Have an Ice 90sConrad Peter of Tujunga...

Have an Ice 90s

Conrad Peter of Tujunga recently observed his 90th birthday, but it would have been almost ridiculous to have made a big deal about his age.

Peter observed the occasion at the North Hollywood Ice Capades Chalet with 30 of his closest friends, all women.

And, after having cake and opening his presents, he laced up his skates and did an hour or so on the ice.

German-born Peter, who has been taking skating lessons for 30 years, is the only man, and the only 90-year-old, in instructor Jerry Boivin’s Tuesday and Thursday skating group called the Coffee Club.

The group is for mature skaters, mostly 40 and older, who enjoy the social aspects as well as the exercise. All, says the instructor, are at least 20 years Peter’s junior.

Boivin, who has been teaching the group for about 16 years, says no one is more enthusiastic than this lone male skating student, and adds that Peter is an old smoothie on and off the ice.

Peter says he skated as a boy in southern Germany, but after coming to the United States after World War I, had more serious things on his mind.

Like the economic crash of 1929, which made finding work very hard for a young man still struggling with the language.

He married in 1931 and found employment as a tool and die man and draftsman in the Midwest, then headed for California in 1951 because of his wife’s poor health.

“I had heard that the climate was favorable in a place called Tujunga,” Peter says, “so we moved here and bought the home I have had ever since.”

He worked at Lockheed from 1951 to 1969 and took up skating seriously after his wife died in 1959, needing something to take his mind off his loss.

Some almost-60-year-olds might consider brisk naps as a suitable new sport to pursue, but Peter says skating seemed just right for him.

“I’m a very healthy person,” Peter says, emphatically. “I don’t eat any sweets or bad stuff like heavy German food, and I don’t smoke or drink. I have always been fit.”

In addition to his Tuesday and Thursday sessions in North Hollywood, Peter also laces up at the Ice Skating Center in Pasadena every Wednesday and is an active member of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Tujunga, where he sings in the choir.

Now, That’s a Recycling Bin

Stop eating your foot lotion and drinking the facial wash, and listen up.

It’s time for our recycling lesson and our guest hostess is Kacee Colter.

Colter is the manager-owner of the Body Shop in Topanga Plaza.

Among the items she has for sale are peppermint foot lotion, pineapple facial wash, cocoa butter hand and body lotion, passion fruit cleansing lotion, as well as cucumber, banana and strawberry other stuff.

But, products are not what this meeting is about.

Colter and her partner, Greg Purcell--both former commercial real estate agents--bought this Body Shop franchise operation, she says, because it has a number of positive aspects. They include the natural ingredients in the beauty aids and the fact that the franchisees are required, as part of their agreement with the parent company, to be involved in community philanthropies.

Philanthropies, however, are not the point, either.

The point here is that Colter is offering her clients two different opportunities to save the planet and achieve personal happiness through recycling.

Once you purchase an item from her store, you can bring back the clean, dry bottle and have it refilled. Or, you can turn in the old bottle and she will recycle it.

The distinction is that if you want to be green, but don’t want red hands from rinsing out the bottle, bring it back to Colter and she’ll do it for you.

One less bottle in the local dump, er, landfill.

Colter says about 25% of her regular clientele recycle regularly; the rest are in it strictly for the strawberries.

Guilt-Free Fries?

A hamburger joint is the last place on earth you’d expect to find the health food police, but take it from Felicia Villegas, it’s a happening thing.

Villegas is the manager of Stars drive-in in Canoga Park, Stars being the kind of place that offers eggs, bacon, sausage and burritos for breakfast, and burgers, sandwiches, fries, rings, zucchini and corn dogs as an all-day sort of thing.

It’s the kind of place where people didn’t used to mind a little grease running down their hands and arms, but that was before we all found out about the Big C.

Cholesterol.

Now, along with other Valley class fast-fooderies, such as Weber’s Place in Reseda, Stars has served notice, at the bottom of its menu, that it fries cholesterol-free.

Villegas assumed that not too many burger people knew or cared too much about cholesterol, which just shows you that you can be obliged to learn something new every day.

“About 25% of our customers seem to be very health conscious,” Villegas said.

And those 25% really, really care.

“They’ll ask the service person if the fat is really cholesterol-free, and then they’ll ask to get a confirmation from me,” she said.

At least one person was so concerned about what his fries were going to be fried in that he made Villegas get the container so he could see the label.

Mouse Play

Some Disney employees have banded together in the past few weeks to form a new production company.

This, however, is not a group that is going to sign big stars, go over budget or cause mouse movie mogul Jeff Katzenberg the miseries.

The group--officially known as Character Actors and Other Strangers (ChAOS)--are, for the most part, non-talent members of the Disney family, according to founding member, Ben DeJean.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t have any, says DeJean, a recent film school graduate who works in the mail room. It means that they work behind the scenes, instead of in front of the cameras, at the studio, he explains.

DeJean says ChAOS--now an officially Disney-sanctioned group--has had auditions to cast its first production and hopes to have the play pulled together and ready for viewing in January or February.

But they are still looking for a venue.

Surely there’s a stage, or sound stage, or library somewhere in one of those Disney buildings where Agatha Christie’s long-running London gem, “The Mouse Trap,” can be sprung.

Overheard

“The two ingredients for a totally cool (stay-at-home) date are a really bad video and a really great woman. Or, vice versa, of course.”

Calabasas man, 24, to friend on phone