Splash!

When visitors wonder why Jim Wallin, Arcadia planning commissioner,
has no diving board for his swimming pool, he tells them about his big
impulsive moment. Not long ago a nephew from out of state, a husky lad
of 21, visited him and kept practicing triple flips, striking the water
with a tremendous splash.

Soon the dichondra around the pool was
turning brown from the chlorine in the water. Wallin repeatedly
suggested he do simpler dives and splash less, but the nephew
apparently was wearing earplugs.

One Sunday as Wallin watched
from the house the young cannonballed again. Wallin walked grimly to
the garage, got out his power saw, plugged it in and, to his nephew's
horror, zipped off the board.

::

ONLY IN L.A. —
A woman customer, leaving a dress in a West Side cleaning shop, said
severely, "But I must have it by Friday!" The boss assured her it would
be ready. She repeated the warning and he said, "The only reason I
won't have it is if I drop dead."

"In that case," she said firmly, "have someone call me and I'll come and pick it up."

::

WHEN
Dillard Jackson, former Bakersfield High School football player, was
knocked out by Pat Lowry recently at Hollywood Legion Stadium, his
second, bringing him back from slumberland, asked, "You feeling all
right, boy?"

Jackson replied groggily, "You better send somebody else in there, coach."

::

ABOUT
five minutes out of San Jose the other day a distraught woman followed
by a conductor and a porter came through a passenger car on the
southbound Daylight Limited crying pitifully, "My baby! My baby!"

After a while the concerned passengers, including Barbara Berholz of Pasadena, were given the incredible explanation.

The
woman had boarded the train in San Jose with the feeling that she'd
forgotten something. Suddenly she remembered she'd left her baby in her
parked car at the station.

The train was stopped and she was let
off in the outskirts of the city, to get back to her cheeild as best
she could. And I thought I was absent-minded.

::

SPEAKING OF faulty memories, most people have trouble remembering jokes. Once heard, they slip through the mind as if it were a sieve.

The
other night at a party after several persons said they'd heard some
good ones lately but couldn't remember them, a woman announced brightly
that she had the answer to this problem in her purse.

For the last few weeks, she said, she'd written the punch lines of the good stories she'd heard so she wouldn't forget them.

She dug out the list, read off about a dozen punch lines but couldn't remember the jokes that went with them. Broke everyone up.

::

IN 1941,
George Gillman gave a 40-year lease on his lot on W 3rd St. to a store
for $3,332 a year. His county taxes on the property, located on the
fringe of the downtown section, were $450 in 1941 to $2,286 a year. He
presented statistics gathered by the L.A. Bureau of Municipal Research
to reinforce his protest.

"No one in his right mind would buy the property for so small a return on the investment," he said.

His
plea was rejected on the basis that the county was not responsible
because he had given a bad lease. These, too, are the conditions which
prevail for property owners.

::

AROUND TOWN —
In his first press conference, in which he said nothing more
controversial than the fact that he is a Giant fan, William W. Burke,
53, new FBI special agent here, concluded, "If I've said anything I
shouldn't, don't print it" . . . "Say, Darling," the hilarious musical
comedy at the Biltmore about the headaches of getting a show on the
road, has Jerome Cowan, who plays a theatrical producer, saying, "This
may be the first show in history to give staff credit to a
psychiatrist."