Real estate lite: Long Beach’s Skinny House,...
Real estate lite: Long Beach’s Skinny House, once featured in “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” is on sale again.
Just wide enough to accommodate a double door, the Gladys Avenue residence was built in 1932 by one Newton Rummond, who bet a friend he could squeeze a house into a 10-foot-by-50-foot lot.
The current owners put the 900-square-foot, Tudor-style abode on the market for $199,000 in 1990, then changed their minds. Now the Skinny House’s price has been reduced to $149,900. It’ll be an interesting test of the Southern California maxim that you can never be too thin.
Political punch lines: Sorry, fight fans, but we couldn’t find anything in the records of the L.A. City Council to match the outburst of Bell Gardens Mayor Josefina (Josie) Macias, who threw a chair at a colleague the other day. The fracas also featured some shoving and punching.
Oh, L.A. City Councilman Nate Holden did scuffle with Alan Robbins after a 1976 debate, but they were both state senators then, so it doesn’t count. Nope, the City Hall reps have been a pretty dull group, except for a couple of instances.
In 1925, one L.A. councilman, called a liar by another, struck him “back of the left ear.” The Times reported it was apparently the first time that one L.A. lawmaker had slugged another “at a public session.” (Apparently, no one could speak authoritatively about saloon sessions.)
And in 1892, L.A. Mayor Henry Hazard, accused of favoritism by one Councilman Rees, branded the latter “a dirty liar and a cur.” When Hazard confronted him, The Times said, “the slow-speaking councilman” said “in a trembling” tone: “Now I will take my hat.” And Rees left the chamber, depriving Hazard of the chance of throwing a punch (or a chair) at him.
“The Ballad of Slick Willie”: Banjo Fred Starner, a member of the National Hobo Assn., is obviously excited about the inauguration of Bill Clinton. Banjo Fred has honored Clinton (known to the hobos as The Arkansas Traveler) with a parody of the old Kingston Trio hit, “MTA.” The chorus goes like this:
Did he ever inhale, no he never inhaled.
So his fate was not unhinged.
Will he abide forever without the sniff of that weed.
He’s the man who never inhaled.
One Wayne Newton coming up: Brent Sverdloff passed along a newsletter from the L.A. Cacophony Society, which describes itself as some “free spirits devoted to experiences beyond mainstream society.”
We regret we missed the society’s “Multiple-Personality Book-Signing Party” in December. The star of the show was Claire, Ms. Multiple Personality herself. The idea was you would bring a celeb’s unsigned autobiography and Claire--for a mere 25 cents--would “perform a calligraphic channeling” of that star’s signature in the book.
So we missed out on a rare chance to pick up an autograph for our dog-eared copy of “My Life: The Early Years,” by Macaulay Culkin.
miscelLAny:
L.A. service technician James Cacioppo, who captured a 40-foot-10-inch tree root clogging a storm drain, finished third in the nationwide Monster Root Contest sponsored by Roto-Rooter. Winner was Joe Bristol of Concord, Calif., who came up with a 57-foot-9-inch root.
