putterings       516   <   517   >   518       index

light construction, minor repairs; something to stay busy, an eerie glow
 

He spends all day at home puttering around in his garden and frequently helps neighbors with projects involving light construction.   ₁

However, he has performed unpaid activities performing minor repairs on apartments owned by a friend, “puttering ... something to stay busy.”   ₂
 

ex City of Los Angeles, petitioner, vs. Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board of the State of California, and [ — — — ], respondents; Petition for Writ of Review (various dates, but all filed March 2, 1984) : 1 and 2, respectively, pdf pages 190 and 312 : link
 

The petition for writ of review appears to have been denied. Surprised to find this document at google books (via a search for “puttering something”). The respondent, a police officer seeking compensation for health problems caused by performance of his duties, had —

“...been with the police department 14 years and last worked on March 15, 1983...
      His last day of work was characterized by extreme mental stress and he cannot in fact remember how he got home, though he concludes he evidently drove himself by automobile. He claims that for several years he has felt stress and pressure from his job and dates the onset of his awareness of this, at least in retrospect, to the S.L.A. shootings where he was in a position to observe a woman coming out of the house on fire. Other incidents occurring in the line of duty added to his stress and anxiety such as viewing murder victims, seeing bodies with maggots crawling around on their heads, etc. He was not willing to say interestingly that he thought his experiences were more stressful than an average police officer’s nor for that matter an average citizen’s.”
pdf p 188 : link

I have heard similar stories from (retired) police officers of my aquaintance (neighbors). In fact, this is my own “takeaway” from these two putterings, and their context — that the law enforcement officer, too, was an unwitting (unfully witting) victim of circumstances whose full import would emerge only years later..
 

I remember the day of Patty Hearst’s abduction by the Symbionese Liberation Army (I was a student at UC Berkeley at the time); that morning, I was in Ulrich Knoepflmacher his well-attended survey of the English novel class. I would soon withdraw from the university (for a variety of reasons, personal failings and failures all). And I was in Los Angeles on the day (17 May 1974) of the shootout between the LAPD and members of the SLA at 1466 East 54th — the so-called “SLA Barbecue.”

See wikipedia on the police shootout — link — the expression “SLA Barbecue” seems to have been scrubbed from the internet, or at least rendered nearly invisible by its dominant search intermediaries.

—

See Vin McLellan and Paul Avery, their The Voices of Guns, subtitled “The definitive and dramatic story of the twenty-two-month career of the Symbionese Liberation Army, one of the most bizarre chapters in the history of the American Left” (1977) : 375
borrowable at archive.org : link

For a factual description of events, see The Symbionese Liberation Army in Los Angeles, “A report prepared by the Los Angeles Police Department” (July 19, 1974), via the waybackmachine : link

from the LAPD report, page 58 (pdf page 66)
 

3 February 2025