Case of the Glass Dogs

As always, last week’s phenomenon becomes an ordinary event this week.

Remember the piece here about the Irish settler seen gnawing away at the glass window of a parked car in Coronado?

Let Lucile McNeil of Independence, Cal., tell about her claustrophobic mongrel, Cappy.

One time in Salt Lake City she left Cappy, a girl dog, in the car while she and her husband went to a theater. Half an hour later Cappy was in the theater looking for them. There was a jagged hole in the window Lucile had left lowered for ventilation.

Six months later in Lone Pine Cappy, who hated containment, did it again.

Two
years later while having lunch with a friend in a Pomona restaurant the
dog came into their booth. Refused admittance at the front door, Cappy had gone around to the the rear and come in through the kitchen. 

In all cases Cappy had cut her mouth but didn’t swallow the glass.

WHILE IN
New York last week attending the National Book Awards, Rex Barley was
introduced to a distinguished literary critic who asked superciliously,
"Do people really read books in Los Angeles?"

Rex thought he
was kidding but he went on, "I know they read about yoga and things
like that but do they actually ever read a serious book?"

Rex
walked away, shaken by the thought that the man has helped mold
literary opinion for 20 years. Los Angeles is second to New York in
book sales.

STRANGE SEASON
Confliction mars this season’s time:
While Spring implies we’ll be re-born
Stern income tax, with grimmer rhyme,
Retorts we’ll merely be re-shorn.
–WILLIAM BAFFA

AFTER A recent concert, violinist Mischa Elman was having a midnight supper with Irwin Parnes,
under whose auspices he will appear in Philharmonic Auditorium next
Saturday, when a young man came over to the table and said, "Mr. Elman, I’ve wanted to meet you for many years to thank you." 

He
related that when he was 10 his parents took him to a concert in his
home town, Fargo, N.D., and he became so inspired he took up the
violin. Lacking the talent for the concert stage, he said, he joined a
jazz group and had had a satisfying life in music. "I wanted you to
know," he concluded, "I owe it all to a concert I’m sure you have long
since forgotten."

"Oh, no," said Elman, now in his 80s, "I remember that Fargo concert very well. They paid me with a bad check."

THIS IS TO
advise city and county overseers that the natives are restless again
over proposed tax increases. To quote on of them: "How can they justify
a $5 auto tax in the face of their giveaways? This turnip is out of
blood. Where does the line form for the protest march?"

"THE SPACE AGE is beyond me," Sallie Fiske
says, "and when I read that scientists expect to recover and bring home
one of our satellites to the launching pad I wondered, will it have
‘Yankee, go home!’ on it?" No, probably just a busted nose cone.

FOOTNOTES — In his interview with Frank Evans on KRHM-FM George Shearing expressed admiration for Buddy DeFranco and mused, "If he made an album with Mort Sahl do you suppose it would be called ‘Buddy and Sahl’?"
. . . Coincidence note: There’s a David Crockett working at Disneyland
— on the caissons for the upcoming Matterhorn, Monorail and Submarine
rides . . . Doris Hellman gets piqued when she encounters the word
"razed" as in "Fire Razes Building." "Fire really lowers it," she says
slyly . . . Terri McDaniel observes: "People who live in glass houses
must spend a fortune on draw drapes" . . . It’s only a matter of time,
Frank Barron reasons, until a bearded musician tells a barber, "OK, now
let’s take it from the top" . . . Thought for the week: Imagine, vaporlock in mid-March!   

Mayor’s a Creek

That wasn’t smog around the City Hall the other day, it was a smoke signal denoting Mayor Poulson’s
induction into the Creek tribe. Their ceremony was intended to make
people aware of the 15,000 Indians in the L.A. area who are being
assimilated into normal society.

Take Creek Chief Wah-Nee-Ota,
for instance, who helped officiate. His other name is William McGuire.
He is 42, a musician and actor, married and has three daughters, wears
his hair in braids and has a wonderful sense of humor.

When he
came here from Muskogee, Okla., in 1937, he went out to Republic studio
hoping to get work in westerns. He noticed that sixNavahos with long
hair were always grabbed first by the casting director. The others were
on a next-best basis. He let his short hair grow, got some jobs and
hasn’t cut it since.

When Bill applied for membership in the musicians union — he plays the vibrola,
something like a guitar — he was given a questionnaire. To the
question "Do you speak any foreign languages?" he wrote, "Yes,
English." To the question, "Are you a citizen?" he wrote, "No." When
called before the board he explained that he is a member of the Indian
nation and technically his tribe still is at war with the United
States. No peace treaty has ever been signed.

WHENEVER POSSIBLE Bill tries to straighten people out on the matter of scalping. "We learned it from the white man," he explains.

When
the early settlers came from England they were paid a bounty for every
Indian body. Things became a little cluttered, and the king’s treasurer
announced he’d pay on the head, then the scalp.

When the live
Indians learned what was happening to the dead Indians they adopted
this supposedly sacred ritual of their very own. "It’s all in the
history books under ‘The Art of Scalping.’" Bill said.

How did he get along with Mayor Poulson? "We are blood brothers now," Chief Wah-Nee-Ota said stoically.

ONLY IN L.A. — The
girls in Classified are giggling again. A woman placed a for-sale ad
stating, "Boxer puppies, golden red fawn" — describing their color.
Three persons called wanting to buy the fawn.

THESE GHOULISH THINGS REMIND ME
Even funeral ads to my budget do cater,
The billboards encourage die now and pay later.
— M.L.G.

MONDAY at
9 a.m. a county crew arrived at the handsome, modern new courthouse in
Torrance to set the scene for the dedication ceremony scheduled for
10:30.

The men moved a portable platform on the front lawn,
put the bunting around it, attached the loudspeakers and set up about
200 folding chairs.

As the time approached the dignitaries took their places on the platform and the commoners found seats.

At 10:30 sharp the ceremony was called to order.

At 10:45, as the oratory shifted into overdrive, the automatic sprinklers went on, soaking the celebrities.

DURING a lesson in phonics, Dorothy Feist, 2nd grade teacher at Galt elementary school in Van Nuys,
gave the word "night" and asked the class to furnish similar sounding
words. One youngster said "sight." Randall Marco said "fight" —
emphasizing the first letter.

"And how do you start ‘fight’ "? she asked.

"With a gun," he replied.

MISCELLANY — As
might be expected, Mother’s Day gags about Elizabeth Duncan and Frankie
are circulating . . . A business associate phoned Bob Hope in Palm
Springs regarding his TV show tonight and the long distance operator
said, "Give him my love." When the Banning operator plugged in she
said, "Tell Mr. Hope to take care of himself." Such is the esteem in
which the man is held . . . June Street north of 1st should be a safe
place. Emmett C.McGaughey, police commission president, lives in the 100 block and Duncan Shaw, a member, in the 500 block. 

A Nose Is Thumbed

The
National Book Award for fiction, you may have read, went to a
collection of short stories, "The Magic Barrel," by Bernard Malamud,
English prof at Oregon State. To short-story addicts this is a triumph
indeed. It is also a slight nose thumbing at magazine editors who
insist on relegating short stories to a secondary position behind
stale, repetitious articles.

It also could reflect a feeling
by the judges that no novel worthy of the award was published last
year. Short-story collections rarely win an award; in fact, publishers
are reluctant to bring them out at all.

Several Hollywood writers were discussing the decline of meritorious fiction and came up with some bitter comments.

THEY AGREED on this sad truth: "If you’re not writing for television, you’re not eating very good."

One
outlined the writer’s dilemma as follows: "OK, I’m working on a script
that is junk but will pay me $750 or $1,500. It’s a fairy tale, full of
cliches, with maybe a twist that’s different. I come to a situation
that is so strained it’s on the edge of travesty. I could write a line
of dialogue that would destroy the whole business. It would make me
feel better. But I back away from it and play it straight, the way they
want it, so there will be no suspicion that anybody thinks I’m kidding.
That way I get paid."

Another challenged, "Well, if you hate TV so much, why do you keep writing it? What about your novel?"

"What are you talking about?" the first retorted. "How can I write junk one day and good stuff the next?"

SPEAKING OF TV, a Santa Monican,
while asleep, slugged his wife so savagely in the back she could hardly
move for three days. He was subconsciously re-enacting a brutal fight
scene in a TV western he’d watched before retiring.

It has come to this.

SPRING
A softness steals into the air,
While birds new mates are choosing.
Grandpa gets out his rocking chair,
To sun-tan while he’s snoozing.
–JOSEPH P. KRENGEL

THERE’S AN
apocryphal story about a stranger who asks an old-timer downtown how to
get to the post office, and the old-timer, after deep thought, says,
"You can’t get there from here."

Then there’s the case of Jack Clarke and his brother, visiting here from Chicago.

Jack arranged to pick him up the other day at 8:15 a.m. at 36th
and Hoover. He wasn’t there. Jack scoured the neighborhood in vain.
When an hour passed he phoned the place where his brother was staying
and learned he had left there on schedule.

When two hours passed he phone again. He was told the brother had phoned and said he was waiting at 36th and Hoover but had seen nothing of Jack.

On an impulse Jack toured the SC campus area and found his brother. As he suspected, there are two of them — 36th and Hoover Street and 36th and Hoover Boulevard — blocked off from each other.

"It’s impossible," the brother said.

"Not in L.A.," Jack said.

AT RANDOM —
A typographical posy to Playhouse Pictures for the shaggy dog take-off
on Viceroy’s "thinking man" commercial. Excerpt "Do you think everyone
should be a dog?" "Well, that’s something everyone should decide for
themselves" . . . No truth to the rumor there’s an underground move to
bring the Brooklyn Zoo here.