Lisa Bialac-Jehle of Topanga hopes it was...

Lisa Bialac-Jehle of Topanga hopes it was just a wry comment on our freeway battlefields.

She saw a truck with a hand grenade hanging from its rear-view mirror on the Santa Monica Freeway.

“Luckily,” she added, “it wasn’t hanging by the pin.”

“There you go again, picking on Reseda,” wrote City Councilwoman Joy Picus. She was referring to our disclosure that the Valley community’s name is Spanish for “a plant characterized by thick stems and coarse foliage . . . often found growing near mini-malls.”

Picus points out that, in Latin, reseda means “to heal, to rest, to bring calm and peace.” She may have something there. After all, no freeways pass through Reseda.

Mention here the other day of the old Iowa courthouse that now stands in Torrance made Bertie Rountree smile. She and her husband, Thaddeus, were married in the Council Bluffs building before it was dismantled.

Long before it was dismantled. The date was Dec. 29, 1919.

“I was a stock girl and I told my boss that day that I was going out at lunchtime,” recalled Bertie, age 89.

She remembered with a laugh that, during their courtship, she realized Thaddeus had serious intentions “when he finally started going to my Methodist Church. He was Episcopalian.”

Their family has since grown to comprise a son, three grandchildren, four great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren.

Bertie and Thaddeus, 90, a retired railway employee, visited the transplanted courthouse not long ago. “They’ve added an elevator since we were married,” she observed.

Christo--considered an environmental artist by some and a mess-maker by others--moved one step closer to his latest dream:

The erecting of 1,700 giant yellow umbrellas along an 18-mile stretch of the Tejon Pass area between Bakersfield and L.A.

A state Senate committee approved a bill that would exempt Christo from paying sales tax on the $2 million he is expected to spend on the materials for the 28-foot-wide umbrellas. Both Kern and L.A. counties support the tax break because they expect the Umbrellas of Tejon, due to be installed in October, 1991, to be a great tourist attraction.

On the other hand, if the winds are brisk, the project could develop into one of Interstate 5’s most memorable SigAlerts.

L.A. police were called to an apartment on East Pico Boulevard early Friday morning by nervous tenants who heard suspicious noises. Sure enough, they found an intruder wedged between two walls--and crying. The officers had to go to work with a hammer and chisel to free the poor creature. When they finally succeeded, she fled the scene. “She took off for Mama,” theorized Sgt. Kevin McCarthy. The kitten is still at large.

miscelLAny:

Street names in one Woodland Hills neighborhood include Cezanne, Da Vinci, Gauguin, Michelangelo, Matisse, Picasso and Monet avenues. There’s no Christo, though.