Car Troubles

    Two years ago, Bob Joseph bought a two-cylinder French Panhard, which has positively no area in front for a license plate.  He has been driving it with only the rear plate.

    On consecutive days recently he received two citations.  A new law went into effect in October requiring cars to have both plates, and it is being enforced.  He explained ineffectively to the officers that the dealer sold him the car with only one plate.

    He went to the Traffic Fines Bureau at 810 Wall St., where a courteous marshal showed him the nice new law and advised him to go to the Motor Vehicle Department at 35th and Hope Sts. and get new plates.

    He did, then asked where he could put the one in front.  The man there saw no possibility and directed him to the Highway Patrol at 4th and Vermont.

    There he retold his sad tale.  An officer circled the car, looking for a spot to put the front plate.  When he came up with nothing Bob asked, "What do you suggest?"

     "Sell it," the officer said.


    UNDERGRADUATE ENTHUSIASM for today's game is about even.  First SC students swiped a UCLA air horn, which was returned.  Then UCLA students put a blue paint coating on Tommy Trojan, the SC statue.  Then four SC students put a red paint job on UCLA's Founder's Rock but were caught swiping two banners.  An SC student policing group has curtailed their privileges.


    THIN MARGIN
When getting on a bus that
    is packed
The avoirdupois I long
    have lacked
Is then a  joy, a thing
    of merit,
As past the fatter forms
    I ferret.
    --DELLA SKELLETT


    IT IS traditional and inevitable that reporters, who write the news stories, and copy readers, who edit and put heads on them, should quibble.  Reporters contend copy readers destroy their lilting prose.  Copy readers accuse reporters of slaughtering the language.  They went at it again the other day.
 
  A rewrite man turned in a  story about a W 8th St. liquor store holdup in which a case of Scotch was stolen.  The reporter, obviously a naive fellow, identified it as "Hague and Hague" instead of Haig and Haig.

    A surly copy reader asked him, "Are you sure it wasn't a case of Holland gin?"


    IN HIS latest Desert Rat Scrap Book, all about good Injuns, Harry Oliver tells of a party of tourists visiting some Indian ruins in a desolate section of Arizona.  To get to them they had to leave their cars and walk.

    En route, a woman exclaimed, "Gracious, I forgot to lock the car!"

    "Don't worry," the Indian guide said, "there isn't a white man within 50 miles."


    IT MAY BE comforting to know that the Health Department is watching over you, even if you don't care.

    Bob Martin received a notice the other day that his dog Concho had been quarantined for 14 days as a rabies suspect.  Puzzled, he phoned County health and asked why.  "Because he bit you," he was told.

    Then Bob remembered.  Six weeks ago the dog playfully bit or scratched him on the leg.  About a week ago the sore looked infected and Bob stopped at Hollywood Receiving Hospital, where a doc put a bandage on it.  He also turned in a dog-bite report which went to Central, then to County health, then to Burbank, where Bob lives, and boom -- quarantine for Concho.
   
Meanwhile, the wound was healed.


    FOOTNOTES -- It was a big week for bird watching.  In addition to the usual sparrows, towhees, blue-jays, juncoes and flickers, four stately quail, a long absent thrush, the first robin of fall and a yellow-breasted number tentatively identified as a MacGillivray's warbler visited the back yard.  That's what it states in Ernest Sheldon Booth's "Birds of the West" -- MacGillivray's warbler . . . Councilman Ransom Callicott, chatting with a friend about car mileage, remarked, "Five gallons of gas is just a light lunch for my car."

 

   
   

Time for a Change

    This is Big Game Week and I might as well get into the act, too.  I suppose it's true -- once a sports writer, you never get over it entirely.

    SC and UCLA are being criticized for the way they play football.  Also the Rams, who can't win for losing.  Everyone's disgusted with them.

    The Trojans have a great defense, the hecklers say, but their offense falters.  Oh sure they're No. 2 in the nation, but that's because of the wonderful McKeevers.  The heck its is.  It's because they're strong in all 11 positions.

    UCLA, newly come alive, sends the self-appointed experts into despair.  The team looks good one game, bad the next.  Not only that, it plays the single wing, which the critics call horse and buggy football.  I happen to find the single wing a refreshing change from the ubiquitous T system, with all its variations.

    AND SO THE HECKLERS say the colleges ought to open up the game.  Be more imaginative.  Well now, Stanford plays a flashy game.  Dick Norman leads the nation in passing, Chris Burford in receiving.  The Indians are gamblers.  They'll pass on fourth down and four to go in their own territory.  And where are they?  Nowhere.  Mostly because their defense is pitiful.

    It could be that the Dodgers did L.A. a disservice in their magnificent drive for the pennant and their World Series victory.  Every team here is now expected to be not only victorious but also spectacular.  Fans go out to see them win.  They can't abide a loser.  Contrast this with the Middle West, where 75,000 people will sit in the cold or rain to watch teams which have been beaten repeatedly.  But it's their team.

    My theory is that college football suffers mostly from the fickleness of the fans and too much undeserved criticism.  I like it as it is.


    THIS IS to report an incredible, world-shaking event.  Tuesday an editor handling a piece of copy wasn't sure how to spell Khrushchev (most people forget the first h) and looked through the day's papers for verification.  Mr. K was not mentioned that day in any news story or column.


    PUPPY DOGS
They are cuddly-
Also puddly.
--JOSEPH P. KRENGEL


  

ONLY IN L.A. -- A semi-private City Hall elevator, used mostly by the brass to get to upstairs from the basement garage, is notoriously temperamental.   Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.  To warn users that it is unreliable it now bears a handsome brass, lighted, permanent sign, "Out of Service" . . .  Actress Dodie Drake awakened one night recently hearing strange noises.  Thinking someone was trying to break into the house, she called police.  The culprits?  Avocados falling off a tree and rolling down the roof.


    JOHN CORNELL, who keeps tab on the changing L.A. scenery, reports another landmark on N. Broadway, not far from the vacant and mourned Ptomaine Tommy's, has gone out of business.  It was a store, notable for its sign, "Dental Equipment Refishishing."

    Boss probably went refishishing where they were biting better.


    FOR Red Rowe of CBS TV, Halloween was  a treat, not trick, night.  Pranksters removed a For Sale sign from a nearby lot and stuck it in the front lawn of the new Woodland Hills home into which he was preparing to move.  Next day a doctor's wife saw the sign and offered him so much more than he'd paid he couldn't refuse.  So Red's house-hunting again.


    AT RANDOM -- Harrie Mabie heard a newscaster on KMPC say, "Smoke was noticed by the officer passing through the ventilator."