People and Events

It has been 72 years since a couple of adventurous young sisters named Augusta and Adeline Van Buren, descendants of the President, hopped on their motorcycles and put-putted from New York to California to prove something or other.

Four other lady bikers have now roared into Los Angeles after making more or less the same trip to commemorate that jaunt and to promote motorcycling. The women of the Van Buren TransCon, as the latest expedition was labled, wheeled up outside City Hall on Tuesday to accept the congratulations of city officials and the stares of baffled idlers.

Heading the cross-country bike trip were Courtney Caldwell, a Santa Monica accountant, and Jeanne Mare Werle, a Hollywood free-lance writer. Riding with them were Patty Mills, Kansas’ state Women on Wheels director from Topeka, and Carol Auster, a Lancaster, Pa., professor.

Other than some “real rainy weather in the east and some windy weather in the west,” reported Caldwell, the trek was a ride in the park. Did they encounter any challenges from outlaw motorcycle groups along the way? “No,” Caldwell said, “but we ran into a lot of nice people who had their minds changed about what bikers are really like.”

Of course the four hardly resemble Hells Angels.

They were followed closely by a rental truck carrying eight other motorcycles so several manufacturers--all Japanese--could share in the publicity.

The Van Buren sisters rode American models. But that was in 1916.

While the women were going on about the joys of blasting around in the saddle of a motorcycle, another bunch calling themselves Fly America were preparing to take off today from Lancaster to span the continent in the opposite direction.

By hang glider.

The two men and a woman will not make it all in one jump, as you might guess, but in daily hops of varying lengths, depending on the weather. They are “basically doing it to publicize the new-found safety in hang gliding,” explains spokesman Kelvin Jones.

The pilots are Greg de Wolf, 38, a Los Angeles-area instructor; Cindy Drozda, 30, a Boulder, Colo., carpenter, and Ian Huff, 29, a master hang glider pilot, also of Boulder.

After being tow-launched by pickup truck, the three plan to head north through the Mojave Desert, across the Owens Valley to Nevada, then to Utah, Salt Lake City and on eastward to Kitty Hawk, N.C., where the Wright Brothers caused so much excitement in 1903.

It’s expected to take them four or five months, which should make it easy enough for the tow-launch truck to keep up.

The lady motorcyclists only took a month.

Los Angeles and its suburbs did not do too well in the second annual Great American Roach-Off, whose local kickoff at a Norwalk elementary school was duly noted here in March. The national competition is sponsored by the exterminator industry to stir people up about getting rid of the awful things.

The winner of the regional contest to determine the biggest dead roach found in California or Arizona turned out to be Millie Ravich of Palm Springs, which should be of some interest to the Chamber of Commerce people there.

Ravich won $500 for her 1.7-inch brown American roach, which will now be sent to Philadelphia for the national finals July 7.

Nancy Dunavant, a spokeswoman for Western Exterminator Co., which conducted the regional competition, said several local winners in Los Angeles County got $75 apiece for their entries, but the judges did not bother to figure out second and third place.

The late songwriter Harry Warren was no momentary flash on Tin Pan Alley, having turned out a stack of hits that included “You’ll Never Know,” “The More I See You,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “I Only Have Eyes for You.”

Warren, who died in 1981, wrote songs for Broadway and came to Hollywood in the early 1930s. He won Oscars for the song “Lullaby of Broadway” from the movie “Gold Diggers of 1933,” for “You’ll Never Know” from the film “Hello Frisco, Hello,” and for “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” from “Harvey Girls.”

Cal State Los Angeles’ School of Arts and Letters is sufficiently impressed with Warren that it is devoting much of today and Thursday to a study of his work. This afternoon, some of his films (“42nd Street,” for instance) will be shown.

Dr. Chuck Berg, University of Kansas director of film studies, plans to lecture on Warren’s movie work during his years at Warner Bros.