STAMPEDING CATTLE, boats, pianos, mayonnaise, fish, broken watermelons, bananas, hot asphalt, soft drinks, margarita mix, tomatoes, beer, 150 tons of honey, a wild boar’s head, a 5-foot-tall papier-mache rhinoceros, a U.S. Navy depth charge, sides of beef and mannequins--all of these things have littered Southern California freeways. Two exhibitors heading for the San Diego County Fair in Del Mar once lost a dead, 15-foot, 2,000-pound great white shark on the Escondido Freeway when their trailer overturned.

There have been at least three armored-car mishaps on Southern California freeways, the most recent last Dec. 7, when a Loomis truck hauling $500,000 worth of coins broke an axle on the Pomona Freeway in Rowland Heights. Highway patrol officers stood guard with shotguns, remembering that when a Brinks truck sprinkled the Hollywood Freeway near Cahuenga Pass with $7,000 in dimes and quarters, motorists jumped out of their cars and managed to get away with about 10% of the loot.

One spill resulted in a drama so long-running it has passed into the realm of urban myth. In the late 1960s, a poultry truck overturned and dumped more than three dozen chickens along the embankment of the southbound Hollywood Freeway at Vineland Avenue in North Hollywood. Nesting in the shrubbery at the side of the freeway, the chickens prompted complaints from motorists by wandering out on the roadway and stopping traffic.

An elderly widow named Minnie Blumfield made the chickens famous when she began spending $30 a month of her Social Security check to feed the small flock. She sprinkled seed through the chain-link fence, and the chickens multiplied until estimates of their numbers reached as high as 75. “They’re just chickens,” Blumfield said, “but I do love them.”

Eventually, she and a neighbor, actress Jodie Mann, persuaded Caltrans to let animal regulation crews trap the birds and truck them off to a farm in Sylmar. It took three months to catch them with baited traps. Blumfield, then in her 90s, died in 1977. Some of the chickens must have evaded capture because a few still live at the edge of the freeway, according to CHP Officer Monty Keifer. “We had a chicken hunt and tried to catch them,” Keifer says, “but we weren’t too successful. As soon as we showed up, they took off into the bushes.”

Mann says the story of Minnie and her chickens is a persistent favorite; every couple of years a journalist calls her to revive it. The last call prompted Mann to dust off a screenplay she wrote about the incident a few years ago and “try to peddle it around town.” Some people at a major studio, she says, are “very interested.”

RAYMOND OPPENHEIM, 37, WAS walking across the Los Angeles Street bridge over the Hollywood Freeway on the evening of Aug. 18, 1987, when he saw a man and a woman straddling the guardrail. They were, he told police later, “talking to each other, acting kind of crazy. . . . “ It wasn’t until he heard the squeal of brakes on the freeway below that he realized they had jumped. “I should have stopped them,” he said at the time.

Both were struck by automobiles and died. Cards on the bodies identified them as Marigail Richardson, 35, and her husband, Peter, 40. Their only address was a Chula Vista postal box. It was days before the coroner’s office learned that they had been living in a Pasadena board-and-care home. Marigail grew up in Houston, where her mother said she had been a “beautiful child.” But she drifted away from Houston after bouts with epilepsy and stays in mental institutions.

After one marriage and divorce, she met and married Peter, a Shanghai-born Vietnam War veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress. The couple moved from state to state in an apparent search for a better life.

In their last days, a friend at the board-and-care home said the Richardsons became inexplicably upset, saying they “couldn’t take it anymore.” They set fire to the wastebasket in their room and were told they would have to leave. That night they jumped from the freeway bridge.

The car that struck Marigail belonged to a family from Houston. They were here on vacation.

THE FREEWAY CAN BE AS GOOFY AS IT is grim. There was, for instance, Sandra Tsing Loh, a composer who borrowed a white Steinway grand piano and set it atop the Citicorp Plaza parking structure in downtown Los Angeles on Labor Day weekend of 1987 to serenade Harbor Freeway motorists. Loh said the traffic noise enhanced “the musical environment.” Whether any motorists actually heard the concert isn’t clear, but a lot of them waved.

CHP Officer Ralph Elvira remembers that two or three years ago on the Golden State Freeway near Newhall he pulled alongside a man who had spread a newspaper across his steering wheel while driving at moderate speed. Elvira assumed the motorist would notice him and put the paper aside. But while he watched, the driver licked his finger and turned the page. Elvira pulled him over and wrote him up for driving at an unsafe speed--the safe speed for reading at the wheel being 0 m.p.h.

CHP Officer Steve Ussher found his own casual driver when he stopped an Australian proceeding erratically on the San Diego Freeway near Mission Viejo. The problem, the driver explained to Ussher, was that his pet kangaroo kept jumping into his lap. Indeed, there was a 3-foot-tall kangaroo sitting on the passenger side. “It was wearing a little vest with an Australian logo on the back,” Ussher says. “The rear seat was full of eucalyptus leaves. The guy was doing travel promotion for Australia, trying to drum up tours.” Persuaded that neither driver nor kangaroo was under the influence, Ussher sent them on their way without a ticket.

THE HIGH-SPEED PURSUIT HAS TAKEN on new dimensions as the freeway system has grown. It is not uncommon now for drivers to try outracing officers through several counties. In November, 1988, a woman led the CHP on a 175-mile chase at speeds of more than 110 m.p.h. before finally being stopped at a roadblock on State Route 94 near Campo, east of San Diego.

When asked, she explained that she “just wanted to get away from San Pedro.”

STEPHENE MOSELEY REMEMBERS thinking that Chris Hoyt had been shot by a sniper when he suddenly slumped at the wheel of her Dodge Dart on the Golden State Freeway in the San Fernando Valley the night of Oct. 21, 1970. “There was a loud explosive noise and there was blood coming off his head,” she says. She managed to grab the wheel, steer the car to the shoulder and stop, even though Hoyt’s foot was still jammed down on the accelerator. As another motorist pulled up behind them, she ran to him, calling frantically, “My friend’s been shot.”

She was wrong. What killed her then-fiance, a 22-year-old University of Redlands graduate student in speech therapy, was a 60-pound chunk of Palos Verdes stone dropped from the Peoria Street overpass in the Sun Valley area. The point of the boulder punctured the top of the car and pierced Hoyt’s brain.

“He was very gifted,” says Moseley, now married to a Temple City attorney. His parents, Gloria and William Hoyt of Redlands, say their 6-foot, 3-inch son was not only a good athlete but also a talented musician who sang and had played violin in the University of Redlands orchestra for five years. They sued the state for $250,000, pointing out that there had been nine other instances of rocks--and in one case an automobile engine block--being thrown from the Peoria Street overpass. But a jury ruled against them.

The death of Hoyt, as well as those of two other Southern Californians killed in similar incidents in other areas within 60 days, did, however, prompt state legislation to screen some freeway overpasses accessible to pedestrians.

“They fenced the Peoria Street overpass within one week of Chris’ death,” says Gloria Hoyt. No one was ever arrested for his murder.

THE NEWLY MARRIED COUPLE FROM Carson rented a Cloud 9 limousine for the evening, directing the driver, Terry Kunce, to take them to a Westside restaurant. Afterward, opening a bottle of champagne in the back seat, they closed the cloth-covered divider between the front and rear to indulge the husband’s long-time fantasy: to make love in a limousine. After the long drive back to Carson on the 405, the couple emerged unwrinkled and nonchalantly thanked their driver for the ride.

“They were neat people,” says Kunce. But she reminds similarly inclined clients to keep in mind that while the partition between driver and passengers may be opaque, it’s not soundproof.

A Freeway Crash Course Statistics are for Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura, San Diego and

Imperial counties.

Number of freeways : 31.

Total miles of freeway : 1,801.

Most heavily traveled freeway interchange in the nation : I-10 and 405 interchange, with an average of 513,000 vehicles per day.

Most heavily traveled interchange in Orange County (ranked seventh in the nation) : The confluence of the 5, 22 and 57 freeways, with an average of 350,000 vehicles a day.

Most heavily traveled section of freeway in Los Angeles County : I-10 just east of Normandie Avenue, with an average of 328,000 vehicles a day.

Average freeway speed : 31 m.p.h. *

Predicted average speed in the year 2010 : 19 m.p.h. *

Number of freeway accidents in 1988 : about 70,200. *

Number of freeway deaths last year : 1,900. *

Number of births : No one collects this data.

Cost of building a mile of freeway : $100 million for Interstate 105, now in progress.

Number of raised pavement markers : 8,687,000.

Amount of garbage collected from freeways in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties in fiscal 1987-88 : 35,000 cubic yards.

Sources : California Department of Transportation, California Highway Patrol, Southern California

Assn. of Governments, LA 2000 Committee.

* Excludes San Diego County.