Clerk from another world:With Halloween growing closer,...

Clerk from another world:

With Halloween growing closer, Angel Barragan was reminded of the time she found a purse in a Beverly Center store where she worked. And how difficult it was to persuade the owner to take it back.

Barragan found a phone number inside the purse and called the owner. “When I introduced myself, she hung up,” Barragan recalled. “I called a second time and again she hung up.”

Barragan persisted and finally was allowed to explain why she was calling. The owner then turned grateful and apologized for her behavior.

In retrospect, Barragan said: “I guess I couldn’t blame her for hanging up.” After all, it was the time of the year for Halloween jokes. “I might have hung up myself,” Barragan said, “if someone had called and said, ‘Hi, my name is Angel and I’m calling from Heaven.’ ”

Oh, yes. Heaven was the name of the store where Angel worked.

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WRITER MEETS WRITER, WRITER LOSES WRITER . . .: A colleague noticed a flier posted at a Westside gym (see excerpt)--a Hollywood-style job-wanted ad.

The writer put his phone number on 10 tear-off strips at the bottom of his appeal. All the numbers were taken, hopefully none by Valley smokers. Sounds like a complex courtship.

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THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED STUDIO BOSSES: Tuesday was the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of Hollywood’s most famous screenwriters, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Actually, he was famous as a screenwriting failure.

He just didn’t fit into Hollywood (though no one cared that he smoked). But he needed the money. He told writer Budd Schulberg in 1939 that he had sold a total of eight copies of his novels “The Great Gatsby” and “Tender Is the Night” the previous year, earning royalties of $13, according to author Robert Westbrook (“Intimate Lies”).

Fitzgerald couldn’t even relax in a theater. When Scott and girlfriend Sheila Graham went to the movies, Westbrook wrote, “Scott often insisted they change rows three or four times during the course of a single film, complaining that the person behind him was kicking the back of his seat, though these phantom feet never touched Sheila’s seat.”

But his biggest annoyance was being rewritten by other screenwriters. Once he noticed that a final script bore the words, “Script Okayed by Joseph Mankiewicz.” Fitzgerald crossed out the words and wrote instead, “Script Scrawled Over by Joseph Mankiewicz.”

Fitzgerald admitted he was a bust as a screenwriter. “I just couldn’t make the grade as a hack,” he wrote his editor, Max Perkins. “That, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.”

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MUSEUM WITH A DARK PAST: The Travel Town transportation museum in Griffith Park once was the site of:

* A municipal prison farm at the turn of the century, where city jail inmates labored in fields of alfalfa, which was fodder for the city fire horses.

* A boys camp for wayward youths in the 1920s.

* A prisoner-of-war camp housing German and Japanese soldiers during World War II.

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ANOTHER SIGN OF RELIGIOUS UNITY: Ike Shatori of Torrance points out that Cardinal Mahony wants to rebuild St. Vibiana’s Cathedral on Temple Street.

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GIVING 107%: Joe Shea visited a movie complex in Hollywood that was conducting a presidential poll in which patrons who purchased drinks chose straws representing the three candidates. In the local vote, Clinton led with 48.9%, followed by Dole (39.1%) and Perot (19.2%). That adds up to 107.2%.

Wonders Shea: “Did some people in graveyards vote, or were these results from Chicago?”

miscel LA ny:

When a contest was held to find a slogan for Orange County, a geographically challenged reader sent this submission to the Orange County Register: “L.A.--The Land of Virtual Ecstasy; Home of the Big Orange.”