Urban folk tale No. 7,321: This story...

Urban folk tale No. 7,321: This story has been repeated of late in locales as varied as Anaheim Stadium’s press box and a La Brea Avenue synagogue. Invariably, with such plausible (but improbable) yarns, the original source is impossible to track down. . . .

A motorist suspected of being drunk was pulled over by an officer and ordered to take a roadside sobriety test. It was interrupted when a serious auto accident occurred nearby. The driver was told to wait while the officer sprinted over to the crash scene.

After several minutes, the nervous suspect decided the hell with it and drove off. When he got home, he told his wife he was going to bed and, if anyone asked, he had been there all evening.

The officer arrived a bit later and the wife recited the alibi. The officer asked if he could see her husband’s car. When they looked inside the garage, the officer asked the wife if she could explain why her husband had driven home in a police car.

*

First, midnight basketball. . . : Greg Horbachevsky spotted a sign in La Crescenta that would seem to indicate that a crime bill had provided funds for a park.

*

The rest of the story: The name of the park actually dates back almost half a century, according to La Crescenta librarian Mary Jones. Actor Dennis Morgan, the area’s honorary mayor at the time, saw a safety poster showing a young boy who had been struck by a car. Morgan felt “that any child who had to play in the street had two strikes against him, and the third strike could be getting hit by a car,” Jones said. So Morgan organized a series of ballgames involving celebrities and baseball stars that helped raise the funds to build Two Strike Park.

*

No hangovers, either: Steve Nemiroff of West L.A. found a beer offer for people who don’t want to worry about being pulled over by police or absent-mindedly absconding with a police car.

*

Just what L.A. needs: Lunchtime strollers in the Criminal Courts area were treated to a bizarre parade of limos and horses ridden by Elvis imitators and Trojan warriors, who were making O.J. jokes. No doubt a sidewalk merchant snapped a photo and will soon have prints of the procession on sale outside the courthouse.

miscelLAny L.A.’s multilingual roots extend further back than you might think, as a reading of historian Harris Newmark (“Sixty Years in Southern California”) will show.

During the Civil War, when Union Army Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell scheduled a visit with L.A. Mayor Jose Mascarel, “it was feared that embarrassment must follow,” Newmark wrote.

The reason?

Mascarel was not fluent in English. Fortunately, McDowell spoke Mascarel’s native language--French.