EARTHQUAKE KIDS: On the field, the Northridge...

EARTHQUAKE KIDS: On the field, the Northridge Little League team united a town hit hard by the quake. Off the field, however, there has been less unity. Now some parents and players have made an instructional video that combines baseball fundamentals with Little League World Series highlights. And some parents are upset about being left on the bench. “My feeling is that it should have been all or nothing,” says one. But team manager Larry Baca, who was involved with his son, said “the production company said there was no way 14 kids” could all participate.

KIDS II: But don’t feel too bad for the rest of the boys. Many have landed parts as extras in the feature film, “Three Wishes,” which also stars Patrick Swayze. It’s about youth baseball in the 1950s. . . . Also, the team will ride together on the Arco float in the Rose Parade.

ESCAPE: You’re moving to Calabasas to escape crime and congestion. Good idea, but just one small warning: You’re far from alone. . . . And, with growth, comes controversy. One fight is over the plan to include more retail stores at Calabasas Park Centre. Says project director Mark Ossola, above: “You would think we were putting in an adult bookstore.” See Valley Business, Page 10.

RETURN VISIT: It will be a homecoming of sorts Saturday for University of Alabama-Birmingham basketball coach Gene Bartow when his team visits Cal State Northridge. Bartow lived on Bahama Street in Northridge in the mid-1970s when he coached at UCLA. . . . “I walked that campus every morning,” Bartow says. “I love that area.”

OPERATING: You can’t see most of their faces, and you don’t know most of their names. But the men and women behind the masks in hospital operating rooms are asked to perform one miracle after another, and the results still amaze them. . . . For one surgical team at Burbank’s St. Joseph Medical Center recently, the job was to fix the heart of retired letter carrier Ed Gillespie (E1).