Straying Spouses 101: We recently mentioned the...
Straying Spouses 101: We recently mentioned the tale of the hotel vice president who came up with the idea of sending thank you cards to the homes of its guests--an idea that backfired when he received responses from some puzzled (and angry) spouses who had never stayed at the hotel.
That story brought a note from Billie Long, who recalled a similar disaster at Pierce College where she worked as a secretary.
“In the late 1960s . . . our assistant dean decided to try to determine why there was such a high attrition rate for evening classes,” she writes. “He sent out cards to all of the students who had registered for an evening class and then dropped it shortly after the semester began. He included a return card requesting feedback . . . if it was class content, the instructor, personal reasons, etc.
“He soon started to receive telephone calls from very puzzled husbands and wives. They didn’t understand where he got the idea that their spouse had dropped their classes. Several remarked that their spouse had perfect attendance. . . . The dean promptly decided that it was not a very good idea and wondered how many marriages he had inadvertently broken up.”
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Speaking of marital combat . . . “I’ve only been married two years and so far I haven’t needed anything like the ‘Self-Defense’ course that you (The Times) advertised,” writes Tad Daley.
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That’s cold: Little did the tiny L.A. suburb of Paramount know that it would be dragged into the Harding-Kerrigan affair. But there it is--a cartoon in Newsweek that shows Kerrigan about to be run down on the ice. Her assailant is Harding, who is driving Paramount’s most famous product--the Zamboni ice refinisher.
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Press releases we never finish: “Northern California boasts the Golden Gate Bridge, the Mendocino Coast and the Wine Country. Southern California has towering palm trees, Venice Beach and Hollywood. But what unites these two disparate regions? California’s ‘laid-back’ lifestyle? Great weather? Would you believe cottage cheese?”
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Talk about a grim warning: Lisa Jacobi of L.A. sent along an excerpt from a user’s manual containing a typo that would give any parent a start (see illustration).
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A fraternity of sorts: After reading a Times story about the generation gap among criminals, a Dallas resident phoned to thank this newspaper for mentioning an old friend, imprisoned kidnaper Robert Dacy. The caller said the article enabled him to get in touch with Dacy at the state prison in Tehachapi, 40 years after they had lost contact. And when had he last seen Dacy?
“We were cellmates at San Quentin,” he said.
miscelLAny:
While employed as a U-2 spy plane pilot for the CIA, Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, causing an international furor. Freed in exchange for a Soviet spy, Powers eventually settled in L.A., where he was killed in 1977 in a helicopter crash while working as a traffic and weather reporter for KNBC-TV (Channel 4) news.