Matt Weinstock, July 8, 1959

Mother's a Smuggler There is a nice old doll, maybe 60, who drinks along with the boys in a Hill St. bat cave. Every now and then some longtime friend calls her Mother, which leads to mutual merriment. The Mother story goes back perhaps 15 years, when she was a popular waitress in an all-night restaurant in Long Beach. One night a young lieutenant with a full head of steam was chatting with her when he noticed in horror that the booze-buying deadline had slipped by. She tried to hustle him a pint but had no luck. Here indeed was a crisis. He had to make ship, be awake and alert at a certain hour, without a drop to soothe his nerves which, he knew from experience, would be jumping. So they plotted. NEXT DAY the old doll got dressed in her best and met the ship's launch at the scheduled time and was taken aboard the battlewagon. She was greeted lovingly by the lieutenant, who introduced her to the captain and other officers as his mother. The captain invited her to lunch. All this took place under the eyes of scores of sailors who knew darn well she wasn't his mother but that nice hasher in Long Beach.  Meanwhile, she was nervously trying to deliver a fifth of whisky concealed in her handbag to her "son." She couldn't because of all the beaming brass eager to welcome the lieutenant's dear mother. Finally he managed to take her on a tour of the ship and somewhere in the tangle of the engine room she managed to slip him the bottle, which he stashed. Topside again, the lieutenant arranged to get his mother ashore, explaining that she was only in town for the day and had to catch a plane back to her home in Boston. Although seamen do not always revere officers, this has been a well-kept secret and to this day she is known to them as Mother. :: A BUNCH OF downtown office workers got into a discussion about ferocious denizens of the deep, and a girl named Helen came to the rescue of sharks and whales. Men had no ethical right to kill them, she said, because the sharks and whales were in their own habitat, minding their business and the hunters were not. This blew up a storm, led by a girl who disagreed vehemently, and later sent Helen this verse: These giant mammals     would agree That you excel in     sympathy. My daily prayer is     most devout -- You're never inside     looking out.  ::  THE REHEARSAL at a Huntington Park church for a CBS Church of the Air program went off fine a few days ago but when director Gene Webster began taping the show the choir upped the tempo, throwing off the timing. As a result, the program came out a few seconds short. When Gene pointed this out, the choir director shrugged, "Oh well, that's show business." :: ONLY IN L.A. -- The grim drivers, four abreast in the fearful 5 p.m. westbound traffic on Olympic Blvd., were on the pace to make all the signals when, near Catalina, an unmistakable whistling decrescendo rent the air. Someone had a tire puncture. The drivers looked about in alarm, each hoping it was someone else. A flat tire in rush hour traffic is almost a fate worse than death. The agonizing whistling finally stopped and was followed by the familiar thumping. One man, in despair, was seen wrestling with his steering wheel, the others happily darted off. :: FRAGMENT OF flighty conversation between two teenage girls overheard in a seaside restaurant by a gal named Muriel: "I don't know why I get so upset about it because I really don't care -- do you know what I mean?" :: AT RANDOM -- Tex Elgin of Oxnard says that when the folks around Lompoc, near the Pacific Missile Range, hear a roar they don't know if it's the Navy sending up a rocket or the Air Force exploding a publicity blast. . . . A station wagon with Ohio license plates on Harbor Freeway had a Volkswagen in tow instead of the usual trailer. Only thing Seymour Mandel could figure was that the couple and their children used it as a scout car en route in patrolling the prairie.