People and Events

Terminal Island fish broker Dino Lauro finally made a deal to get rid of the 13-foot great white shark that has been nothing but trouble since a fishing boat snagged it in the San Pedro Channel a week ago today.

Lauro says he has sold it for $600 to a “collector” who wants the jaws.

Capture of the shark got a lot of publicity because it or its cousin had been loitering off Newport Beach only a day or so before, prompting authorities to keep people out of the water.

Although the dead shark was causing a sensation at Galletti Brothers Seafoods, where Lauro is manager, he decided it was “time to get rid of the thing” because it was interfering with business.

Originally, Lauro expected to sell the 2,000-pound great white for $1,500. There was a parade of restaurant owners on the prowl for a good stuffed wall display, taxidermists interested in doing the stuffing and just plain gawkers. No one offered $1,500, however.

The buyer plans to pick it up today. “I’m tired of answering phones,” Lauro said at last. “I’m getting sick of it.”

Danny Kramer just signed a contract with a skateboard manufacturer to help warm up audiences at exhibitions with a few tricks on his own board. Not bad, says his mother, for a kid who’s only been skateboarding a year.

Better yet for someone 3 1/2 years old.

“He started when he was in diapers,” says Donna Kramer, of Lawndale. “He just took to it like a duck to water.”

Danny’s professional skateboard career came after his mother drove him to a skateboard exhibition at UC Irvine a few weeks ago. He took along his board, helmet and elbow pads, joining older youngsters in whipping through a few tricks while all waited outside for the show to start. A skateboard company representative spotted him and videotaped him.

“Two days later,” says Kramer, “I got a call that they were interested in signing him up as a paid crowd pleaser. He’s certainly that . Everywhere he skates he draws a crowd.”

She doesn’t really worry about him, she says, because he always wears his protective gear. “All he’s had is little cuts and scrapes, thank God.”

Things, one eventually suspects, don’t just happen.

It was duly noted that Patricia Seaton Lawford was in a black limousine and accompanied by a photographer on Wednesday when she removed the ashes of her husband, actor Peter Lawford, from a Westwood crypt and took them to scatter at sea.

It didn’t take some reporters long to hear that the photographer was working for the National Enquirer.

“We didn’t orchestrate it, but we did have the right to take exclusive photos on the boat,” insisted Iain Calder, editor and president of the supermarket tabloid, which is based in Lantana, Fla. “I honestly don’t know if we paid her any money. We have done a number of things with her in the past.”

In any event, the camera may have witnessed the disposal of only half of Peter Lawford’s cremated remains.

Actor Stuart Whitman said Thursday that the other half were disposed of soon after Lawford’s death in 1984.

“We had this big party at my house--a big one with champagne and toasts--right after he died and he had been cremated,” Whitman recalled.

“Then we dumped half the ashes in the ocean. He was a dear friend. He would have enjoyed it.”

The Los Angeles City Animal Regulation Commission was considering an appeal on a barking dog case at this week’s meeting, which was held at the 11th Street Animal Shelter. As always, the session was taped. Commissioner Rita Hoisch said she had a little trouble understanding the tape later.

There were too many yapping dogs in the background.

Jim Backus, as it turned out, couldn’t make it. But six other members of the original cast of the old television show about carefree castaways showed up at Orthopaedic Hospital to help dedicate the Gilligan’s Island Waiting Room.

The room was donated by Sherwood Schwartz, producer and creator of “Gilligan’s Island,” which a spokesman says is “the most rerun television show in history, including ‘Lucy.’ ”

Those reruns enabled some awfully young patients to recognize the likes of Bob Denver (Gilligan), Alan Hale (the Skipper), Natale Schafer (Mrs. Thurston Howell III), Tina Louise (Ginger), Russell Johnson (the Professor) and Dawn Wells (Mary Ann).

There is nothing amusing in the pamphlets Los Angeles cops began passing out Thursday to motorists cited for failure to buckle seat belts or use child restraints, as required by law.

The brochures, prepared by the Greater Los Angeles Motor Car Dealers Assn., contain graphic accident photographs in full color--including one of matching coffins for parent and child.