Postal wonders of the world:Beatrice Friedman of...

Postal wonders of the world:

Beatrice Friedman of Montebello was naturally a bit surprised recently when she received a letter addressed to “The Friedman Family” in Israel.

True, there was a sort of ZIP Code coincidence.

Israel has its own five-digit code. And the letter, sent by a Jerusalem resident, was addressed to a Friedman family in the Israeli Postal Service’s 90641 area. The Friedmans of Montebello live in the U.S. Postal Service’s 90640 area.

Still, Beatrice Friedman wonders: “Is ours the only Friedman family they could find?”

The letter, by the way, was a wedding invitation. Friedman mailed it back to the sender. We’ll let you know if she gets a response.

Assuming her letter doesn’t wind up being delivered to herself.

THE INSULTS KEEP A COMIN’: Last year, Dan Fink of L.A. received a piece of junk mail from Pac Bell addressed to: “The Fink.” The other day, a similarly impolite greeting arrived from USC (see excerpt). Is there something about his last name that brings out the devil in secretaries?

NO FREEWAY CHICKEN: A motorist phoned radio station KFWB Thursday afternoon with a sighting of a peacock. “It was in the center divider of the 210 Freeway, going eastbound,” said traffic reporter Robin Johnson, who heard no estimate of the speed. “By the time Jeff [Baugh] got over there, though, it was gone.”

We wondered if the driver might have actually seen a chicken, a bird reported periodically on local freeways since a truck carrying a load of the feathery critters overturned on the 101 in the late 1960s.

But Johnson had a better theory.

The peacock, she pointed out, “was seen near Santa Anita [Avenue], which is near the [L.A. County] Arboretum, where they have a lot of peacocks running around.”

PALM ATTITUDES: We first started our world-renowned collection of L.A. palm tree literature after reading a poem in which John Updike described the branch-less creatures as “isolate, like psychopaths . . . beneath the adobe band of smog across the sky.” We hadn’t known trees could be so interesting!

The latest addition to our palm lore is from Horace McCoy’s L.A. novel, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”:

“Palm trees grew up, 50, 60 feet tall, suddenly tufted at the top. Once you entered the park you had the illusion of security. I often imagined they were sentries wearing grotesque helmets.”

Oddly enough, the speaker is a man who recently shot his dance partner-girlfriend at her request. The two of them were a bit too isolate, themselves, come to think of it.

CALL DISCONNECTING: Writer Anita M. Busch of the Daily Variety reprised some of her favorite film-land conversations over the last six months, including this telephone chat with a Creative Artists Agency rep published in that newspaper:

Reporter: “Client information, please.”

CAA: “OK. Hold on.”

Reporter is transferred--and disconnected.

Reporter (calling back): “Yeah, I was trying to get to client information, but I accidentally got disconnected.”

CAA: “That’s what happens when they aren’t there.”

Reporter: “What do you mean?”

CAA: “If they aren’t there, the line will automatically hang up on you.”

That’s one service we haven’t heard any of the phone companies brag about in their commercials.

miscelLAny

We told everyone we knew that Chelsea Clinton would choose to attend UCLA (not Stanford)--and all because we misheard a news report on the radio. The item was about Sports Illustrated naming UCLA “the No. 1 jocks school.” Unfortunately, we thought it said UCLA was Socks’ No. 1 school.

Steve Harvey can be reached by phone at (213) 237-7083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com and by the Postal Service at Metro, Times Mirror Square, L.A., CA 90053 (make sure you designate, U.S.A., not Israel).