People and Events

From the low-life characters in “The Front Page” to hard-drinking Clark Gable in “It Happened One Night,” reporters have seldom been pictured as great credit risks.

Their image apparently is changing.

Los Angeles police detectives arrested Charles Frank Austin, 36, and said he had submitted at least 35, and perhaps more than 100, credit applications to various businesses and banks, using names that were in newspaper and magazine bylines.

“The way he’d do it,” Detective Reynaldo Morales said, “was he’d file an application for a credit card, using the name of the reporter, the address and telephone number of the publication and make up the other pertinent information.”

The investigation began last month after some reporters received phone calls from companies checking aspects of their “applications.”

Chuck Freadhoff, a reporter with Investors Daily, said at least $8,000 in purchases were charged to him.

“The guy even tried to get some mail-order steaks from Omaha on my name,” Freadhoff said.

A phony Sears application for Times reporter Sheryl Stolberg was uncovered in time, leading Stolberg to quip: “I’m quite adept at racking up my own bills.”

Most of the applications had one entry in common: An address in the 6000 block of a Victoria Avenue address near Inglewood. It was there that detectives arrested Austin.

You know glasnost is for real when . . . Mrs. U.S.S.R. is competing in the Mrs. World competition.

Irina Suvorova, a 24-year-old veterinarian and mother of one, is the first Soviet representative at any international beauty competition.

Producer David Marmell said Suvorova is excited about Monday night’s Mrs. World contest in Las Vegas and her subsequent tour of Hollywood next week because “she said she only knows about three American cities from watching television--Las Vegas, Hollywood and Dallas.”

Added Marmell: “I told her those are the typical American cities.”

Guess what Los Angeles police officers said when a man walked into the Central Station and placed some TNT and plastic explosives that he’d found on the counter?

“We quickly asked him to take the stuff outside,” Sgt. Bill McDaniel said.

The explosives, which were reportedly found in a trash can, were detonated by the bomb squad.

Things go better without Pepsi, says the American Family Assn.

Angered that Pepsi would not cancel its contract with Madonna after the release of her “Like a Prayer” video, the group is asking people not to drink Pepsi for one year.

AFA said that in her video, Madonna “is the symbolic Christ (and) is shown in a scene suggesting that she has sex with a priest, obviously to free him from sexual repression.”

Asked for her reaction to the boycott proposal, Madonna spokesman Bob Merlis said: “She doesn’t react to people like that.”

What could be more fitting for a St. Patrick’s Day Parade than Ireland’s first venture into automobile manufacturing: a 1959 Shamrock?

The Shamrock is known as the “Irish Thunderbird,” though “Irish Edsel” might be more appropriate in terms of its sales for the only year of its production. It will carry Grand Marshal John Lynch, the Los Angeles County assessor, in Los Angeles’ downtown parade next Friday.

Owner Dick Midkiff says it’s one of only two Shamrocks in the United States.

He still remembers the first time he laid eyes on the machine.

“I thought it was the ugliest thing I ever saw,” he recalled. “It was parked in a guy’s driveway and I would pass by it every day. Finally I had to ask him what it was. Then I bought it.”

Midkiff owns a Japanese auto repair company.

Japanese?

“If you can fix an Irish car,” he said, “you can fix anything.”