Surfing Camel Was Out of Place and Out of Time
Sorry, this column doesn’t have a swimsuit issue. But we can offer you a surfing camel. In downtown L.A.
The creature was spotted by writer Jay Berman in a photo of a Shriners parade that had hung for years in the office of the L.A. Dept. of Neighborhood Empowerment. And therein hung a mystery. A caption said it was “Seventh Street at Broadway ... 1908,” according to the California State Library History Section (see photos).
The library “got everything right except the location and the date,” Berman concluded in the L.A. Downtown News.
Berman and Greg Nelson, the department’s general manager, noticed that the cars were too modern for 1908 and that a photo of that intersection should show Bullocks department store and Loew’s State Theatre.
They fixed the date at about 1926, helped by a reader who identified the northbound car in the lower left as a 1926 Nash Ajax (the reader once owned one).
And historian Greg Fischer identified the intersection as Third and Broadway, pointing to the former Pan American Building at the left, a five-story landmark that still stands.
The fate of the surfing camel, which hung from cables, is unknown. The same is true of the artificial palm trees, though I suppose they could be elsewhere, disguising cellphone towers.
Strange animal sightings (cont.): The story of the California sea lion that wound up atop a CHP patrol car miles from the ocean the other day reminded Hugh Ryono of another unusual creature migration.
“During the El Nino storms of 1997-98, my wife, Pam, and I got a call at the Marine Mammal Care Center at Ft. MacArthur in San Pedro that a sea lion was at the new aquarium site in Long Beach,” Ryono e-mailed this column.
So? So, the aquarium was still being built. Buffeted by stormy seas, the animal apparently had swum “up the mouth of the L.A. River, climbed up and over a bank of boulders, ‘walked’ across a wide patch of muddy dirt, slid between a set of chain-link fences, and was found sleeping in the construction area of the aquarium.” The trespasser was taken to the Marine Mammal Care Center, then returned to the ocean, where it may still be frolicking. When it’s not trying to avoid a surfing camel.
Guys need compliments, too: The publication Beverly Hills (213), which has refused to change its name to Beverly Hills (310), carried a store ad that seemed discriminatory (see accompanying). Why no fine men?
Time warp: A young man holding a cup of beer on an Isla Vista trolley was ordered to exit by police. He produced a driver’s license that showed he had celebrated his 24th birthday in August. But when asked the month of his birth, he said July. A check verified that the driver’s license was his. Asked why he didn’t know what month he had been born in, the man responded, “Have you ever shaved your face in the morning and missed a spot?” He was arrested for public intoxication.
miscelLAny: Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine pegged the cost of a year at USC at $37,968 and rated the school as 70th best value among private colleges. Apparently offering a winning football team doesn’t count for much, since Caltech was No. 1.
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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, 202 W. 1st St., L.A. 90012, and by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com.