Everett Rogers Assumes USC Chair

Everett Rogers is joking that his new business card will be an exercise in redundancy. That’s because Rogers this week became the first Walter H. Annenberg professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC. He’ll also be the associate dean for doctoral studies at the school.

It will be a while, though, before he really settles down in Los Angeles, Rogers said. For the next few months he’ll be spending half of each week at Stanford University finishing up his commitments there and in the spring he’ll be teaching a class at Stanford’s program in Florence, Italy.

But once he does come to rest here, Rogers, co-author of “Silicon Valley Fever: The Growth of High-Technology Culture,” said he will be concentrating on his chief interest--the impact of new communications technology both here and in the Third World. Among other matters, he’ll be following a UNESCO project that will put 20,000 microcomputers into Asian and African classrooms.

Rogers said he decided to move to USC partly because, “I’ve always been a rolling stone. I’ve never stayed more than nine years any place else and this was my tenth year at Stanford, so I guess I’m giving in to the decadal urge to move.” At Stanford he was Janet Peck professor of communications, which he believes was the first chair created in the field.

Rogers is the second professor to assume a new chair at USC this year. In November, the university announced that Alexander Morgan Capron of Georgetown University would be the first to hold the Norman Topping Chair in Law, Medicine and Public Policy. He began his job this week, too.

Children Get Help

Of the helping hands that were extended over the holidays, ones that reached the farthest may have been across Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.

Due to seasonal vacations, Las Familias del Pueblo, a community center for Latino families on Skid Row, found itself swamped with children, as many as 60 at peak periods. The influx of children, some accompanied by a parent but many not, threatened to overwhelm the center’s staff of two, said the Rev. Alice Callaghan, director of Las Familias.

Fortunately, Callaghan said, she happened to discuss the problem with Jill Halverson, director of the Downtown Women’s Center, which provides services for homeless women and is a few blocks from Las Familias. The solution the two arrived at was to have some of the women help out, the two said. So for the past couple of weeks women from the center, two each on morning and afternoon shifts, have come to Las Familias to read stories, comfort or simply play with restless and excited kids.

“We would have been doing little more than riot control if the women hadn’t been here,” Callaghan said. “They moved right in and for all the children know, they’re just more adults who have come in to play with them.”

Halverson said the homeless women were eager volunteers because “many of them have had children but they haven’t seen them in years. And they were pleased to do it because we’ve received so much from the community this year.”

As for next year, Callaghan said she hopes that Las Familias will have worked itself out of business on Skid Row. In its continuing program to move Latino families out of the area, it has relocated 89, she said. By next Christmas, all of the remaining 120 to 140 families should be off the Row, she added.

Biker Deserves a Break

Musician E. J. Marshall doesn’t believe bicycle riders should be treated any differently than motorists when it comes to satisfying a desire for what Marshall, 23, called “the American basic”--McDonald’s hamburger, fries and a Coke.

Since the inside counter of a local McDonald’s was crowded at lunchtime one day recently, Marshall decided to ride her 10-speed past the drive-up window. She got away with her lunch, she said, but not before being lectured by the restaurant manager. He told her that bicycles were not allowed in the drive-through lane, and that next time she would not be served at the window.

Marshall then telephoned the district manager for the chain and explained her plight. She said the district manager assured her, “It’s not McDonald’s policy to discriminate between motor-powered vehicles and human-powered ones.”

These days, Marshall said, whether she’s on a bike or a moped, workers at the drive-through window treat her as courteously as if she were in a car.

Levine Opens Show

While her son can look forward in 1985 to such controversial matters as balancing the budget in Washington, Shirley Levine will be starting the year off peacefully in Los Angeles City Hall. Levine-- mother of U.S. Rep. Mel Levine, a Santa Monica Democrat--will open a show of her abstract geometric paintings in the hall’s Bridge Gallery at a party hosted by Mayor Tom Bradley and the city’s Cultural Affairs Department on Wednesday.