HOLLYWOOD — The following letters respond to recent reporting in The Times. They have been edited for length and clarity.
I have been a psychiatric nurse in this county for thirty-one years, and I want to thank the Teague family for one sentence in your story about their father (“Family Seeks Help Finding Man, 68,” August 16): “Everything he says in those videos, he believes. That is what this illness is.” I have spent my career trying to teach that sentence and his daughter said it better than I ever have. To the readers watching those videos: the family has told you exactly what to do, and it is the least dramatic thing imaginable. Note the time. Note the corner. Call the number. Do not film him, do not follow him, and do not comment. An audience is the one thing that has never once helped a person in psychosis, and I speak as someone who has been trying to help them since 1995. — Imelda Barragán, Los Feliz
So the bench can move after all, for $4,850, expedited (“The Bench Can Move by Mid-September After All,” August 13). I wrote to you about this bench in July and I intend to keep writing until it is gone, so here is my arithmetic to go with Ms. Quintero’s. The city will pay a premium to its own contractor to relocate an obstruction its own contract installed, at $1,212.50 an inch, and the councilmember says find the money, and for once I agree with everyone. Pay it Tuesday. And when that street-furniture contract comes up for renewal, I would like the council to remember that a newsstand bolted down in 1981 nearly died of a bench from 2011, and read the fine print like it owes us money. Because it does. — Cornell Biggs, Hollywood
I am one of the lawn chairs (“Full Pads at Six in the Morning,” August 14). Fourth season, third chair, the one by the water table. My grandson graduated two years ago and I still come, because there is nothing on a television at six in the morning half as good as live football played by people who love it in weather that permits it. I knew Marvin Teale a little — he sold me a raffle ticket in 1991 and I never won and he never let me forget it. When the boys wear his decal at the Marshall game, I will be in the chair. I am bringing two thermoses. One is for whoever forgot theirs, which is how Marvin would have run a sideline. — Vess Hardaway, Hollywood
Your story on the backpack distribution mentioned, almost in passing, that the drive was still about forty scientific calculators short. I am a retired civil engineer. I sent that paragraph to the firm where I worked for thirty-four years, with a note that said “surely we can do something about this.” My old firm, I am pleased to report, remains incapable of doing anything by half measures: sixty-one calculators arrived at the church in nine days, and I am told a rival firm has since called to ask why nobody invited them. Madam organizer, next year, invite both. Competition is a renewable resource. — Hollis Brandenburg, Hollywood
Your July story on the bike-lane deadlock quoted a volunteer who said that since the city keeps counting parking spaces, we would count the other thing. That volunteer was me, and I am writing to report that the counting is done. Thirty-four injury collisions on one mile of Vine since 2015, four of them serious, every one mapped to its intersection and, where the report allows, to the movement that caused it. The committee returns next week. The map will be in the record, printed large, because the one thing a map cannot be accused of is being a paragraph. I would rather have spent those evenings fixing bicycles. — Tobias Ferrand, Cahuenga Boulevard