Wall-to-Wall AversionPamela Moretti looked down at the...

Wall-to-Wall Aversion

Pamela Moretti looked down at the floor of her Chatsworth home and experienced waves of disgust.

There on the floor was the offending object, making a statement about how far the world has sunk into rug regimentation.

Moretti, at that epiphanic moment, decided to join a small but growing cadre of crusaders who lead homeowners out of a wall-to-wall desert of blah into the Camelot of creative carpetry.

She wanted to make carpets that are a joy for the eye and a thrill for the feet.

She yearned to learn how to offer custom-sculpted carpets for the same price as those sold in a store, and techniques of the craft, such as how to vary the pile height of a carpet for a bas-relief effect.

But where to start?

Moretti became one of a group of six students from around the country who signed up for a seminar at the Carpet Sculpture Gallery in Brea.

The class was taught by gallery founder Volker Bauerle, who has pulled the rug out from under the carpet world, Moretti said. Bauerle taught her the tricks of the custom-carpet trade.

Now Moretti is going into the revivalist rug business from her own home. She hopes to interest area architects, builders and interior designers in her abilities, saying she not only makes custom carpets--with personal logos, personal designs or insets--but has learned how to brighten inlays by weaving in fiber optics to provide iridescence.

“One-of-a-kind carpets and area rugs are found in the most lavish mansions, in statehouses and in the White House,” said Moretti, who is completing a small piece that will probably become a wall hanging and getting her garage set up as an atelier.

Elder Buff

When last heard from, Theodore Hasapes of Woodland Hills was organizing a contest to determine who was the strongest, hunkiest, buffest bodybuilder over age 70 in the known world.

He spread word of the contest as far as he could, using personal resources and family money. Fewer than 10 people entered last summer’s contest, Hasapes said, but it was an outstanding success--not in numbers, maybe, but in spirit.

“People who keep fit when they are older deserve recognition,” he said.

It is an idea he has been playing with for a few months, and he has come to a conclusion: What the world needs now is a club for older iron pumpers.

Not just any chain-breaking, telephone-book-ripping bodybuilder older than 70 can get in, however. Hasapes says he is looking for a few good men.

One is health guru Jack LaLanne, whom Hasapes calls a noted strongman who has performed incredible feats of strength. Another potential member is former Mr. U.S.A. Armand Tanny, brother of the late legendary bodybuilder Vic. Still another is Joe Weider, whose fitness pills and powders, according to flexible folks such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, have fueled a whole generation of the overdeveloped.

So far, Hasapes says, he is the only member of the group. He says he not only is trying to enlist the fitness celebrities, but has contacted health clubs throughout Los Angeles trying to recruit prospects.

Killing Fields

Doris Hoover of Woodland Hills is a free-lance terminator.

A killer.

Like many paid hit men, she stalks and kills her prey, no mercy given.

Specifically, she stalks the stalks and kills the killers, because Hoover is not a gun for hire, but a volunteer milk thistle eradicator, keen on weeding out what she sees as an ecological blight.

After decades of overgrazing by local cattle, followed by devastating fires in the early ‘70s, milk thistle, a noxious weed, had been allowed to almost take over certain areas of Malibu, particularly Sycamore Canyon, Hoover said.

By 1987, when Hoover first saw the area, “milk thistle had not only overrun the natural plants and ground covering of the area but had destroyed a natural food source for the area’s deer,” she said.

Armed with a new master’s degree in botany and an environmental ideologue’s zeal, she amassed a volunteer army, including a local Eagle Scout troop and volunteers from the Santa Monica Mountains chapter of the California Native Plant Society.

For her work, she has been nominated by the society to receive the National Park Service’s Lutz Memorial Award honoring volunteers.

Oyster Update

Remember Dan Davis, who found the 15-million-year-old oyster sticking out of the top of a hill in Bouquet Canyon? Said he was hiking in Bouquet Canyon and there it was?

Davis thought that there might be a pearl inside his find.

Erwin Schwarz, director of imaging services at Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, used the facility’s equipment to try to determine what was inside the 12-pound shell. Although the hospital did not bill Davis for the scanning, Davis did promise people at the center that it would receive a portion of the profits from any sale.

Schwarz told Davis that there could be a pearl or two inside the aged mollusk, a relic from the Miocene Epoch, when water covered a great portion of the real estate we now call the Antelope, Santa Clarita and San Fernando valleys.

Davis then hired Beverly Hills attorney Lloyd Robinson to protect his interests and to deal with potential buyers and took his mollusk up to CEMAX in Fremont for further tests.

The pearl, or pearls, that Davis says he is fairly certain are inside the shell are probably not as valuable for their size--about the size of a marble--but for the idea that they have survived for all this time.

Davis says he has not decided whether to auction or sell the shell as is, or to open it in hopes of finding the pearls.

“I’m still thinking that over,” he said. “But the 3-D imaging seems to tell me that there is something in there.”

Overheard

“I’m hedging my bets.”

Man to friend who was surprised to see him at church