PARK PARKING: It will cost a little...

PARK PARKING: It will cost a little more to enjoy county parks, starting next week. The weekday rate per car will remain $2, but weekend fees will increase to $4. Also: a day-use annual pass goes from $30 to $50. Beach parking passes, which were included before in the annual park fee, will now run a separate $50. But you can get both for $75. . . . The increase was planned well before the county bankruptcy. . . . “Our rates have been a bargain for years,” says parks supervisor Tim Miller.

OLD ORANGE: Orange County still sends mostly conservative Republicans to Washington. But would you recognize this Orange County from decades past? In his new memoirs, Pierre Salinger quotes his sister Anne, who was in his 1964 campaign for a U.S. Senate seat from California: “I didn’t know anything about Orange County, so I was very unsuspecting. We got there, the train stopped, and there were mean-faced people all over the place; they started throwing tomatoes and oranges and God knows what. They were so unkind.”

HOME AGAIN: How fitting, says Holly Halsted Balthis of South Laguna, that the luncheon today for past Rose Parade queens is at the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. “I went to dances there as a young girl,” she says. . . . That was nearly 70 years ago. Balthis, 87, is the oldest living Rose queen. Each year she throws a party at her spacious home for local past queens. . . . “We’re a unique group,” she says. “After all, there’s only one of us a year.”

LOST AND FOUND: It was 25 years ago that Cal State Fullerton alumnus Eric B. Johnson lost his class ring on the north shore of Lake Arrowhead. Recently a young boy found it--on the lake’s south shore. He took it to nearby boutique owner Audrey de la Rosa, who made out worn initials and, with diligent effort, managed to track down Johnson, now president of a Hawaiian company. . . . When the boy wouldn’t accept a monetary reward, Johnson sent macadamia nuts and Kona coffee. Says De la Rosa: “It brought three people together from totally different backgrounds.”