Cardboard

As "Car Painter Earned His Stripes" (Sept. 2), your feature on the legendary Southern California pinstriper, suggests, "everyone who knew him or even spent five minutes with him has some crazy tale." Absolutely true, and here's my "crazy tale." In the 1960s, Von Dutch worked out of his garage in Reseda. One rainy evening he lifted a piece of footprint-and-paint-laden cardboard from the floor of his workshop and announced to no one in particular that "some idiot's going to pay me $100 for this."

Cruising the streets of South Gate in search of America's hottest export, Jose Gonzalez hit the brakes outside a liquor store. He struck pay dirt, not in the refrigerated section, but in the cardboard-filled dumpster out back. "With a full load I can earn around $20" at a recycling center, Gonzalez said, pointing to the flattened Budweiser cartons in the bed of his battered pickup. "I'm told that they'll end up in China."

Police were looking Monday for the mother of a newborn boy who was found in a cardboard box outside a downtown Los Angeles apartment. A resident returning home about 8:45 p.m. Sunday found the infant on the doorstep and called police. "She was only gone for half an hour," Los Angeles Police Officer Alex Baez said. "And in that time span, the baby was left there." The 5-pound, 4-ounce newborn was in good condition Monday at County-USC Medical Center, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Daryl H. Miller wonders "how a show as wildly uneven as "Queer as Folk" can be so compulsively watchable" ("Return of Showtime's Gay Soap," Jan. 5). Some of the rest of us wonder: If it weren't for the frontal nudity and the explicit sex scenes, would anyone put up with this show for five minutes? Perhaps viewers enjoy "Queer as Folk" because, like other soap operas (which also offer cardboard characters, contrived situations and bad dialogue), it's so silly. KEVIN DAWSON Sunland It seems to me that the rampant media glorification of the "Sex and the City" women is sadly misplaced ("A Love Note to New York," by Howard Rosenberg, Jan. 4)

Re "O.C. Trash Haulers End 5-Day Strike," Oct. 6: Our trash haulers, with overtime, can now make more than many of the teachers in our local schools. (Don't kid yourself, those teachers put in plenty of overtime.) What a message for our young people. Five years of college plus required ongoing credits plus enormous responsibility.... Why bother? Donald Kerns Garden Grove I was amazed when I noticed two pictures in your Oct. 3 California section on the trash strike.

To walk through parts of downtown Los Angeles is to negotiate urine-scented, open-air bedlam. Business owners, workers and stray tourists dodge and weave through sidewalk shantytowns inhabited largely by addicts and the homeless mentally ill, some of whom shout at the air as if tormented by demons.

I would like to add another preventive measure to those mentioned in "Bugged by Pesticides?" by Clara Young (Jan. 14): the elimination of cardboard from cupboards. Cockroaches love to eat both the board and the glue that holds it together, and the tunnels of corrugated cardboard make an excellent nesting place for these creatures. Many of us use such boxes for storage of seasonal dishes, small appliances, paper party goods, etc., and a simple, clean solution is to purchase inexpensive plastic storage bins to store these items.

Thinking outside the box isn't easy when you make corrugated cartons for a living. But Southern California's myriad box makers are finding it necessary to survive in a commodity industry. While much of the economy continues to boom, U.S. box shipments are projected to grow a miserly 1% this year, reflecting America's spending spree on imported goods packed in foreign-made containers.