No Deal

This corner's continuing seminar on the subject "Do Mr. Parker's boys hand out too many traffic citations?" is at a stalemate.

The
deadlock has to do with a case recently presented here in which a
motorist who lives in a suburb and is not familiar with one-way streets
received two citations in five minutes.

Driving west on 5th Street, this naive outlander
turned left on Olive Street from the middle instead of the extreme left
lane. It was 1 a.m. and he insisted he created no hazard, but got the
ticket anyway. Then he turned west on 6th Street, one-way eastbound, and got the second.

HE WAS technically guilty, of course, and paid his fines. But he resolved never to go downtown again.

After
this sordid tale was printed, a man from the LAPD called and said he'd
like to talk to the offender and perhaps show him the error of his
ways, if I would furnish his name.

"I wonder if he'd think as he does," the officer said, "if he had run head-on into another car when he made the illegal turn."

I
got hold of the motorist and said the LAPD would like to talk to him
about his criminal ways. He said he'd be happy to talk to someone as he
is still outraged by the two tickets. But he said he'd have to be given
amnesty and a guarantee of safe conduct before he ever came downtown
again. That, of course, is impossible. Let him fight his way as the
rest of us must do. So that's where we are, nowhere.

THIS IS TO report that a true innocent is running loose in our fair city. He phoned Paul Henninger of the radio and TV department the other day and asked how to got to Chavez Ravine to see the Dodgers play.

"You're kidding," Paul said, visualizing millions of wasted words over the controversy.

The man wasn't and Paul broke the news to him about the Coliseum.

Now,
on second thought, Paul wishes he had directed him to the Ravine. He
might have taken root and challenged the Griffith Park hermit to a
beard-growing contest.

ANXIETY NEUROSIS

–M.L.G.

REPORTERS agree that the Elizabeth Duncan case had more surprises than any they had ever covered. The other day another one, hitherto unreported, was revealed.

When Luis Moya was first questioned, before he and Augustine Baldonado were revealed as the actual slayers of Olga Duncan, he was noncommittal. Deputy Sheriff Roy Higgins, knowing Moya
was religious and that his mother was dead, said to him, "When you die
and meet your mother, what are you going to tell her about your part in
this case?"

Moya didn't answer but asked for a Bible. None could
be found immediately and an attache was dispatched to a nearby hotel
for a Gideon.

Moya read for a while, then readily confessed his part in the crime.

ITEM WITH MORAL — April 20, Adolf Hitler's birthday, passed unnoticed. He lost. April 17, Nikita Khrushchev's birthday, was elaborately celebrated. He won.

AT RANDOM — Spring
continues to burst out all over. This chalked message was on a freight
car, one of a long train clanking along Pacific Coast Highway near
Oxnard: "Let's go to down, lovebirds, to see the girls" … People
handling the campaign for the Orthopaedic Hospital's proposed
$6.5-million children's center are grateful to the unidentified person
who sent them five $50 bills with an Easter card. Only clue was the
postmark, Highland, Cal. … Nice tribute in Holiday to Gene Fowler,
dubbed "the gilded pauper," by Ben Hecht — although Lucius Beebe has him living in Beverly Hills instead of Brentwood.