Dick Whittington

The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced $2 million in grants to Southern California arts and cultural institutions. Among other things, the money will enable USC librarians to bring 34,000 historic photos of 1920s and '30s Los Angeles into public view via the Internet and help the Pacific Symphony press forward with its "Music Unwound" series, a bid to enhance the concertgoing experience by adding visual projections and slices of...

"We both wanted a house that was open and engaged the landscape," says architect Kevin Daly of the two-story Ocean Park home he shares with his wife, Dana Cuff, a UCLA professor of architecture, and their two children. Although they purchased the lot with its small postwar bungalow in 1987, the couple waited 10 years before building.

Gentlemen, start your mouths. The dwindling audience that still prefers AM radio to the smooth stereo of FM had better get used to jawboning because music is steadily dying out on the AM band. No fewer than five Los Angeles stations now offer all-talk and/or all-news and at least a half-dozen more devote at least part of their programming to talk shows.

Want to listen to some vintage K-100, with Dr. Feelgood riffing on the British rock invasion? Pining for the days when "Sweet" Dick Whittington of KGIL and friends, in full uniform, "invaded" Catalina Island? Curious about Howard Stern's possible return to terrestrial radio, or Doug McIntyre's firing, and rapid resurrection, at KABC? Then you're likely a LARP. That stands for Los Angeles Radio People -- a species subject to an attention deficit disorder in much of the media but poked, prodded and celebrated like nowhere else at LARadio.

Both Tommy Harrison and the late Bob Satterfield emerged as champions, thanks to the efforts of J. R. Moehringer ("The Champ," May 4). The article was a journalistic throwback to a lost era; for a few brief moments, we could once again have been reading the best of Ring Lardner or A. J. Liebling. Moehringer has me convinced that old-fashioned sentimentality isn't dead after all. Somehow, I feel that Satterfield would have forgiven Harrison for his innocent role-playing, maybe understanding better than most of us that we all live semi-delusionary lives.

Visitors are often charmed by Acton, a picturesque desert community that has retained its small-town nature. Although the U.S. Census Bureau defines Acton as having fewer than 1,500 people, those living here consider the 8,000 neighbors scattered in the nearby hills as part of the Acton family as well. According to local history, Acton supported 35 bars during its heyday as a flourishing mining town--including the 49er Saloon that remains in the center of town.

We are no longer tenting tonight. We are back in the house after having been away two days and one night while the termite crew draped a large orange-and-black tent over the house and about 2 feet of ground around it. We used to have a mint bed large enough to supply all the juleps served at Churchill Downs on Derby Day. Now we have just enough for one abstainer who might want a very small sprig of mint in his iced tea.

"Find that spontaneous well of emotion, and use it," the high school teacher instructs her class of damp great poets in a high school in Evanston, Ill.; and Ben Janis, the hero of James Atlas' first novel, wanting to be the greatest poet of them all, dowses for this well in a somewhat comfy suburban terrain. He's horny, he's adolescent, he's Jewish, he is burdened--this is a switch--by nice parents, he is avid and scared.

A frantic Carole Hemingway, already five minutes late for her weekday talk show, hurried to restore order. She apologized to listeners for the delay, and blamed traffic. She telephoned the show's scheduled guests in Washington, and blamed technical difficulties. Finally, about 15 minutes later, as talk centered on the crisis in Somalia, Hemingway savored the triumph of her own rescue operation.