Mother's a Smuggler

There
is a nice old doll, maybe 60, who drinks along with the boys in a Hill
St. bat cave. Every now and then some longtime friend calls her Mother,
which leads to mutual merriment.

The Mother story goes back perhaps 15 years, when she was a popular waitress in an all-night restaurant in Long Beach.

One
night a young lieutenant with a full head of steam was chatting with
her when he noticed in horror that the booze-buying deadline had
slipped by. She tried to hustle him a pint but had no luck. Here indeed
was a crisis. He had to make ship, be awake and alert at a certain
hour, without a drop to soothe his nerves which, he knew from
experience, would be jumping. So they plotted.

NEXT DAY the old doll got dressed in her best and met the ship's launch at the scheduled time and was taken aboard the battlewagon.
She was greeted lovingly by the lieutenant, who introduced her to the
captain and other officers as his mother. The captain invited her to
lunch. All this took place under the eyes of scores of sailors who knew
darn well she wasn't his mother but that nice hasher in Long Beach.

 Meanwhile,
she was nervously trying to deliver a fifth of whisky concealed in her
handbag to her "son." She couldn't because of all the beaming brass
eager to welcome the lieutenant's dear mother.

Finally he
managed to take her on a tour of the ship and somewhere in the tangle
of the engine room she managed to slip him the bottle, which he stashed.

Topside
again, the lieutenant arranged to get his mother ashore, explaining
that she was only in town for the day and had to catch a plane back to
her home in Boston.

Although seamen do not always revere officers, this has been a well-kept secret and to this day she is known to them as Mother.

::

A BUNCH OF downtown
office workers got into a discussion about ferocious denizens of the
deep, and a girl named Helen came to the rescue of sharks and whales.
Men had no ethical right to kill them, she said, because the sharks and
whales were in their own habitat, minding their business and the
hunters were not. This blew up a storm, led by a girl who disagreed
vehemently, and later sent Helen this verse:

These giant mammals
    would agree
That you excel in
    sympathy.
My daily prayer is
    most devout —
You're never inside
    looking out. 

::

 THE REHEARSAL at
a Huntington Park church for a CBS Church of the Air program went off
fine a few days ago but when director Gene Webster began taping the
show the choir upped the tempo, throwing off the timing. As a result,
the program came out a few seconds short. When Gene pointed this out,
the choir director shrugged, "Oh well, that's show business."

::

ONLY IN L.A. — The
grim drivers, four abreast in the fearful 5 p.m. westbound traffic on
Olympic Blvd., were on the pace to make all the signals when, near
Catalina, an unmistakable whistling decrescendo rent the air. Someone
had a tire puncture. The drivers looked about in alarm, each hoping it
was someone else. A flat tire in rush hour traffic is almost a fate
worse than death. The agonizing whistling finally stopped and was
followed by the familiar thumping. One man, in despair, was seen
wrestling with his steering wheel, the others happily darted off.

::

FRAGMENT OF flighty conversation
between two teenage girls overheard in a seaside restaurant by a gal
named Muriel: "I don't know why I get so upset about it because I
really don't care — do you know what I mean?"

::

AT RANDOM — Tex Elgin of Oxnard says that when the folks around Lompoc,
near the Pacific Missile Range, hear a roar they don't know if it's the
Navy sending up a rocket or the Air Force exploding a publicity blast.
. . . A station wagon with Ohio license plates on Harbor Freeway had a
Volkswagen in tow instead of the usual trailer. Only thing Seymour
Mandel could figure was that the couple and their children used it as a
scout car en route in patrolling the prairie.