Archive: Interesting Angelenos

The restaurant critic, cultural anthropologist and voice of Los Angeles found out this month that he had pancreatic cancer.

"82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life" opens at the museum this weekend. Some pics.

Broad chooses the New York Times for announcement that he wants to spend more time with his family and "catch up on my reading."

Roger Mahony spent his 81st birthday weekend at refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan, headed for Iraq.

It's the Presidential Media of Freedom for Vin Scully and 20 others. Watch the call from the White House.

This year's local genius grant winners have ties to USC, Caltech and CalArts.

From his home on Rockingham Avenue in Brentwood, where he and his wife Betty hosted countless salons and strategy meetings, Stanley Sheinbaum played a key role in LA and world events.

Gary Cypres' shrine to sports history (mostly baseball) is right up there with Eli Broad's Grand Avenue temple of art as proof of one man's passion.

He is a bean counter "actually worth writing about" and the point man in City Hall on the homeless issue, says the Downtown News.

Before he left the gang life as a teenager, Sal Martinez did five stints in juvenile hall, was stabbed four times and shot twice.

Hong was a prominent immigration lawyer and community leader through the middle decades of the 20th Century and helped in the move to today's current Chinatown.

Jenelle Hamilton is a local secretary, grad student, single mom and Girl Scout leader. And a sumo fighter.

As for getting old, he sings, isn't that the goal?

Born to the first Korean couple to immigrate to Los Angeles, she was a Navy code breaker in World War II, an activist in LA and part of a popular postwar restaurant family in the San Fernando Valley.

Donna Bojarsky and friends unveiled a new group Future of Cities: Leading in LA at the hilltop Pritzker residence.

The CicLAvia organization will conduct a national search for an executive director.

The typewriter belonged to Samuel T. Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb that could kill people but leave buildings unscathed.

The story of the LAPL map treasure collected by John Feathers is told in a video for the LA Review of Books.

The Seahawks' Richard Sherman was raised by a veteran city of Los Angeles sanitation driver.

As president, Pisano oversaw the transformation of NHMLA. She will stay on until a replacement is named.

April Thompson, who died on Saturday, was the Manager of Stadium Services at Dodger Stadium. Some may remember her as an usher starting in the 1970s.

Capote purchased the Smith-Corona electric here in 1970 and kept it in his writing room at the Bel Air home of close friend Joanne Carson. It was used for Capote's last three books.

Steve Soboroff's collection of now 23 machines tours to raise money for journalism scholarships. Here are some of the others.

The last chef of the year from Los Angeles was Wolfgang Puck back in 1998.

Edwin C. Krupp, the longtime director of Griffith Observatory, bought his 1968 Chevrolet Camaro new when he was a grad student. It's got 479,000 miles and no power steering or brakes. ABC7's Dave Kunz checks it out.

"I wasn’t making a declaration. I guess it was misconstrued," Vin Scully says of KPCC report. Why does it feel that something deeper is going on. Plus: Vinnie rips John McCain.

Cal Worthington might arguably have been the most recognized Southern California car dealer from his decades on television pitching his Worthington Ford dealership. Worthington "and his dog Spot" —which could have been an elephant or tiger or hippo — sold cars here starting in 1950 in Huntington Park.

Nyad addressed her crew before entering Key West waters. "I am about to swim my last two miles in the ocean. This is a lifelong dream of mine..."

Music Man Murray is the record collector who has a huge collection of vinyl kept in a building on Exposition Boulevard near La Brea. He became an actor at age 80.

Kenneth Klee, one of the most respected bankruptcy lawyers in the U.S., is profiled in today's Wall Street Journal for his side practice. It won't help deter the stereotypes about Californians.

He talks with Giselle Fernandez of Los Angeles Magazine about leaving AEG, his breakup with Phil Anschutz, regrets about the NFL stadium deal and the leadership potential of Eric Garcetti.

Ernest Marquez likes to say that his family lived in three countries — Spain, Mexico and the United States — without ever leaving home. Their home was in Santa Monica Canyon, before the artists and the actors arrived. Nice profile in the LA Times and video of the family's hidden cemetery in the canyon.

McManus & Morgan just reached its 90th year in the Westlake district — reason enough to re-post my favorite LA video of 2011.

In the current issue of Boom, Lynell George explores the civic and online phenomenon that is Hidden LA. Plus some observations about Boom, the journal from UC Press that wants to be the California magazine we never had.

Basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has a few regrets and what sounds like genuine awareness of flaws in his game — the game of life. Some are about being aloof when he was younger, some are about being bad with money and tools, some are from the dating wars.

Gold didn't get to buy the Dodgers last year, which means he's free next month to drive one of his Porsche's 12,000 kilometers from Beijing to Paris. Much of the race is off road: think of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.

Artist and designer Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA -- in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? According to TED.com, "for fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where 'the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys.'"

You visit it and have dinner and drinks served by former Pan Am flight attendants. Of course.

On a trendifying block of Ocean Park Boulevard in Santa Monica, between Bob's Market and Thyme Cafe, is a relic of another time. Owner Colby Evett, 93, goes to work every day, and is kind of famous in the world of models and radio-controlled airplanes.

This past September, David Davis contributed at our Native Intelligence blog a lovely piece on the legacy of Theo Ehret, his friend who was the house photographer at the Olympic Auditorium. A show of Ehret's boxing and wrestling photos is now on display downtown.

Sahakian oversees special traffic operations for the city’s Department of Transportation. This makes him the official responsible for planning and executing street closures for all the big traffic-snarling events in Los Angeles — from the Oscars and the LA Marathon to next month's move of the space shuttle Endeavour.

He's at basketball training camp — in Turkey — and announced on Facebook this morning that he has a new haircut. What he doesn't have any more is a professional tennis player for a fiancee.

Gary Platt, 86 years old and retired, has put up a community book exchange and lending library on the curb in front of his house in Woodland Hills. Lily's Library is named for his granddaughter.

The headline of the piece is "Venus and Serena against the World." It's thrust is that the tennis stars have come a long way from Compton to dominate the sport, with a close look at mom and dad. May be some new stuff in there even for those familiar with the Williams' story.

Rodney King had PCP, cocaine and marijuana in his system and was probably in a drug- and alcohol-induced delirium when he fell into his swimming pool and drowned in June, the San Bernardino County coroner's report said Thursday.

They designated pet names for each other derived from "The Wind in the Willows:" Isherwood was Mole, slowly working underground; Vidal was Rat, working productively above ground, engaged with the world.

Daily Bulletin columnist David Allen tracked down his man — the mysterious figure who stands up and dances at so many live music performances around town that he showed up in "Shut Up and Play the Hits," a documentary on the band LCD Soundsystem. Here's the scoop.

Jim Drake is another example of an aerospace industry worker who pioneered the Southern California outdoor sports scene. Drake, an engineer who worked at RAND and elsewhere, didn't invent the sailboard, but he and a partner, Hoyle Schweitzer, perfected the design and got a patent for the Windsurfer.

Yes, that was the elusive Kings owner and Los Angeles power figure celebrating on the ice — his ice — with the Stanley Cup on Monday night. Some 18,000 Kings fans and a live television audience got their first looks at possibly the most powerful man in Los Angeles. Nice looking guy — let's see more photos and video of Phil Anschutz.

Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics, has an interesting personal story in addition to being highly accomplished in her field. She came to economics later in life, after putting her first husband through law school and working in the HR department at UCLA.

Ray Bradbury died last night, his daughter has confirmed. For his 90th birthday, Bradbury talked about remembering his birth and the womb. "I have total recall of all of my life." Updated stories, links and video

Here's a side of Clippers' play-by-play man Ralph Lawler that you probably didn't know. The 1960s stage musical "Hair" changed his life. He's this week's guest DJ on KCRW.

Video: Two-time Olympic champion Kerri Walsh of Manhattan Beach tells NBC 4 that she and beach volleyball partner Misty May-Treanor are going for the gold again in London.

Steve Soboroff, the former city commissioner and candidate for mayor who took a brief spin with Frank McCourt at Dodger Stadium last year, has become pretty well known for his personal typewriter collection. We've written about it a few times, other blogs have. Now it's the LA Times' turn.

Savko bought a small grocery on the twisty part of Mulholland Highway in the Santa Monicas west of the San Fernando Valley in 1961. He would park his Harley-Davidson out front, other bikers would see it, and they began stopping in.

Richard Parks' documentary film about epic Los Angeles record collector Murray Gershenz, who's pushing 90, debuts on The Documentary Channel on April 21 and will also be on NPR's All Songs Considered website.

Connie Bruck's profile of Philip Anschutz, Tim Leiweke and their empire in downtown Los Angeles — Staples Center, L.A. Live, the Los Angeles Kings, the proposed Farmers Field football stadium and more — is behind the magazine's pay wall. Here's a brief pre-look.

American Masters on PBS on Monday night aired "Charles and Ray Eames: the Architect and the Painter," about the famed Los Angeles design team and couple.

Heather Havrilesky's immediate point in the NYT Magazine is her disappointment in "Homeland" and "American Horror Story."

Steve Soboroff shared a photo after last week's news about the e-book of "Fahrenheit 451." Plus: a typewriter documentary?

Wilson, who pledged to plant five trees a day for the rest of his life, died after losing consciousness while taking clippings from a tree in hi sgarden.

Monday is the 20th anniversary of the shocking afternoon press conference, on live national TV from the Forum in Inglewood, when Magic Johnson announced that he had been infected with the AIDS virus and would be retiring from the Lakers, effective immediately.

Eli Broad’s decision to build his art museum on Bunker Hill, and how he arrived at the decision , "illustrates how the billionaire homebuilder does business, and how he has...