Keene of the Road

There are roughly 4 million vehicle trips made on 511 miles of freeway in Los Angeles County during the commute hours between 6:30 and 8:30 a.m. every weekday.

This creates a potential for chaos that is chilling to perceive.

Cars run into each other, semis jackknife, motorcycles skid out of control, trucks spill loads of live chickens, and mattresses loosely affixed to the beds of pickups fly off to block the number two and three lanes.

Those are the usual problems.

Also, airplanes are known to land on the Santa Monica and nude women are known to stroll along the Ventura, both of which constitute the “something up ahead” that can result in delays ranging from minutes to hours.

But, thank God, in L.A. we have traffic reporters to tell us exactly what is blocking the concrete pathways that lead us to our workplaces, sweating and trembling from the sheer effort of getting there.

One of them is Bill Keene.

He has been talking about fender-benders, car fires, stalled vans and spilled loads for more than 35 years on both radio and television, utilizing some of the worse puns ever heard over the electronic media.

If he said “the malady lingers on” once, he said it 10,000 times, but despite that relentless assault on sensitive ears, we have become accustomed to his pace.

And now the old son-of-a-gun is leaving. Keene is retiring at the end of the month.

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That has caused a tremor in the city equaled only by the announcement 35 years ago that Eddie was leaving Debbie for Liz.

We take anything having to do with cars and traffic very seriously in L.A. Drive-by shootings, for example, an otherwise endurable cultural trait, became intolerable when they turned into freeway shootings in the mid-80s.

The public outcry was immense. We simply would not allow our freeways to be bloodied by people firing randomly out the windows of their cars. If there was to be blood on the San Diego, it would be from the usual tangle of smashed vehicles, not from bullets.

Pressure was applied, and they ended.

Similarly, we bore with placid spirit just about every twist to robbery an evil mind could imagine, but the day we realized carjacking had become the new felony of choice, stronger laws began heading for the books.

Politicians shook their fists and even the governor of California, awakened by a roar of outrage, came south to compare the violent stealing of one’s car to a rape in church.

You get the idea. Cars “R” Us in L.A. Therefore, when a guy like Keene who has guided us down the lanes of life for so many years announces he is quitting, we get nervous. It’s like mom dying.

True, he’s not the only voice in town that gives us traffic and weather over the airwaves, but he is surely the only one willing to report the existence of a half-dozen dogs on the Pasadena Freeway, and add, “It’s a six-pack of curs.” Curs. Coors. Get it?

Well, I didn’t get it for a long time either (I didn’t even want it), but Keene, with his strident, identifiable voice, grows on you, and I began to wonder what life in the fast lane would be like without him.

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So I stopped by KNX-AM one morning to say goodby. Keene was sitting in his glassed-in cubicle surrounded by maps, video screens, a weather wire, a computer and other paraphernalia of his trade.

A paunchy, balding man of 67 with Ross Perot ears and black-rimmed granny glasses, he looks a little like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. You’d expect to find him sitting on a porch swing in a small town in southern Illinois.

He’s quitting, he says, because he’s getting old and because the job, altered by computerized technology, isn’t fun anymore. Also, he’s had major surgery four times in the past two years and there are things he wants to do before taking that final freeway to heaven.

Keene began as a weatherman in 1957. Traffic reports were added when it became apparent it was rear-enders and not inversion layers that everyone wanted to know about. Smog may kill, but a collision causes delays.

When the age of the cellular phone dawned, tipsters began calling from their cars, fleshing out the details of bad news. Keene has about 500 regulars now. People like the Cardinal and Delta Duke.

The Cardinal, by the way, is Roger Mahony, the pope of L.A. Delta Duke is former Gov. George Deukmejian.

But all of that ends May 29 when Keene reports his last spilled load of fish, with the CHP responding. “Fish and CHiPs,” he called it once.

We’ll miss you, Bill, despite the puns, and maybe even because of them. It just won’t seem the same without the malady lingering on.