The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 15

WASTED RIGHTS TailureV of Women Decried i f. 1 IEW PAST IV THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1971 -4 jack smn All Wound Up Over Old 78s VV 1 i BY MARY LOU HOPKINS Tlmts StH Writer LAGUNA BEACH If modern woman a failure? The answer, frankly, it yes, according to Adela Rogers St. Johns, at 75 still a witty and sharp tongued commentator on the world around her a world she covered for many, years as one of William Randolph Hearst's top reporters. The daughter of famed trial attorney Earl Rogers, Adela began reporting at 18, And she first debated -the question of women's success half a century ago with Alice Ames Winter, president of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. She won the debate by declaring modern woman a failure, she writes in her autobiography, "Honeycomb." Still 'Failures' Today, more than 50 years later, Mrs.

St. Johns still says women are failures at least the middle-aged ones. "Women are wasting their right to vote," she said this week when she addressed the Assistance League of La-guna Beach at its Town Hall series. "Women went after the vote to stop child labor and they did," she continued. "But what are they doing about child addiction, ecology or parole abuse?" "There was a time when city editors shook at the mention of women's vote," she said.

"Years ago, J. Edgar Hoover requested my help in getting women to fight parole abuse; .1 went on a speaking tour and within six months there were results. "I would rather have child labor than child addiction," she continued. "How many from the Assistance League or the PTA are on the school grounds trying to stop the sale of drugs to the children?" Please Turn to Pg. 2, Col.

1 Our son came home from his pad at West-wood the other evening to exchange some phonograph records. He borrows a few for a while, then returns them arid borrows others. It's a liberty I encourage. "Could I borrow your Beethoven's Fifth?" he asked. "I haven't heard it for a long time." He's not long out of the Air Force and Is still catching up on classical music, among other amenities, I found the symphony and gave it to him.

"Oh," he said. "What's the matter?" "This with the Philadelphia Symphony!" "What's the matter with Ormandy?" "He's fine. It's just that I prefer George Szell and the Cleveland Symphony. You have that, too. It's a better recording technically.

There's a big difference in recordings, you know." I sat down. It had struck me how far we'd come since I was a boy. Here was a young man able to make refined choices between two great symphony orchestras and conductors. He was conditioned to make such choices. He had grown up with music at his fingertips.

"Listen," I said, "has it ever occurred to you how fantastically lucky you are to have all these records?" He looked at me and sat down, knowing I was wound up. The mature generation was about to speak. WATCHING EYES Painted audience and live one await curtain Arts Are Alive at unlikely opera house in an unlikely place, Death Valley Junction. Times photo by Mary Frampton in Death Valley 1 next to the old theater in August, 1967, and on the following Feb. 10, after incredible labors getting the place in shape, Marta gave her first performance.

It is a one-woman show with tape recorded music, but somehow she gives the impression of being a dozen dancers, changing character and costume almost as quickly as the eye can see. These performances bring her more satisfaction than all the past ones at Radio City and Carnegie Hall, and Please Turn to Pg. 7, Col. 1 Iff "Do. you realize that when I was a boy we hardly, had any music at all? Sometimes a band concert in the park, and a lousy band at that.

Good music was something that existed in another world." "Uh huh." I told him how it was. My introduction to music was with the old mahogany windup and pioneer. A former Broadway dancer "Wonderful she was touring community concert associations three-and-a-half years ago with her husband when their car had a flat tire in Death Valley Junction, population 30. While she waited for the tire to be repaired at the junction's one filling station, Miss Becket walked down the street, passed a burro corral and peeked through a crack in the door of a big, white adobe building. De it Kreisler playing "Humoresque" and "Songs My Mother Taught Enrico Caruso singing tidbits from Verdi, and Galli-Curci, Caruso and some others singing the sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor.

There were a few more maybe a dozen in all and if I heard them right now I'd know them, but I can't remember the names. "The needles were made out of cactus Bpines -or something and the records were -scratchy" I told him. "and if vou droimed SKID ROW: PART 5 Missions Only Port in Storm 7 A one it broke. The sound was tinny, like it was being played in New York and coming over the telephone." KTT. 1 1 uu nuii, Then I took music appreciation in school and two afternoons a week we would sit in a classroom, sweaty from physical education, and listen to one of the scratchy records playing "To a Wild Rose" or The Light Cavalry Overture." There was radio but there wasn't much on it except Rudy Vallee and Graham McNamee and Franklin D.

Roosevelt, until Texaco started broadcasting the New York Met every Saturday morning, with Milton Cross describing the action. My ambition was to be as cultivated as Milton Cross. vi. Jf. BY LYNN LILLISTON Time Staff Wrlttr DEATH VALLEY JUNCTION The curtain of the Amargosa Opera House goes up promptly at 8:15, no matter whether there are four or 50 people out front.

There have been plenty of occasions when the audience did number only four. Recently, however, Marta Becket is more likely to hear the bustle and stir of 50 patrons as she waits in the wings. Miss Becket is a classical dancer, pantomime, painter STAGE REVIEW 'Sleuth' Plot Kept Hush-Hush BY DAN SULLIVAN TlrtiM Thttttr Critic NEW YORK "For the enjoyment of future audiences it would be greatly appreciated if you would not disclose the plot of this play." Well, inspector. That does rather tie our hands, doesn't it? Since the only way to analyze a mystery like Anthony Shaffer's "Sleuth" is in terms of the plot, this leaves us rtually nothing to say other than whether we liked it or not. Damn clever, these English playwrights.

Very well. I liked "Sleuth." But not as much as I expected to. It is clearly the detective play "thriller" puts it a little strongly that no Broadway season used to be complete without. It is both an example of and a criticism of the biscuits and sherry kind of whodunit, and so cleverly put together that for a long time you're not even sure what was dun. A Photo Finish Like "Witness for the Prosecution" and "Dial for Murder," it keeps you guessing.

Unlike those, it does not leave you far outguessed. (Shaffer gets ahead of you for a while in the second act but the final curtain is a photo finish. You may even be wondering why Milo, otherwise so far-sighted, didn't think to put blanks in Andrew's revolver.) It is set in a grand-opera mansion, wittily rendered by Carl that with a few crucifixes on the walls would have done splendidly for the boys school in "Child's Play." But the screw does not turn so eerily as in that evening, although the ending is better worked-out. It has dashes of violence or pseudo-violence (important clue there). But no vicarious sense of danger, as in "Wait Until Dark," which is why thriller" doesn't apply.

Please Turn to Pg. 15, Col. 1 spite the dim light, she could see a stage at one end and realized it had once been a theater. The population of Death Valley Junction is now 32. Acting with swiftness that surprised even them, Miss Becket and her husband, Tom Williams, leased the old building, empty for three decades, plus the adjacent house.

They returned to New York, sold many of their possessions, packed the rest and headed to California. They parked their trailer "When you dial that crazy number, you never know what to expect. It's so far out," said the cute teen-ager who turned The Times on to Z. For a while did a take-off on the Shell Answer Man, only had a Question Man who provided the questions to your answers. Click.

(Shuffling of feet. Crowd noises at love-in or demonstration) "Picket, man, picket That's today's answer for the Question Man. And, here he is." (Fanfare) "The question to your answer is: what do you do when your nose goes on strike?" Behind the scenes. A bachelors' apartment in the Palms area shared by Bob Bilkiss (founder and president of and the guy who pays the telephone bill) and his roommate Jeff Robbins, one of Z's key-five. Scattered about on the floor and on shelves is some mighty sophisticated equipment designed by electro 1 THIS IS ZZZZZZ John Shannon, Bob Bilkiss, Jerry Leibowitz, Dave Friedman, from left, have nothing to sell, nothing to pitch with their recordings on one of the most dialed private phones.

Times photo ZZZZZZ: Sleeper in Phone Book Of course we had talking pictures and once in a while there would be a scene where George Brent would take Karen Morley to the opera and you would hear about five bars of the Anvil Chorus and then the camera would switch to a hospital where Clive Brook was operating on Ruth Chatterton. It used to drive me crazy. You neer heard anything through. I was so frustrated I didn't care whether Ruth Chatterton lived or not. "Finally," I told him, "when I was about your age I was able to buy my own phonograph.

They were getting fairly sophisticated by then. I started my own collection of the old 78 records. I was nuts about Tchaikovsky. They were good records, but nothing like the ones today." "What ever happened to your 78s?" he asked. "I'd like to try playing them." "It was sad," I said.

"I was moving out of my pad one day, only we didn't call it a pad then, and I put the records out on the porch, in the sun, arid they melted." "I'm sorry." "Oh, it's all right. It didn't matter. The War came along right after that." He took the Szell. Rick Smith accompanied fill sister, Kelly Tunney, for five days and nights on Skid Row' This article on his stay at the Union Rescue Mission is the fifth in a series. BY RICHARD A.

SMITH There you are, dropping your pants so they can check for lice, awake half the night listening to stomachs belch mission beans, thinking of that old Indian who put his arm around your shoulder as if to say, "We'll make it yet, boy." You know you will, but he may not. On 5th the place for a free bed and food is a mission. The only place, it should be kept in mind. I needed a bed. Money was low.

I went to the Union Rescue Mission. Rule 1 Be there by 6 p.m., when they lock the door. Wait for Bed Being a first-nighter, I was told to go to the. basement and wait for a bed. You can stay at the Union Rescue Mission, and others, five nights in a row and then not again for 15 nights, after which you can return, kind of a merry-go-round moteL The basement was a low, long narrow room under the main chapel.

At one end of the basement was, a storage bunker for belongings. You're not allowed to carry packages inside the mission. Three days a week clothes are handed out in the basement. Once week there's a clinic. At one side are showers and toilets.

At the far end, on about 10 narrow benches, were sitting other first-nighters, all ages from 20 to 70, though 40 seemed about the average age, and about 45 of us altogether. An olive-skinned man with gray hair, a round nose and a bruise over one eye patted the seat beside him and motioned for me to sit. He got the bruise, he said, when ha fell on his face drinking two Please Turn to Pg. Col 1 THE VIEWS INSIDE BY EVELYN DE WOLFE Times Staff Wrlttr Were you ever so curious about the last listing in the phone book you went ahead and dialed it? So were hundreds of other people. Correction, thousands of other people.

As a result, ZZZZZZ has become the most dialed private telephone number in the world and the creative outlet for fivetalented guys. (short for ZZZZZZ) is a 1-year -old celebrity. Last week congratulatory messages poured in to P.O. Box 64472 in West Los Angeles, after announced it was running a contest for the most original birthday card and that members had pitched in to buy the winner a stereo and send him or her the "Best of tapes for 1970. If applause can be measured by the ringing of a telephone, just imagine what applause for sounds like to the tune of 7,000 to 8,000 call3 from ans each week.

nics-mastermind Dave Friedman, an engineering student at UCLA. On the walls, posters and samples of stationery, the work of would-be cartoonist Jerry Leibowitz. Neatly cataloged, a collection of tapes spliced and spiced by Z's versatile announcer John Shannon. "We're sort of a melting pot," said Bilkiss. "We represent a cross-section "of interests.

We are a combination of long-hairs and short-hairs. We're all in college except for Jeff and we're all 21 except for John, who is 19. "We never project our personal views on although some of us are active in politics during elections. We care, but we're not gung-ho on every cause that comes along. "None of us takes drugs.

Somehow we find neither desire nor time for it. We have enough going with to turn us on. "We strive for a middle-of-the-road humor," added Z's Please Turn to Pg. 5, Col. 1 BOOKS: "The Ape People" by Robert Kirsch on Page 6.

DANCE: American Ballet Theater by Albert Gold-' berg on Page 1 2. MOVIES: "The Bod' by Kevin Thomas on Page 15. MUSIC: David Grimes by John Rockwell on Page 12. AND OTHER FEATURES Dear Abby 8 Comics Page 17 Astrology 14 Joyce Haber 11 Br'dS Page 13 Cecil Smith 16.