Valley Center

Peer through the office window of Maclay Primary Center and you can see the entire campus--15 classrooms around a playground of Hula-Hoops and hopscotch squares. With just 270 students in kindergarten through second grade, Maclay has a fraction of the children of traditional elementary schools--and recesses as orderly as fire drills.

Among them, they are 402 years old. And Saturday, they were inducted into a very special club for centenarians, honored for their long and healthy lives. Juana Manzar, 99, Flossie H. Brown, 104, Harriet Fiske, 99, and Edith Johannessen, who will be 100 on Wednesday, all were feted with music, plaques, praise and a cake as they became the first members of Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center's Century Club.

Simi Valley High center Rafael Berumen felt flu symptoms during the Pioneers' first-round Southern Section Division I-AA playoff game against Highland on Friday night at Simi Valley. His body ached. His mouth was dry. He felt like curling up and going to sleep in a corner. Fortunately for Berumen and Simi Valley, Highland was there to provide comfort. Simi Valley shot 60% and beat the Bulldogs, 103-80, to set up a second-round game against Santa Monica on Tuesday.

Today at sundown many Jewish families will begin the celebration of Hanukkah. Locally, events related to the holiday and open to everyone will be held at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage today and Friday and at the West Valley Jewish Community Center on Sunday. Hanukkah--a word consisting of only three letters when written in Hebrew, but spelled a variety of ways when rendered into English--is sometimes called the "festival of lights."

The dentist spotted a broken tooth and several cavities when he peered into the mouth of an elderly Chinese woman, but even though he spoke English and Thai, she spoke only Mandarin. But rather than turning her away, the dentist simply held up a brightly colored sign that read "Mandarin," and within a few minutes an interpreter was by his side carefully explaining his diagnosis to the woman in her native tongue.

If you're mailing an urgent letter, try to do it in the San Gabriel Valley. On second thought, you're in pretty good shape at any mailbox or post office in Southern California. The San Gabriel Valley has the most efficient local mail service in the country, and Southern California leads all metropolitan regions nationwide, the Postal Service reported Thursday.

The Job Corps, a federally funded job-training program for young people 16 to 24 years old, will open its first recruiting center in the San Fernando Valley on Thursday at the Pacoima Urban Village. The newest satellite office of the Department of Labor's Job Corps, which was established in 1964 and now operates more than 100 training centers nationwide, will be staffed two days a week by employees of the Corps' Southern California headquarters downtown, a Job Corps spokeswoman said.

Several days after reading the latest episode in what is becoming an ill-fated effort to build Disney Concert Hall downtown, I found myself among 2,000 people attending an L.A. Conservancy event in the opulent Orpheum, a 70-year-old vaudeville and movie palace on Broadway. A thought occurred. Instead of the Disney family tossing its money into a now questionable new concert hall, what if they donated a fraction of the amount to restore the Orpheum and several other vintage movie palaces, each of which would become an exclusive home to an arts enterprise?

The white supremacy symbols and black power emblems tattooed into the bodies of Dayvid Franke and Aundre Omar tell tales of the lives they left behind, and of the anger which brought them together. A year ago, Franke says, he was hanging out with skinheads, robbing and stealing in the San Fernando Valley to support his cocaine addiction. Omar recalls sleeping in a cardboard box on Skid Row, bouncing in and out of missions, dealing drugs and getting high off a crack pipe.

David A. DeFore, a real estate consultant, has been elected president of the board of directors of the Valley Cultural Center, which presents the free "Concerts in the Park" series every summer at Warner Park in Woodland Hills. DeFore, an Encino resident and graduate of the USC School of Business, is first vice president at CB Commercial Real Estate Group Inc.