LABJ’s LA Stories
Tiger Travels
A couple of maulings isn’t enough to deter actor Dick Van Patten from playing with tigers.
Van Patten, who played good dad Tom Bradford on “Eight is Enough,” has been on a nationwide tour hawking his holistic dog and cat food (that means barley and oats, not chicken parts) and a newer line of frozen beef for zoo animals.
Last month, Van Patten was in with the leopards at the Philadelphia Zoo and in New York making nice to a 450-pound Bengal tiger named “Asia,” said Joey Herrick, president of Natural Balance Pet Foods Inc., which Van Patten founded.
“Dick was feeding her out of a bottle,” Herrick said of the tiger.
Herrick, too, has been known to step into the proverbial lion’s den. And while saddened by the on-stage tiger attack of Las Vegas entertainer Roy Horn, said he isn’t any more afraid of tigers.
“I’m not really scared,” he said emphatically, but added: “But if I took an African safari, I wouldn’t leave the Range Rover and would want the windows rolled up.”
Amanda Bronstad
Universal Approval
While Universal Pictures provided plenty of explosions and destruction in its recently released action film “The Rundown,” starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, it treaded lightly around its sensitive Hansen Dam locations.
To reproduce a Brazilian mining town in Lakeview Terrace meant removing much of the existing vegetation, for which Universal submitted extensive mitigation, cleanup and re-vegetation plans to the Army Corps of Engineers, which controls the dam.
“We had just had a bad experience with the ‘Charlie’s Angels’ filming, so the community is very skeptical of anyone using the site,” said Dennis Kroeplin, an area resident who sits on the Hansen Dam Advisory Board.
Kroeplin was concerned in part about the habitat of an endangered bird, the Least Bell’s Vireo, and was surprised at the conservation efforts the Universal crew made.
“They agreed to not park their trucks in the basin so it wouldn’t get polluted, and they made sure the filming took place after the endangered bird had migrated south and was finished before it returned,” Kroeplin said.
Matt Myerhoff
D’oh!
Who’d have thunk it? The busiest doughnut day of the year for Winchell’s Donut House, the Santa Ana-based chain, is Halloween.
For the last 45 years, the company has been gilding doughnuts with orange and brown icing, yellow and black sprinkles and candy corn. But the real appeal, said Ira James, the company’s vice president of marketing, is its holiday recipe for cake donuts.
A spokeswoman at Krispy Kreme, the large national franchiser, said sales there also spiked in late October, but she could not identify a specific Halloween cause.
As for James, who joined Winchell’s three months ago from Acapulco Acquisition Corp., the Long Beach operator of El Torito and Acapulco restaurants, the move has been icing on the cake. “I used to eat a lot of Mexican food and now my job is to eat a lot of donuts,” he said.
Kate Berry
Cuba Libre
Since the Bush administration further tightened restrictions on travel to Cuba last spring, one L.A. travel agency has managed to keep its flyers in mojitos.
Since humanitarian missions remain one of the few ways Americans can legally visit the island, Flight Centre Ltd. has started booking philanthropic packages.
“These are not trips for tourists,” said Jenna Abell, Flight Centre’s manager. “Anyone who travels under humanitarian license to Cuba has to be an affiliate of a humanitarian or religious organization licensed by the (Justice Department’s) Office of Foreign Assets Control.”
Abell and Diana Kliche, a Flight Centre consultant, participated in the mission to bring about a half ton of school and medical supplies and clothing to a church and a synagogue. Flight Centre works in conjunction with Ya’lla Tours, whose owner, Ronen Paldi, can’t promote or advertise his service.
“Each person going there can only spend $100,” Paldi said. “(The tour) includes meals, tips to drivers, everything. But it does not include cigars or alcohol, that’s part of the $100.”
Matt Myerhoff
The Roving Eye
Written History
Living out West has its rewards, of course, but one thing Angelenos and other Left Coasters miss out on is a day-to-day connection with American history that residents of say, Washington or Philadelphia can experience all the time.
Now the Los Angeles Public Library and the National Archives and Records Administration are closing the gap.
Through Jan. 4, 2004, the Central Library is displaying 25 documents that have changed the course of American life, including a 1863 draft of the Emancipation Proclamation in President Abraham Lincoln’s cursive.
The documents range from the deeply poignant to the whimsical.
Among the documents included are President John F. Kennedy’s notes from his inaugural address, Thomas Edison’s patent application for the electric light bulb, and an 1873 letter by Levi Strauss in which he complains his patent for making “pantaloons” has been infringed.
“These documents really jerk you back to that moment in history and provide a connection to the events and people who were involved in those moments,” Clemson said. “It’s a great sampling of different time periods in American history.”
The exhibit is free and open during normal library hours (see lapl.org). All items will be on permanent display except the Emancipation Proclamation, which, due to its fragile condition, will only be shown Dec. 5-8.
“In this multimedia world it’s easy to become jaded, they are just pieces of paper,” said Los Angeles Public Library spokesman Peter Persic.
“But there is a powerful reaction when you see them. These are documents that shaped the nation and the world.”LABJ’s LA Stories / The Roving Eye
Weekly Columns; More news and talk from around the town, behind the scenes… Darrell Satzman
