A Chronicle of the Passing Scene
Talk About Having a Cow
The Simpsons might be the hippest of hip cartoons on television, but Bart Simpson could beef up his knowledge of what’s happening around here.
Bart is always admonishing people not to have a cow, man, but people in the Valley are having cows all over the place--wood cows. Thank, or blame, John Scharnberg of Van Nuys and the sagging building industry.
Scharnberg was a successful building contractor when recession hit the building industry several years ago. To pass the time, he started designing and making wooden cows.
“I grew up in Wisconsin milking cows on a dairy farm,” Scharnberg says of his creative choice of Muses. “Having cows in the yard sort of brought that peaceful time back to me.”
Neighbors and friends asked him to make more, and soon his work became a business called John’s Country Crafts. He started taking orders at his home for the whimsical animals, which range from $20 to about $100, Now he now makes animal toy boxes, tables and chairs.
In the past couple of years his business has expanded to include mail order and sales from his home at 6909 Encino Ave., Van Nuys, as well as marketing his cows in 32 states through retail outlets.
Of the 8,000 animals he has sold over the past five years, he thinks almost half are grazing in the Valley. He designs and makes each cow, which takes at least four days.
His sometimes business associate and co-worker is his stepson Ryan Messervier, a recent 18-year-old graduate of Grant High School. The pair occasionally hoof it up to the corner of Sherman Way and White Oak Avenue on weekends to display the goods on a property Scharnberg leases for the purpose of beefing up business.
Making Deals on Wheels
Dodie Leon is a 22-year-old Reseda High School graduate with a job in the fast lane. She is the Woodland Hills Pace Club’s secret weapon, its wheeling-and-dealing, roller-skating clerk.
The discount merchandise chain uses skating clerks as a symbol of its aim to deliver the goods, marketing director Eddie Castaneda says.
Leon began her Pace career a year ago as a regular clerk who just walked around waiting on customers. Then, just before Christmas, the skating clerk quit.
“I always thought it would be a fun way to help people,” Leon says. “I went to my supervisor and asked for the job.”
She was told to report the next week with her skates.
Sometimes people make remarks about how ridiculous her job is and some even try to trip her, but for the most part people seem to be impressed.
And so far she has fallen only once, when a Fox television news crew had come to shoot a story on how jammed discount stores were with customers.
When Leon came skating into camera range, the crew got excited.
“That was when I tripped over some beads and almost fell on my face,” she says.
When Is a Car Rallye Not a Rally?
This year’s clues to Craig Konjoyan’s annual car rally are all about the election, including one about Ross Perot buying up the Valley and renaming it New Texas.
Another has to do with Quayle being furious about the Perot acquisition, since the President promised no New Texas.
This approach makes it more of a political event than the usual summer Cold Turkey Car Rallye that Konjoyan’s been holding in the San Fernando Valley since 1969.
It’s called Campaign ’92 this year, and all funds raised by the Aug. 8 event will benefit the Kommittee to Reelect Undesirable Dipsos (KRUD).
OK, so he’s really planning to give proceeds to AIDS Project Los Angeles.
Planning and producing rallies is Konjoyan’s hobby, the way other people race cars or make up scavenger hunts.
Konjoyan, a Woodland Hills resident, says that most of the year he works at “mismanaging the family real estate holdings in the Valley.” But for several weeks each year, he creates this puzzle on wheels that anyone with a car can try to solve for $10.
Each year, up to 200 participants gather at 7 p.m. at the Sepulveda Dam Basin and after getting the instruction packet, they set out on the course.
It’s like a regular car rally where you go from point A to B and so forth until you get to the end and the party. Except in Konjoyan’s rallies, instructions are given in riddles or clues.
Anyone interested in participating in the car rally, er, political event can call Konjoyan at (818) 591-7191.
Creeping Crawlers
A hole-in-two is not a near triumph in golf to a new mother.
What it means is that her now-crawling Junior or Junior Miss has worn through the knees of yet another pair of kid-chic overalls.
Jennifer Turner of Sherman Oaks was a money-strapped single mom when she had daughter Alexandra, now 7. She came up with what has to be the answer to a penny-pinching parent’s prayer.
Taking a little from lady’s lingerie and a lot from the knee-wear of guys like John McEnroe and Magic Johnson, she came up with California Crawlers, kneepads that protect a child’s knees and whatever happens to be covering them at the time.
The hard part, according to Turner, was getting the darn things to stay on. After Velcro, which the kids just pulled apart, Turner came up with something that’s like an adjustable snap-held kneepad with the kind of stitching used around the cups of women’s bras. The snaps are practically child-proof, Turner said.
The pastel-print pads with matching bib is sold for $7.99 by mail order from California Crawlers, 14325 Greenleaf St., Sherman Oaks. Turner hopes to have them in several retail outlets soon.
Overheard
“I went sailing over the weekend and the ocean looked like the Ventura Freeway. The recession hasn’t improved that situation at all.”
--Woman to friend at Teru Sushi in Studio City
