Moe

Tommy Moe, the 1994 Olympic downhill champion and silver medalist in super-G, and AJ Kitt, downhill bronze medalist in the 1993 World Championships, retired Wednesday from World Cup skiing. Moe, 28, and Kitt, 29, spent more than a decade racing around the globe and said the travel and 12-month training had become too much.

The Irvine Co. said Monday that real estate marketing whiz Donald Moe is returning to the giant land developer after a 12-year hiatus. Moe, 55, of Dana Point, will become senior vice president for residential marketing in the Irvine Co.'s residential division. He held a similar post at Santa Margarita Co. until resigning to become a consultant in 1995. Moe first joined the Irvine Co. in 1972 as a marketing director for the then-budding Fashion Island shopping and office complex.

As the drummer of the Velvet Underground, Maureen "Moe" Tucker kept the beat at the birth of "alternative" rock and had the first Hall of Fame career of any female rock instrumentalist. Hardly anyone knew it at the time: The four landmark albums the Velvets made from 1967 to 1970 were commercial flops. But they survived as crucial influences for some of the most vital rock of the '70s, '80s and '90s. David Bowie, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, R.E.M.

Tommy Moe talked of future success after winning the downhill Thursday in the U.S. Championships at Sugarloaf/USA in Carrabassett Valley, Maine. Hilary Lindh's future involves retiring from competition, after her downhill victory. The two Alaskans, Moe from Anchorage and Lindh from Juneau, were in the spotlight at the championships, which end the U.S. competitive ski season.

Improvisational, jam-based rock 'n' roll has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. Once primarily the well-traveled terrain of the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape and the Allman Brothers, this freewheeling musical style is now led by bands such as Blues Traveler, Phish, the Dave Matthews Band, Los Lobos and a rejuvenated Neil Young. One emerging group is moe, a quartet from Buffalo, N.Y., that brings its high-octane roots-rock to the Coach House tonight.

Since the days he raced fellow high school students in a 1946 Plymouth up and down Whittier Boulevard through his East L.A. neighborhood, Mel Gross has lived and breathed Southland's car culture. He's put 46 years into Pep Boys, where he's still the auto supply chain's West Coast maintenance manager. And he's poured his heart into the cult of the Ford Model A. "These things," says the 63-year-old gruff-voiced grandfather of two, "are all I know."