Pierce College

Los Angeles' hottest weather station has been knocked out cold. This time, though, it's not scorching heat -- such as the record-breaking 119-degree reading recorded there on July 22 -- that is to blame for the meltdown at the Pierce College station in Woodland Hills. A new computer-security firewall installed two weeks ago to keep hackers off the college's computer network is apparently also keeping the National Weather Service out of its 57-year-old station.

A weather station wildly popular with climate aficionados for recording some of Los Angeles' most extreme temperatures is back online, more than two weeks after a computer glitch silenced it. The Pierce College station in Woodland Hills -- which recorded a record-breaking 119-degree reading in July -- had been unable to transmit data since Oct. 2, prompting frustration among weather watchers. A new computer security firewall was to blame.

When Darroch "Rocky" Young was named president of Pierce College in 1999, the big challenges were to boost enrollment and raise morale among faculty and staff. Five years later, the Woodland Hills campus had nearly 3,600 new students, raising enrollment to about 17,000, and relations with the teaching staff were so improved that Young recently listed the faculty union chapter president as a job reference.

Two acres and a mule. That's all Will Green thought he would need to lead a life of packing and hunting in California's backcountry. He bought the two acres on a windblown patch of the western Mojave. And he bought a doe-eyed mule initially so sweet that he named her Sugar, only to discover that she had a personality that grazed in sour pastures. Quickly showing who was boss, Sugar bit the 43-year-old warehouseman, kicked him and dragged him around his corral.

The scene at Pierce College on Thursday was worthy of Noah. Potbellied pigs, llamas, alpacas, horses, mules, a blind pygmy goat and a yard-long African spur thigh tortoise took up residence on a pastoral swath of land amid strip malls, office buildings and town house developments. All were evacuees from the Topanga fire, which roared through the canyons of the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County on Wednesday and Thursday.

Robert Garber has been named president of Pierce College, which will bring him back to the 18,500-student campus where he worked for two decades. He will begin the $146,455-a-year job Feb. 1. Garber, 58, is vice president of student services at San Diego Miramar College. He replaces Thomas Oliver, 60, who has served as interim president for nearly two years. Oliver will stay on as vice president of college development.

Marco J. De La Garza has money to give away. The trouble is, he can't find enough takers. That gnaws at the affable De La Garza, who oversees student financial aid programs at Pierce College in Woodland Hills. He would like students to receive all the assistance they are entitled to so that they can spend more time hitting the books and less time covering expenses with dead-end jobs.

Jack Boyd, who played football at UCLA and was an assistant coach at Pierce College, died last Friday after a long illness. He was 75. Boyd played for the Bruins from 1943-45, leading the team in scoring in 1943. He served as an assistant coach in football and track at Pierce during the 1960s and 1970s. A memorial service will be held Monday at 4 p.m. at Congregational Church of the Chimes in Sherman Oaks. The City Section Football Kickoff Show will air Monday at 8 p.m.

It all started about four years ago, when Duc Tran bought a few roses to speckle a bit of color around the entrance to Pierce College. Tran, a gardener at Pierce, paid for the flowers himself, inadvertently sparking a long-running but friendly competition among the gardeners to fill the campus with lush blossoms and neatly pruned shrubs.

Bill was riding the baler in the field below, Jana was driving the loader, and Russ had wagon duty. So Pat O'Brien rolled a 110-pound bale into the shade and sat down to talk about harvesting hay. Enough hay to feed Pierce College's small herd of cattle. And the horses. And the sheep. And then some. Twenty-five hundred bales, worth about $25,000--money the school doesn't have--for an agriculture program that has been withering for years.