Serious Slapstick
As you may have read, that was quite a comedy of errors the other night in the little city of Cypress in Orange County.
On a tip that Louis Ross Lord, 35, road camp escapee, was there, two Norwalk deputies, D.W. Llewelyn and D.J. Hawkins, went to a house on Sumner Pl.
When Lord opened the door and saw them, he struck Llewelyn, knocking him down. Llewelyn got out his gun and shot at Lord and he went down. As Llewelyn bent over to see if Lord was wounded, Lord jumped up and knocked him down again. He hadn’t been shot, he’d fainted.
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Lord ran out the door and Llewelyn fired another shot, which put a hole through the gas meter. Meanwhile, Hawkins dashed around the house from the other direction to head off Lord. He and Lord collided in the back of the house and Lord went down. Hawkins subdued him with a flashlight and that ended that. But there was a touching epilogue to the Keystone Kop sequence that was unreported in the papers. At the height of the desperate calisthenics a woman next door stuck her head out the front door and yelled, “Why don’t you drunks go home!” and disgustedly slammed the door. :: THE INFORMATION that new standards of air purity which would cut down the carbon monoxide in auto exhaust had been proposed at a state Department of Public Health hearing caught the Spring St. coffee break philosophers in a perverse mood. “The Society for the Encouragement of Suicide isn’t going to like this,” one said. “After all, they have a right to expect the usual lethal quality when they inhale the stuff.” “That’s what I like about you,” a compadre said, “always for the underdog.” :: ELEGY ::
As Paul Connor’s boat passes the fierce, spear carrying Watusi warriors and the two skeleton heads on poles outside a hut, he says. “The natives say they can tell a man’s occupation by his appearance. Take the skeleton-head over there that’s still smiling — they say he was probably in public relations.” :: IRVING ECKHOFF, who helps me watch over these things, was distressed at a headline in the Santa Monica Outlook. “Wife Stabs Bob Crosby in Spat!” Ecky , once a newspaperman himself, felt this was heresy. As he sees it, people can get shot or stabbed in the scuffle, the melee, the corridor or even on the back porch; but the spat, never. “The old ways are best,” he said: “let’s not have any more of these modern switches.” :: YES INDEED, it’s getting brisk these fall nights and no one knows it better than the gas company. A record-breaking 10,719 calls. 3,560 of them requests to “light the pilot,” came into the central office Oct. 30 . . . Incidentally, winter arrived in Idyllwild last Thursday — lightning, thunder and two inches of snow — catching the folks without chains, anti-freeze or firewood. Reminded Ernie Maxwell of an old woodcutter who always sums up such unpreparedness with, “A dollar short, an hour late, and headed the wrong way.” :: MISCELLANY — Paul Dunlap defeated Les Tarr in the Irvine Coast Country Club golf championship but Stan Wood argues it would have happened if Les Tarr’s partner, More Taste, had been around . . . The contracting firm doing an excavation job on Century Blvd. near the airport has posted Burma Shave signs stating, “We are not the stinkers that you think. This storm drain is the missing link.” Helps keep motorists’ blood pressure down during traffic tie-ups . . . Next person to remark that the cranberry situation has bogged down has to put on the dunce cap and stand in the corner. |
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