Wagon

Great info on Mammoth ["Need a Lift?" Winter Holidays Issue, Dec. 14]. I graduated from Lowell Whiteman School circa 1959 in Steamboat Springs, Colo. Hit a tree in a downhill race the day before my college boards. Now that I'm 67, I am going skiing again. Our cheapest trip story to Mammoth, circa late '50s-early '60s ($5 lift tickets . . . three chair lifts, three T-bars). Four of us drove in my parents' '57 Chevy wagon with $80 between us to stay for one week. We slept in that wagon.

Re "Charles M. Runyon, 1922 - 2008," obituary, Oct. 9 Chucko the Clown figures in one of my earliest memories. As a young child, I was a fan of the show and was delighted when my parents arranged for me to be part of his studio audience. It was exciting to drive into Hollywood and go into a TV studio. Chucko's show was all about children's participation. Kids were assigned to one of three circus wagons and competed against each other in playful contests. The day I was on the show, the contest was stacking milk bottles.

Amid rising concern about the company's outlook, General Motors Corp. directors took the unusual step of affirming support for Chief Executive Rick Wagoner on Wednesday. The nation's largest automaker has suffered financially as gas prices have soared, sales have plummeted, values of SUVs and trucks have collapsed and consumer confidence has reached record lows. Last week, GM reported a $15.5-billion loss for the second quarter on an 18% revenue slide.

It wasn't the typical murder weapon viewing. Jurors had to squat, kneel and even lie on their stomachs to get a good look at the instrument that two septuagenarian women allegedly used to kill a homeless man to collect his life insurance. Prosecutors say the 1999 Mercury Sable station wagon killed Kenneth McDavid. It was taken to the basement of the courthouse Friday as part of their weeklong attempt to tie the vehicle to Helen Golay, 77, and Olga Rutterschmidt, 75.

A former car salesman testified Thursday that he sold a Mercury Sable station wagon to one of two elderly women accused of using the vehicle to kill a homeless man in a murder-for-life-insurance scheme. Mario Medina is the first eyewitness to tie Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, to the car that prosecutors say was the murder weapon in the death of Kenneth McDavid, 50, in an alley in West Los Angeles in 2005.

SAN DIEGO -- They sure don't remake 'em like they used to. "Dancing in the Dark," the theatrical adaptation of the MGM classic "The Band Wagon," gives the 1953 backstage movie musical an extensive face lift. And as often happens with radical cosmetic surgery, the outcome isn't born-again youthfulness but flagrant artificiality.

The first rule of selling station wagons is don't talk about station wagons. That's the marketing plan behind the stealthy return of one of the auto world's most practical -- and most ridiculed -- designs. For years, the mere idea of a wagon has been poison in the car world, resurrecting queasy carpool memories of ungainly giants like the Ford Country Squire and the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser for a whole generation of drivers.

THE last of the four "Lonesome Dove" novels to be filmed (and the last to be written, though chronologically the second in the series), "Comanche Moon" finally joins its fellows as a miniseries this week. It has been 11 years since the book was published, and a dozen since the last "Dove" adaptation. I can't say why it has taken so long for it to arrive. (It premieres Sunday night on CBS and continues on Tuesday and Wednesday.

THE western grew up with 1923's "The Covered Wagon," a sprawling epic about the settling of the Wild West in the late 19th century that was shot on location in Utah and Nevada with a cast of thousands. James Cruze, a former actor who had directed some Fatty Arbuckle and Will Rogers comedies, helmed the sagebrush saga, which was the second film to play at the newly opened Egyptian Theatre.

Dolly Parton led an all-star choir in a rendition of "I Saw the Light" in tribute to her long-ago mentor Porter Wagoner at the public funeral service for him Thursday on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, the organization of which he'd been an active member and high-profile spokesman for more than 50 years.