Paper in a Trash Pile

    Another frantic call came into the county sanitation office the other day.  This time it was a woman on the west side excitedly reporting she'd inadvertently discarded her divorce papers in the trash can.  She had to get them back, she said desperately.

    Fortunately she'd gotten the number of the collection truck, 36261.  If it could be stopped, wherever it was, and unloaded, she'd rush over and look through the stuff herself.

    Frank Bowerman told her this was impossible.  He explained that when a load is picked up and emptied into the hopper, a hinged pressure plate packs it tight until capacity is reached.  Only thing to do was to go to Landfill No.1 on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, where it could be dumped, and look.

     She appeared there with another couple, located the load, and after more than three hours of pawing through four tons of debris, found her precious divorce papers.  She thanked the superintendent and triumphantly headed home.

    THE WAY A fellow in the next booth was telling it, the driver of a panel truck doing a steady 55 on Santa Ana Freeway kept reaching out the window and banging the side with a tire iron.

    A policeman, baffled by this procedure, caught up with him and shouted, "Do you mind telling me what you're doing?'

    "Well, you see, officer, this is a two-ton truck and I've got three tons of canary birds in the back and I have to keep one ton of them in the air."

    LINES AT 5 P.M.
It doesn't take cable,
It doesn't take rope,
To be tied up, unable
To see any hope.

Frustratingly pent by
The cars all around,
To learn what is meant by
The term, homeward
    bound.
    –RICHARD ARMOUR

    UNFORTUNATELY this city has no one around, as far as is known, to record the picturesque speech of city and county officials as Herb Caen of the S.F. Chronicle recently uncovered up there.  The champion phrase-maker was a former supervisor named James McSheehy.
   
Studying plan for a public building, he said, "It has all the earmarks of an eyesore."  On another issue he thundered, "The handwriting on the wall is as clear as a bell."

    Others:  "Let's call a shovel a shovel, no matter who we hit!"  "Ladies, I pave here some figures which you can carry in your heads, which I know are concrete!"  "Yes, I agree that it is all water over a wheel, but now it has come back to haunt us!"  His all time classic was probably, "You can't straddle the fence and still keep your ear to the ground!"

    A PERSON WOULD suppose that New Zealand is shielded by distance from some of the effusions of our civilization but apparently not.  This letter from R. White, Northumbria, Henderson, Auckland, was received by Jack Brown of Armed Forced Radio Services in Hollywood:

    "On local networks here we get such a heavy dosage of rock n' roll, clanging geetars, popular slang and jargon that it really does a great country like the United States as injustice.  Fortunately, your correspondent knows your country is not populated entirely by 13-year-olds."

    Are you sure?

    FOOTNOTES — A man playing cards in the Horseshoe poker parlor in Gardena was also listening to music via an earplug attached to a portable radio and reading a pocket book.  Furthermore, a spy reports, he was losing . . . Jim Albert, 8, seeing the first flying fish on a trip to Catalina Island, exclaimed, "Mommy, when we come next time can I take some birdseed to feed the flying fish?"