A Pesticide Company Whose Name Makes a Pest of Itself

You might wonder how a company that tends tropical plants came to be called Rentokil.

At least I did after my vigilant colleague Brady MacDonald made a Rentokil sighting in Costa Mesa (see photo).

Well, Rentokil started as a pesticide company in England, explained Rene Lopez, the L.A. office manager of the international firm.

“Originally, they wanted to call it Entokil, but that name was taken so they added an ‘R,’ ” he said.

Eventually, Rentokil Initial Inc.--its full name--branched out into such other unrelated areas as tropical plants, temporary staffing and security services.

That last business, by the way, is known as Initial Security Guards--not Rentokil Security Guards.

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ARMED WITH A PHONE BOOK: Rentokil is just one of several interesting Southland company names I’ve come across lately, ranging from Radioactive Auto Body & Paint (photographed by Si Frumkin) to Revolver Financial Management and Armed Plumbing Contractors (spotted by John Smythe).

Joseph Fraga, the owner of Torrance-based Armed Plumbing, said he chose that name for a simple, peaceful reason: “I wanted to be near the top of the Yellow Pages. I went through all the ‘A’ names and found ‘Armed.’ I’m armed with everything I need to operate.”

I’m still working on the derivation of the Radioactive and Revolver names.

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TO THE TUNE OF, “THE LAST TIME I SAW HYPERION”: The Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge and L.A.’s Hyperion Treatment Plant are ranked among the top 125 construction projects of the last 125 years by Engineering News Record magazine.

What? You were surprised that the Golden Gate Bridge was included?

As for Hyperion, the magazine cited the 12-year expansion of the reclamation treatment plant near Dockweiler Beach, which can now process up to 800 million gallons of waste water daily.

Alas, the recognition comes too late for a WB network series that had a brief run in 1998--a show with the romantic name of “Hyperion Bay.”

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ANOTHER ONE YOU WON’T SEE ON “UNSOLVED MYSTERIES”: The Seal Beach Sun printed this “Police Blotter” item:

“Monday, Jan. 10, Prowler, 14th Street, 1:55 a.m.: A man reported hearing someone jump over his back wall and saw a flash of light. It turned out to be his neighbors who were throwing things at an opossum.”

The opossum didn’t appear to be playing possum.

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I SPY SOMETHING RED: After reading that a former Soviet spy testified in L.A. that Russian operatives hid weapons in California during the Cold War, I breathed a sigh of relief that the government forbade visiting Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev from touring Disneyland on his 1959 U.S. visit.

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Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LATIMES, Ext. 77083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, Times Mirror Square, L.A. 90053 and by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com.