People and Events

With a hearty “Ho, Ho, Ho,” Mayor Tom Bradley entered the Los Angeles City Council chambers Friday sporting a red and white Santa Claus cap and red stockings filled with gifts for City Council members.

In each stocking were specially designed “dams” for toilet tanks to reduce water use during flushing, water-saving shower heads and tablets to help slow toilet water leakage. When Bradley delivered his holiday message, his smile disappeared. His topic was the overtaxed sewage system and a diminishing water supply rather than sleigh bells and roasting chestnuts. Council President John Ferraro, seeking to inject some levity into what was an unexpectedly serious address, asked Bradley, “Do we have to declare this gift on our (Political Reform Act) form?”

Bradley finally smiled. “No. You can be sure I wouldn’t give you anything worth more than $25, so you don’t have to declare it.”

Hundreds of homeless men in Los Angeles will benefit from empty bottles in a program being tried by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the nonprofit California Glass Recycling Corp. More than 100 large bins to hold recycled glass containers will be set up at 50 parishes and schools throughout Los Angeles.

For every ton of containers donated, the recycling company will give $40 to St. Vincent Men’s Center, which provides shelter, food and counseling. It is expected that $25,000 will be raised. Other charities are setting up similar programs, said recycling company Chairman Mickey Flynn. Flynn noted that a state survey shows that nearly half of California’s consumers would rather donate containers to a worthy cause then recycle the glass themselves.

Chuck Castagna has had quite a time with balloons in the last few weeks. First there was the 35-foot-tall Spuds MacKenzie balloon that Budweiser executives asked him to erect at his Universal City Nissan dealership, which overlooks the Hollywood Freeway. The executives, attending a convention across the way at the Sheraton Universal, thought it would be pretty nice to look out the window and see their party animal floating in the wind.

It was pretty neat, Castagna noted, until they got ready to take it down, and it blew onto the freeway, causing a massive traffic jam.

But being of good cheer, Castagna this week allowed a radio station to place an equally gigantic snowman in the air. “It’s kinda fun,” he noted, “especially when kids come in, the look in their eyes is unreal.” Castagna, general manager of the dealership, knows a good advertising gimmick when he sees it. For the last 15 years, he’s placed 300 Nissan Zs on top of a parking roof, where they can easily be seen from the 230,000 vehicles that pass by on the freeway daily.

Jascha Heifetz, who died Dec. 10 in Los Angeles and was referred to by many as the violinist of the century, willed his 1742 Guarnerius violin to San Francisco’s De Young Museum, for use “on special occasions by worthy performers.”

In a 1980 handwritten will filed in Los Angeles Superior Court this week, Heifetz left his Tononi violin and one of his “four good bows” to Sherry Kloss Labinger of Ashland, Ore., who was his assistant in a master violin class he taught at USC. His Malibu home and its contents are to be divided equally between a friend, Ayke Agus of Los Angeles, and his longtime secretary, Annette Greer of Coronado.

He left nothing of the $1.5 million estate to his children, Josepha, Robert and Jay.