Dear Friend

It's too hot for indignation but maybe, with a cool drink, we can muster a little pique.

I
refer to a certain type of unsolicited direct mail pitch. A large
envelope shows up in the mailbox. How the outfit got your name and
address you don't know.

Inside is a mimeographed letter
addressed to "Dear Friend," stating you have been recommended for
membership in a "new, exciting and convenient way of shopping."
Superimposed in large type is the admonition, "Send no money."

TO GET IN ON THIS
excitement you will want the catalog and to get the catalog all you
have to do is fill out the enclosed application and return it in the
reply envelope. This is where the pique comes in.

The
application wants to know your name, address, age, whether single,
married, separated or divorced, the name of your employer and how long
you've worked there. So far, routine. But then it wants to know, "What
are your present earnings?" And the name of the bank where you have an
account.

Remember, you didn't send for anything, you don't want anything — only to be left alone.

I say it's an impertinence and an invasion of privacy.

::

A MAN NAMED EDDIE asked his wife to go deep-sea fishing with him over the week end and got this evasive and somewhat double-edged reply:

"No,
I don't think I will. I'm afraid I'd get seasick. Besides, there've
been a lot of boat accidents and I don't want to get dumped in the
water with all those sharks around. You go, though, but leave your
wrist watch home."

::

SAFETY FIRST
To drink and drive is
    treacherous
For accidents are grim
So he who drinks just
    like a fish
Should park his car and
    swim.
    — PEARL ROWE

::

DEATH OF retired
Adm. Harry E. Yarnell in Newport, R.I., this week brought a grateful
eulogy from George Krain of the SC photo department.

Krain, a
White Russian, was a newsreel cameraman in the Far East when the
Japanese bombed the gunboat Panay in the Yangtze River in 1937. Because
he photographed the pillage of Nanking he became a fugitive from the
Japanese. Five of his countrymen were executed.

He appealed for
help and Adm. Yarnell, commander of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, got visas
for him and his wife to enter this country.

"He saved our lives," Krain said. "We will never forget him."

::

THE HEAT
is getting to people. A man entering Spring St. building stopped,
muttered something, then reached down and pulled a blue tie out of one
pants leg. . . . And a painting publicist, returning from lunch, gasped
to his companion, "I'll race you to the air conditioning!"

::

EDWARD L. LASH,
3751 Bagley Ave., L.A., survivor of the Norway hotel fire in which 17
were killed, writes Nellie Byrne of the Byrne Travel Service from
Edinburgh, "I think the 22nd of June was our lucky day. We arrived at
the Stalheim Hotel and for the first time on our trip were given a room
on the first floor. The fire broke out on the second floor and spread
upwards. Three in our group were burned to death. Others were killed
jumping from windows."

::

FOOTNOTES —
A photog on another paper always puts his glasses and keys on a desk
when he returns from an assignment and heads for his darkroom. If he
wonders why his key ring has gotten so heavy lately, his colleagues
have been adding a key a day. . . . Regarding supposedly unused watch
pockets in men's trousers, R.R. Auerbach of La Jolla Sportswear says,
"We don't try to figure out the whys — all we know is people want them
in, used or not". . . .A lady Mike Molony knows malapropped to her dog,
"If you don't behave I'll pick you up by the scum of the neck and throw
you out of the house!"

Unfriendly Frisco

My San Francisco
spy has smuggled through the mail a clipping of a sports column by
Prescott Sullivan in the S.F. Examiner as follows:

"Ingemar Johansson demonstrated that he is the possessor of a devastating right-hand punch when he upended Floyd Patterson for the heavyweight championship of the world. Last week the handsome, affable Swede demonstrated that he is also the possessor of an orderly, analytical mind.

"In Goteborg, his home town, Johansson
said it looked like Los Angeles would be the scene of his first defense
of the title and that would be fine and dandy with him. 'I like Los
Angeles because I've never been there,' he declared.

"THINK IT over
and you'll agree that never having been there is the best possible
reason for anyone liking Los Angeles. What other reason is there for
liking it? Can L.A. be liked for its smog, its monstrous freeway
traffic jams or Charlie Park, the scorekeeper who did Sad Sam Jones out
of a no-hit game? Is it to be venerated for its oppressive heat, its
crackpots, the Dodgers or Braven Dyer?

"For years we have been
trying to puzzle things out. Now a young Swede, to whom the English
language is strange and difficult, shames us by making it all look so
easy. Ingemar Johansson likes Los Angeles because he has never been there and no one could sum it up more succinctly than that."

My,
my, such bitterness. They must really hate us up there. And we always
say such nice things about S.F. Only thing to do is smile and whip out
the population figures.

::

"OH MEMORY, thou fond deceiver!" wrote Oliver Goldsmith. It certainly is.

The
boys on the copy desk were discussing the new sales tax on cigarettes,
which make them 30 cents a pack in the office vending machine, and a 2nd World War veteran reminisced, "Gosh, remember how cheap they were in the Army PBX?" That's what he said — PBX.

::

JULY 4 has disappeared into limbo for most people but not quite for writer Alvin Sapinsley.
He and his wife, Elizabeth, were having supper in the patio of their
Sherman Oaks home around 8:30 p.m. when something hit with a sharp,
cracking sound on the roof not too many inches away from his head and
bounced onto the driveway. It was the nose cone of a .45-caliber bullet
— copper-colored and warm.

---

Another panel you will never see in the sitcom legacy version of "Peanuts."

The current legacy strip: "It's a Laugh Track, Charlie Brown."

---

He went up on the roof and found a
deep dent it had made. By fitting the slug into the hole he determined
it apparently had been fired from somewhere around Mulholland Dr. and Beverly Glen Blvd.

He
called the police and an officer was sympathetic and made a report but
said there wasn't much he could and actually there wasn't.

The
disturbing thing is that five minutes before the bullet struck, his
wife had wondered if they could see the fireworks from the back yard.
He'd said he didn't think so and suggested, he recalls with a shudder,
they go up on the roof for a better view.

::

BATHERS BEWARE
Hark, hark, the shark —
All bite, no bark.
    –LEN DRESSER

::

A LADY NAMED
Julia made the final payment on her car and remarked that she should
soon be receiving the pink slip in the mail. At a question by Donna, 5
1/2, she explained the pink slip meant ownership of the car. Donna said
she wanted to be there when the box came. "What box?" Julia asked.
Turned out Donna somehow had gotten the idea that the pink slip was a
ruffled pink seat cover. Breaking the news was like telling her there
was no Santa Claus.

Ah, those wonderful childhood misconceptions.

::

PUBLIC AT LARGE — Picture postcard from Terracina, Italy, from publicist Al Hix has the message, "This is just like Zuma Beach — with pizzas." . . . Tom Cracraft
can't understand why the missile people don't send gophers and moles up
in rockets. "Out in Studio City," he says, "we're hardly ever bothered
by monkeys."

Way, Way Out

The
Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America have been sending me daily
notices concerning their convention here this weekend and, although I
am open-minded on flying saucers, I simply don't know how to handle
thisoverwhelming situation. As the boys say, it bugs me.

One featured speaker, a press release states, will be Kelvin Rowe of San Jacinto,
"who reportedly has flown into outer space more than 350 times." The
release blandly adds, "Rowe's contacts have been primarily with people
from Jupiter and Pluto." Just like that.

Another will be Daniel W. Fry of West Covina,
"who in 1950 rode in a spaceship from another world from White Sands
Proving Grounds, N.M. to New York City and back in half an hour."

Another will be Hope Troxel, Altadena interior decorator, "who has enjoyed many remarkable incidents involving extraterrestrial life."

ANOTHER WILL BE
Reinhold Schmidt, Bakersfield grain buyer, "who on Aug. 14, 1958, flew
from the Mojave Desert to the Arctic Circle and under the ice pack in a
spaceship from the planet Saturn." Schmidt's experiences, which
required a whole page for the telling, continue: "On Nov. 5, 1957, he
was contacted by aSaturnian spaceship and invited aboard by its crew of
four men and two women outside Kearney, Neb. Schmidt has since had many
contacts with his friends from outer space."

 Many aviation and
military authorities are quoted as expressing belief that there's
something up there all right, doubtless from outer space. Of a sighting
in Rome, Clare Boothe Luce said, "I did see an object. I don't know
what it was."

The AFSCA also raises some interesting questions,
including the following: Was the star of Bethlehem a spaceship? Did
Moses receive the Ten Commandments from outer space? Was the Red Sea parted by extraterrestrial technology? Are there more than nine planets in our solar system?

Honest, fellows, I don't know. Somewhere along the line I seem to have lost my childlike credulity.

::

LET US LOOK IN on an exciting drama of conflict and emotion in a suburb and hope we don't disturb it.

There's
a campaign in this town to cut down trees for one reason or another,
mostly beauty of what is called progress. A certain woman announced she
was going to take out a crooked fig tree at the side of her house. She
feared it would crack the sidewalk. Not only that, it looked dead.

Suddenly,
the tree has busted loose with leaves and small figs. She can't
understand it. A neighbor can. A tree lover, she has been secretly
watering it at night.

::

 AFTER MANY years
of drinking as he pleased, a movie studio worker recently saw the
light. His doctor held the lamp for him. Stop or drop, he warned. Dead,
he meant.

Four days after he quit the liquor store he'd patronized for 14 years had a sign in the window, "Going Out of Business."

The
poor guy now has a guilt complex. He is brooding about the possibility
that he may have undermined the economic foundation of an Inglewood
shopping center.

::

  HARDEST KIND
The most difficult work that
    I have to go through,
Is trying to look busy when
    I've nothing to do.
    –RALPH FREEMAN

::

A CABDRIVER named
Dick Vasquez tells of the time he picked up a passenger who had
misplaced his car while busy relaxing and suggested they cruise around
looking for it.

They went up one street and down the next but it was nowhere in sight. As the cabby turned a corner the passenger said irritably, "We've been on this street before. Gosh, you're dumb!"

"Yes, sir," Dick said, "but my cab's not lost, is it?"