Eddie Dominguez had only stopped to mail...

Eddie Dominguez had only stopped to mail a letter on Western Avenue, but he couldn’t ignore the driver who called out: “I have a cat in my motor.”

Dominguez walked over to the woman’s car and opened the hood. He heard meowing from a source he couldn’t locate. Another passerby, Natalie Windsor, stopped to lend assistance. So did others.

Windsor, noting that Dominguez is a host on a Latino TV station (Channel 22), called the rescue operation in Hollywood “a real L.A. experience. The driver was Asian. There were nine adults of assorted ethnicities and genders working under her hood, including two young men wearing earrings and skeleton T-shirts. A postman even stopped to donate his broom.” No one knows why he happened to have one.

The disgruntled cat, wedged into an area above one wheel-well, was finally extricated alive and kicking after 45 minutes.

It was a Hollywood ending: The animal was adopted by the duo in skeleton T-shirts.

Police Chief Daryl F. Gates would have been unlikely to approve of any actor chosen by the ACLU to portray him. But, in case there was any doubt, the group picked Ed Asner, a liberal--and a roly-poly one at that--for the role of the slim, jogging police chief.

“Cops and the Constitution: A Democracy in Danger,” which will be staged at the American Jewish Congress on Wilshire Boulevard tonight, is a dramatic presentation “based on quotes from Gates and (Assistant Chief) Robert Vernon as well as readings from department materials and the record of the LAPD.”

Surely someone will videotape it.

List of the Day:

Correct (and incorrect) pronunciations of local place names, as mentioned in the 1932 book, “The Van Tuyle System of Information”:

1. Cahuenga--Cah-weng-gah, not Kay-hew-en-ga.

2. Conejo--Ko-nay-hoe, not Conny-joe.

3. El Tejon--Ayl-tay-hone, not El-tea-john.

4. La Brea--Lah-bray-ah, not La Bray.

5. Tujunga--To-hun-gah, not To-jung-ga.

And, for vacationers:

6. Yosemite--Yoh-sem-it-ee, not Yoso-might.

Actually, we believe the correct mispronunciation of No. 6--one we employed as a kid--is Yose -might.

Before we lay the Lakers to rest:

An NBC source says that when one of the NBA playoff games at the Forum went off the air for five minutes because of a power outage, 12 affiliates phoned from across the country to ask if L.A. had been hit by an earthquake.

And, by the way--who was the wise guy who altered the sign at a Pasadena church school to read “We party train,” instead of, “We potty train”?

miscelLAny:

John Porter, who served from 1929 to 1933, was the first (and only) used-car salesman to be elected mayor of L.A.