Pumpkin Popularity: With the heroin death of...

By Sharon Bernstein and Henry Chu

July 13, 1996 12 AM PT

Pumpkin Popularity: With the heroin death of a musician touring with the rock band Smashing Pumpkins, and the arrest of the group’s drummer on drug charges (A1), music stores are bracing for increased sales. “It’s kind of sad when someone dies and their record sales go up,” said Rich Kane, manager of Tower Records in Northridge. “You look at Jerry Garcia when he passed away, or Kurt Cobain. You should have seen when Ella Fitzgerald died.”

Hardball: Los Angeles Police Officer Stacy Lim, above, has parlayed heroics on the CSUN softball team to heroics on the job (C8). Nowadays Lim, who in college batted .238--above average for its time--teaches tactics at the Police Academy, where recruits learn that she survived two bloody attacks on her life. “It knocked me back a little bit,” she said of a bullet she took to the chest during a carjacking.

Vive la Fete! Bastille Day, the French Independence Day, falls on Sunday, but the three Valley campuses of Lycee Internationale de Los Angeles are celebrating today. . . . Why? “If you’re going to be partying and drinking wine and eating French food on Sunday, people wouldn’t make it to work on Monday,” said a spokeswoman.

They’re Fluent: The Lycee Internationale, with six branches and 500 students in Los Angeles, conducts all classes in French. The school was established 18 years ago on Victory Boulevard in Van Nuys and now has locations in Tarzana and Woodland Hills. . . . In the Valley, about 9,600 residents speak French at home, according to U.S. Census figures.

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Henry Chu

Henry Chu first joined the Los Angeles Times in 1990 and worked primarily out of the San Fernando Valley office before moving to the foreign staff in 1998. He served as bureau chief in Beijing from 1998 to 2003, Rio de Janeiro from 2004 to 2005, New Delhi from 2006 to 2008 and London from 2009 to 2014. He was a 2014-15 fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. From 2016-19 he was international editor at Variety magazine. A graduate of Harvard University, Chu returned to The Times in March 2020 as deputy news editor based in London. He left in 2024.