Ready for Jet Age?

Almost
everyone who travels east and back by air these days wants to fly in
the jet transports. As a result, reservations are not always easy to
get.

Furthermore, there are frequent delays due to minor
adjustments. For instance, a man I know had a reservation on the noon
plane out of L.A. and didn’t take off until 10:50 a.m. the next day.

While waiting he got into a conversation with a stewardess and she told him of a maddening two-hour delay on a recent flight.

The
passengers were told the delay was due to a routine mechanical checkup.
Actually, a mechanic got locked in the men’s room and the door had to
be removed to get him out.

The jet age is here. The question is, are we ready for it?

LAST SUNDAY at 7 a.m. as Darr
Smith went to the store at Highland and Franklin Avenues for some
cigarettes he came upon a cluster of sports-car addicts holding a
rendezvous preparatory to roaring off to the Pomona road race.

He
found a place to park his oversize car near a Volkswagen around which
two young men were strangely busy. He was intrigued because they were
doing something under the raised hood in front. The VW engine is in the rear.

He
came closer and got the picture. A couple dozen cans of beer had been
dumped into the space and the two young men were covering them with
loads of ice cubes.

That, Darr submits, is Southern California living.

LATE TO WORK
You lied to me, Metro, you won’t go to heaven,
Your 6:49 came at 7:11.
— JOY TURTLEDOVE

A NEWCOMER recently bought a home in a thickly settled section of the Hollywood Hills and, to insure privacy, put up a board fence.

His
neighbor complained that it cut off his view and asked him to remove
it. He refused but the neighbor protested so persistently it was
finally agreed the neighbor would pay its cost and take it down.

This he did — and promptly put it up on the other side of his house, blocking that neighbor’s view.

IF THERE IS still
official wonderment as well as consternation whence came the large rat
which ran loose in the new $24 million Courthouse Monday before being
killed in a phone booth, a cabby
has a clue. He was there when the Vanderbilt Hotel was pulled down a
few days before and what impressed him most was not the spectacular
collapse but the hundreds of rats which ran out. Maybe this one was a
fugitive.

QUOTE & UNQUOTE — Harry Laugharn, APCD photog, described a friend thusly,
"He has brown hair with a firebreak" . . . James V. Ryan spotted this
notice in an auto supply store on Sunset Boulevard near Echo Park: "50%
deposit required to anyone we do not know. 100% deposit required from
some people we do know."

AROUND TOWN — A
graying gent was attracted by a sharp-looking young lady walking ahead
of him on S Broadway — until he caught up with her at the next corner.
As they waited for the signal he saw that she was smoking a cigar. End
of dream . . . An employee of a plant which moved recently to knew
quarters on Boyle Avenue met some old cronies, one of whom asked where
he’d been lately. "Out on Boyle," he said, pronouncing it "bail" . . .
No truth to the rumor the men of Good Humor will change their tune. At
least so advises O’Hara MacPherson, who describes himself as a bad humor man.