Not a Bill for the Faint of Heart

Jane Miller of San Diego sent along a bill from the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla that was headed: “A MAJOR ARTERY HAS RE-OPENED!”

“Kind of scary,” she commented, “especially if you’d had cardiovascular surgery.”

And what is the “major artery”? The bill explained: “Construction on North Torrey Pines Road and Genesee Avenue is finally finished . . . “

One more reminder that every event in Southern California has a traffic angle.

YOU CAN SAY THAT AGAIN: Clark Adams of Torrance found evidence that a school day isn’t the only thing that has been shortened at Westchester High. (see photo)

A CONGRESSWOMAN WHO DRESSES LIKE A MAN: The London Daily Telegraph seems to have performed a sex change operation on one Southern California congressional member. (see excerpt) Dana--we hardly knew ye!

FAMOUS NON-HAPPENINGS: This column has mentioned several current urban folk tales recently. Here are some of my favorite L.A.-area historical myths:

* One of the designers of Long Beach’s Traffic Circle was killed in a crash in the circle.

* Early-century evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson was buried in 1944 with a working telephone in her coffin.

* For years, the Original Pantry Cafe on Figueroa Street hired only ex-cons as waiters (the rumor apparently started half a century ago after a visiting sportswriter said they looked like ex-cons).

* The Southland was bombed by the Japanese in February 1942. (Local anti-aircraft guns actually opened fire on some weather balloons that had drifted over the area.)

* W.C. Fields’ tombstone says he’d rather be in Philadelphia (his marker contains no jokes).

* Murdered socialite Evelyn Throsby Scott, whose remains were never found, was buried in an offramp of the San Diego Freeway while it was under construction in 1955. (Her husband, L. Ewing Scott, who was convicted of her murder, told writer Diane Wagner years later that he buried her in the desert near Las Vegas.)

* Singer Jan Berry of Jan & Dean suffered a near-fatal car crash in 1966 on the same stretch of Sunset Boulevard that he sang about in the earlier hit “Dead Man’s Curve.” (It was about a mile away, off Sunset.)

* Jerry Mathers of TV’s “Leave It to Beaver” was killed in Vietnam. (He’s very much alive although his “Beaver” cable series died.)

* The Northridge quake had a magnitude of 8.0 but officials said it was 6.7 because the law requires the government to give cash grants to victims of magnitude-8 quakes. (There is no such law.)

HALLOWEEN FOLK TALE: Film historian Lee Harris says there is also an apocryphal story that a star of horror movies donated his body to the USC medical school when he died, and that his head is floating in a jar there.

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In our L.A.-insult-of-the-week category, a New York Times article on technology declared, “We take radio communication for granted, but probably not one person in a hundred on the Long Island Expressway (one in a thousand on the Santa Monica Freeway) could explain how exactly their cell phones work.” Wait until I call up Aimee Semple McPherson and tell her about that crack!

Steve Harvey can be reached by live telephone at (213) 237-7083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com and by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, Times Mirror Square, L.A. 90053.