Valley Chronicles : A Kitten’s Odyssey: A Tight Spot, a Dramatic Rescue and a New Home

This is a story--with a happy ending--about a five-hour rescue.

The victim was gray and white and about 2 months old.

Somehow, this cuddly creature got herself stuck in a four-inch pipe that extended seven feet into the ground, then went off at an angle.

West Valley Animal Care Center Officer Doreen Vail responded to the call of a kitten in distress in the 5500 block of McLennan Avenue in Van Nuys.

When the officer arrived on the scene, she could hear the kitten crying but, because the pipe was angled, she was unable to get to her.

The officer called for backup, which arrived in the person of Officer Dennis Kroeplin. He tried to lasso the animal, then they tried sticky tape. When neither worked, both officers started to dig.

After a while, they realized the digging was going to take forever. Then Kroeplin had a brainstorm: a kind of rescue vacuum cleaner.

Kroeplin requested that another officer come to the location with the department’s special animal-retrieving apparatus. The officers stuck the six-foot hose down the pipe and gently sucked the kitten out.

Temporarily, the young feline became Kitten No. 20388 at the West Valley Center.

Then Janeane Vigliotti of Encino spotted her and, without knowing the animal’s history, made arrangements to take her home.

Now the kitten and another cat from the shelter are ensconced in Vigliotti’s apartment.

Vigliotti says they are going to be strictly inside cats.

She Pedals for Dollars

Here’s what Suzanne Schlosberg--author of the upcoming book “The Ultimate Fitness Log”--is going to do on her summer vacation.

She’s going to hop on her trusty two-wheeler and pedal her way across the United States.

This six-week trip, which begins June 6, is not just an exercise in endurance or something to beef up her fitness credentials. The 25-year-old Calabasas woman will be raising research money to eradicate a little-known, but crippling, disease.

Flash back to 1989, when Schlosberg was a teaching assistant at a West Los Angeles elementary school trying, without much success, to teach while keeping the kids from throwing erasers and cutting up.

One of her more engaged and engaging students was Rebecca Smith, who is crippled with ataxia telengiectasia, a disease that attacks the nervous system. The youngster, now 15, is the inspiration for Schlosberg’s trip.

The cyclist--who will be on leave from her position as an editor at Shape magazine in Woodland Hills--is trying to raise $5,000 for the A-T Medical Research Foundation in Los Angeles. She is getting pledges from friends, family and the community. She and her family contributed the $2,750 to cover travel expenses.

Schlosberg will make the trip with about 35 other philanthropic riders under the auspices of Kneeland and Associates, a Seattle-based company that arranges long-distance rides for charity.

She has sent out a flyer asking for mileage-based donations, in addition to inviting the public to contribute.

In making her pitch, Schlosberg first cites the need for research into this illness. She also mentions that she has the geography skills of a first-grader and that it’s about time she learned where Ohio is.

5th-Grader Voices Criticism of Female Trading Card Characters

Jessica Rutberg, a fifth-grader at Highland Hall School in Northridge, is in high dudgeon.

She is seeing red over some trading cards popular with the younger set.

Called Marvel Universe X Men, the cards portray the Saturday morning cartoon characters who are male and female do-gooding mutants.

According to Jessica, “All the boys at my school were passing the cards around, so I asked to see them. When I saw the way the females looked, it made me mad.

“Real women do not look like something designed by Playboy for school kids. Real women do not look like they are made of silicone and plastic,” she said.

The youngster composed a short letter to the comic book and card company. But before sending it off, she got at least 100 co-signers.

Her letter reads, in part: “I think that how you make girls look in X Men cards is really disgusting. The boys in my school look at them every day, and I think they think that is how normal women look. Oh, please.”

A Marvel Universe spokeswoman, by phone from New York, said she hadn’t seen the letter but that the X men and women are portrayed in an idealized form.

The answer didn’t impress Jessica, or one of her letter’s signatories, Shari Tarvera-Behring, who is clinical director of the Child and Family Development Center in Santa Clarita, as well as a professor in the education psychology and counseling department at Cal State Northridge.

Tarvera-Behring said she is pleased that Jessica not only objected to the way women are depicted on the cards, but also that the youngster had enough self-confidence to take action.

The psychologist said many women have a problem with self-image because they don’t measure up to the way the ideal woman is portrayed in the media.

“I don’t think Jessica is going to be one of those,” she said.

Woodland Hills Group Hoping to Raise $100,000 for Youth Club

Brad Rosenheim and his coalition of business people and residents, under the aegis of the Warner Center Assn., are trying to raise about $100,000 to create a Boys & Girls Club at the Serrania Avenue Elementary School in Woodland Hills.

Rosenheim, a public policy consultant, says the club will not only bring an after-school sports and a tutorial program to the area, but will also deliver a needed message to the youngsters.

The message, he says, is: Stay out of gangs.

“There is a Boys & Girls Club that serves the North Valley, but we realize that something like it is needed in our area. If people think gangs are not rampant in the West Valley, they are wrong,” Rosenheim says.

He says his group is working on getting grant money and will be holding fund-raising activities.

“I think people will want to get involved if they realize we need to be active in reaching our kids,” Rosenheim said. “This is a proven program that has 1,300 affiliate clubs throughout the country training young people in leadership and guidance in behavior and attitude.”

Overheard

“I want to be cremated and have my ashes scattered around Nordstrom.”

One of a group of friends in Calabasas discussing how they would like to leave this earth.