An armored truck, the kind that picks up and delivers large sums of cash for banks and stores, stopped a few days ago at 1st and Main Sts.  The armed attendants got out and grimly looked about.  They conferred briefly, then the one who had been riding shotgun dashed into the Health Department building while the other stood guard.

    City employees, watching from the windows, envisioned a repeat of the famous Brink's robbery in Boston.

    Soon the attendant emerged from the building and joined his colleague.  In a little while an emergency truck pulled up.  A man got out with a red can and under an armed escort poured the contents into the truck.  Yep, plenty of money but no gas.

    ONLY IN L.A. — Floodlights flashed across the sky Wednesday night from the area of Pan-Pacific Auditorium and  a man I know, driving toward it, guessed they were for the lavish $100-a-plate Republican fund-raising dinner at which the President spoke.  As he reached the battery of searchlights he saw they were for the opening of a new taco and pizza diner nearby.

     MY WAITER
When I'm late for a show
His footsteps are slow.
When I've hours to spare
He sprints like a hare.
        –EDITH OGUTSCH

    DOCTORS ARE aroused by Seymour Kern's novel, "The Golden Scalpel," a localized tale of ruthless, unethical medical practices — object money.  Some say it's one-sided and unfair, others that it doesn't go far enough in revealing medical skullduggery.

    Meanwhile, the book has gone into a second printing and Kern, a real estate broker here for 25 years, is working on another.  It will deal with real estate in L.A. during the depression.  Kern calls it "a remarkable period of contemporary history, hitherto untold."

   AS NATIONAL and local politics take on a bitter aspect, it was refreshing to come upon a fine lesson in civics or, as it is called today, social studies, in the Railsplitter, weekly newspaper at Abraham Lincoln High School on N Broadway.  The page 1 banner-line story by John Hernandez begins, "Last week, 53 students ran for student office and 26 were elected.  The students who did not succeed should try again and never give up hope."

    A RADIO newscaster reporting the funeral of actor Matt Moore remarked glibly that his brothers Owen and Tom didn't attend.  A young lady named Catherine, who reveres the memory of all three acting brothers, became angry at what she considered a flippant, gratuitous comment.  She phoned the station and asked the announcer if he knew why they hadn't been there.  He admitted he did not so she told him, "Because he attended their funerals when they died!"  She hopes he'll be more careful in the future.

    IT WAS inevitable and the other day, reports Yetta Davis, volunteer worker for the Red Cross blood bank, 1130 S Vermont Ave., it happened.  When a receptionist finished interviewing a donor and he had removed his jacket he said to the nurse, "O.K., take me to your bleeder!"

    AROUND TOWN — Big new thing at pay playgrounds are Jumping Beans, ground-level trampolines.  It's an odd sight, driving by, to see youngsters seemingly suspended in mid-air . . . Many recent arrivals from the East complain they miss the seasonal changes.  Not so a gal named Mary Louise, who says, "I can tell the days are getting longer — the sun now rises over my drainpipe and sets two inches from the pine tree in the yard" . . . The flu epidemic has turned up many instances of sacrifice.  One lady was at her wits' end trying to persuade her reluctant husband to take a scheduled green pill and finally, to show her derision for such sissy conduct, swallowed it herself.