Odds & Ends Around the Valley

Ups and Downs

Generally speaking, kids 7 or 8 years old are not overly familiar with the concept of Angst.

Life’s ups and downs to Mutant Turtle-age groupies mean Magic Mountain, locally, where you can hurtle down Viper’s 3,830 feet of track doing vertical loops, corkscrews and a boomerang or two, or the 8,650-foot-long Colossus with its 105-foot drop on which cars travel 62 m.p.h.

It is up to a future generation of social scientists to decide why we, as a people, from a very early age, find that allowing ourselves to be boxed into tiny, teacuplike containers and plunged at 60 m.p.h. to 70 m.p.h. to what appears to be certain death is an amusing way to spend a day.

It has been suggested that for adults, death hurtling is a welcome diversion from the freeway shootings and sobbings over the bill collection.

Children, on the other hand, adore any occasion in which screaming doesn’t result in parental sanctions, in any of their myriad forms.

Why people of any age want to do this sort of thing was not the topic on the table, however, when some lucky second- and third-grade students at Oxnard Street School in North Hollywood were visited by a pair of Magic Mountain operations staff members recently.

What was on the table was a mock-up of Viper and Colossus so that the amusement park’s John Svensen and Roland Miller could show the kids just how the roller coasters worked.

Elizabeth Teicher, the children’s English teacher, said most of the 7- to 9-year-old youngsters come from low-income families. “Many of them haven’t had the opportunity to go to places like Magic Mountain, so this was a real thrill for them.”

She said the youngsters particularly liked the video they were shown that gave a history of roller coasters. “They laughed when they saw my face turn green, watching the pictures of the famous thriller rides.”

This was not just a one-shot event for Magic Mountain, an amusement park spokesman said. Bonnie Rabjohn said any school or organization may call and request a free show-and-tell visit, complete with videotapes.

Morning Mail

Anyone who hasn’t filed a number of legally threatening pieces of paper at the post office gets piles of unsolicited mail.

Journalists are no exceptions to this basic constitutional freedom to be the recipients of useless information. Reporters’ mail brings them more than they ever wanted to know about subjects that have no relevance to their area of expertise, section of the paper or part of the world. Send them a boring, inane, demanding, ponderous, dumb or cute press release and, swoosh, it hits the round file with a satisfying slam dunk.

It takes a legitimate news item, or great skill, to get a press release noticed in this town, which brings us to Laurie Golden.

Publicist Golden, in writing about an upcoming San Fernando Valley medical conference, knew she had to come up with something simple, yet grabby, with a nice bite that would amuse with its presumption.

What she came up with is: “Thanks to medical and health-care progress, people are talking about ‘freezing’ heads, rallying for euthanasia rights, and rethinking the need for a health-care rationing system under governmental supervision and control.”

The conference to which she was referring will look at medical ethics, biology and insurance and is sponsored by the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn., Valley Presbyterian Hospital Foundation and Arco. The meeting, which will be held Oct. 18 and 19 at the Warner Center Marriott and Towers, will bring together noted scholars and authors to outline the current thinking and future trends in these areas, all of which Golden explains in the press release.

What she doesn’t tell us is anything else about freezing heads.

A phone call to Golden elicits the information that head freezing is one of the ethical questions up for discussion at the medical event.

She said she didn’t know if the speakers would be for or against it, or exactly how head freezing works.

Literary Offerings

If you’re wondering how former Valley College instructor Les Boston is handling his retirement, the word is he’s flunked the course.

Boston was a speech and English teacher at the college from 1963 to 1989, faculty president from 1969 to 1971, faculty adviser to the Writers Roundtable and something of a rabble-rouser, according to his own assessment.

Now, he’s a desktop publisher who has just issued the first book from his Van Nuys home/office.

The $10.95 volume, being sold through Dutton’s bookstores, is called, “Four Valley Poets,” and features the work of . . . four Valley poets. “The name is a takeoff on the title, ‘Eight Harvard Poets,’ which introduced E.E. Cummings, for one, to the world,” Boston said.

The tyro publisher doesn’t expect to rake it in with this first book. “You have to do self-help books for that,” he said. But he is excited about introducing these writers to the public.

They include two Valley College instructors, William Wallis and Terence Martin, and two Valley residents, Michael Martin and A.C.L. (Ann) Stanton.

In the forward to this first edition, another Valley College instructor, John Zounes, describes the work of each.

Stanton, he writes, is a hard-headed realist who calls it as she sees it. Zounes describes Marth as a prober of the dark side. Wallis is said to be like a seismograph with the needle jumping off the machine. Martin is likened to the guy who offers a hitchhiker a ride and then takes him places he didn’t want to go.

This does not sound like light, airplane reading.

Yakety-Yak

There are all kinds of entrepreneurs, but Bryen Hamilton and Ted Weifuss, both 23, may also be humanitarians.

The two will contract to take care of a household chore so onerous and loathsome, so despised, that it has separated husband from wife, child from parent. A chore not only noted in song, but No. 1 on the hit parade of household complaints.

To wit: The garbage.

As in, you did not take out the garbage.

You know who you are.

You promised you would do it.

You said you would remember.

You didn’t do it.

Hamilton and Weifuss will do it.

Anywhere in the Valley and surrounding areas they will, for $3.50 a week, take out your trash before your pickup day, come back after, reline the cans or other receptacles and put them back in the proper place.

Hamilton, a business student at Pierce College, said he and his pal thought up the idea because they saw the need. “Everyone fights over who is going to take out the garbage in every family because no one wants to do it.”

The pair of young businessmen spent about $200 having flyers printed up in August, then went door to door throughout many neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley handing them out.

“It took a lot of time getting set up,” Hamilton said, “but now that we are in business the word of mouth is starting to kick in.”

Overheard

“I guess we can safely assume there will be sushi on the menu when the commissary reopens.” --Universal Studio executives discussing the possible company takeover by a Japanese firm