The Foundry

    Almost everyone at one time or another aspires to be a writer and perhaps reshape the world with a literary effort so filled with truth and wisdom that fame and riches are inevitable.

    When they confide this dream you wonder whether to break it bluntly or gently that writing is difficult, lonely work requiring great discipline and that the rewards are usually meager unless, of course, they hit big with, say, a cookbook.

    Well, this is to report that a  group of disillusioned pros meet regularly in a home in Beverly Hills and parcel out TV ideas on the basis of "You do that one, I'll do this one."  It's strictly hack work but they sell them.  There's quite a market for western and private eye "originals," you know.

    They call it the Foundry.

     ONLY IN L.A. — You wouldn't believe some of the phone calls that come into the City Health Department about the flu, Al Torribio reports.  One man phoned he'd felt a chill and put his head in the stove oven to get warm.  He immediately got a fever and felt woozy, he said, and wondered if the flu wasn't due to stove ovens. 

   THE NEW semester has started but Derrill Place, English teacher at Glendale College, is still smiling over a thing that happened the last of last semester.  Students in his class in Children's Literature fastened their final exam papers together with pastel-colored diaper pins.

    SENSATIONAL
Scalpers are getting $10 for good seats at the Finch trial — News item.
The American folk way
Is really an odd way.
When it finishes here,
They should take it to
    Broadway.
        RICHARD ARMOUR

    WHAT SEEMED like a good idea at the time has become a first class headache in Lakewood.

    Last May a Douglas F-3D, a jet fighter, retired by the Navy after heroic service in Korea, was enthusiastically promoted — free — by the Lakewood park department.  It was brought from Litchfield , Ariz., and set up in Del Valle Park.  Hardly had the dedicatory oratory concluded when a massive wave of thrilled youngsters swarmed all over it.  They had continued to crawl in, out and over it day after day.  Only problem was that here's a 10-foot drop from the center of the fuselage to the ground, a hazard to reckless youth.  So last Dec. 22 the city council ordered the plane fenced off.

    Now the problem is what to do with 45,000 pounds of airplane.   Lakewood officialdom is welcoming suggestions.

    A LATE-SLEEPING writer who moved recently to a new home off the Sunset Strip was awakened the other morning by the woman across the street saying sharply, "Patrick, take your daddy's Oscar out of the sandbox and bring it back in the house!"

    With the Academy Awards only a few weeks away, he thought the committee ought to know.

    IT'S ODD how chatter forms a pattern.  I've heard three persons say, in effect, "What with the hangover, the bills and the flu, I've written off the month of January.  I'm starting 1960 with February and pretending January didn't happen."

    ALTHOUGH he covers the courthouse, reporter Chester Washington had never made it to the witness chair, until the other day when he testified for a doctor, his Sunday golf companion, who was seeking a divorce.  Asked what effect the wife's conduct had on the doc, Chester said, "It made him nervous and was detrimental to his golf game."   The divorce was granted and presumably Chet will not demand a stroke-a-hole handicap.

    MISCELLANY — A Hollywoodian is driving bartenders nuts.  He goes into bars and orders warm beer.  When bartenders say all their beer is cold he reminds them that gourmets consider 58 degrees the proper temperature for drinking . . . Maybe movie actors don't deserve to be paid for the showing of their old films on TV, Leon Luk observed, but they do seem entitled to damages.