A good Samaritan’s not-so-good luck: A year...
A good Samaritan’s not-so-good luck: A year ago John Leslie stopped work on his bar exam in Pasadana and ran to the aid of another test-taker who had suffered a seizure.
Controversy (and lots of lawyer jokes) followed when the State Bar initially refused to give Leslie, and four others who also assisted, additional time to finish the test.
The bar later agreed to disregard that section of the exam and Leslie, 29, passed. He was praised in editorials, named Citizen of the Week by KNX radio and appeared on the “Tonight Show” with Jay Leno. All of which was gratifying, but what he wanted was a job with a law firm.
He sent out dozens of letters. He was encouraged after appearing on some radio talk shows. “Lawyers would call in and say, ‘We’d love to hire him,’ or ‘Wish we knew where he was,’ ” Leslie said. But when he later phoned those firms, he not only wasn’t hired, “they wouldn’t even take my calls.”
So he started his own practice in North Hollywood. “It isn’t easy,” said Leslie, who takes occasional musical gigs as a saxophonist to make ends meet. “But I’ve got one client who was wronged by a corporation--it’s the kind of case that got me interested in the law in the first place.”
Leslie harbors no bitterness. “Jobwise, the legal profession is feeling the recession, too,” he said.
If there were more attorneys like Leslie, lawyer jokes might disappear altogether.
*
The hard-working sleeping policeman: The announcement that the city of L.A. plans to install speed humps on local roadways stirred memories for Al Cadis of Hawthorne. He recalled hearing on a “trip through the Caribbean (I don’t remember which island)” that humps “were actually called ‘silent policemen.’ ”
Cadis wasn’t conked on the head by a coconut or anything. He’s almost correct. Of course, we didn’t even know what a speed hump was when Jim Stott sent us a picture of a mysterious sign in Westlake Village several months ago. We learned that they’re street barriers that are about 12 feet wide and 3 inches high--flatter than their cousins, speed bumps.
It was soon afterward that we were informed by Diana Britt of Pasadena that in Jamaica a speed hump is a “sleeping policeman.” We learned, too, that it’s a “judder bar” in New Zealand and a “flic alonge” (sleeping or reclining cop) in France.
We can only repeat our call for a special session of the United Nations to come up with a handle for humps that is acceptable worldwide.
*
Counterpoint: A North Hollywood reader, recalling the Watergate era, suggests that a proper observance for President Richard Nixon would have been an 18 1/2-minute period of silence.
Embraceable Lakewood: T.C. Cirillo notes that the publicity over the Spur Posse, the high school boys who keep statistics on how many girls they slept with, still seems to be in the city’s subconscious. At least, he assumes that Colony Cablevision of Lakewood meant “Lakewood Living” when it listed Channel 27 as the home of “Lakewood Loving.”
miscelLAny:
We hope that the only reason we received a flyer from Dr. Dudley Danoff, the guru of “super potency,” is that we previously wrote about a firm whose “Men Only” ads talk about a penis-lengthening procedure. Danoff says that “super potency . . . is more than size, blood vessels, the nerves--it’s about heightened self-awareness. . . .” That, he says, is how you acquire “penis power.” Lakewood doesn’t want to hear about it, Danoff.
