Los Angeles Deals With the Images of Battle : Mideast: The routine of life goes on despite worries over war in the Persian Gulf. But the conflict is not far from most people’s thoughts.

Los Angeles, the morning after . . .

The traffic crawled. The coroner and courts were busy. The police were mopping up after three more drive-by shootings. “Crime goes on,” said a district attorney’s aide.

But there was something different about Thursday. At the Biltmore downtown, there was a rush of room service orders as people took breakfast in their rooms in order to watch television news. On Hollywood Boulevard, a boom box was turned softly to the news. Waiting for an RTD bus, commuters listened to a young American fighter pilot, speaking in a gentle twang, talk about shooting down an Iraqi plane.

Down the street, Rob Estes, an actor about the same age as the American pilot, talked about the war and his role in a movie called “Aces” in which he will play a fighter pilot.

“I guess you can say the war is having an effect on my life,” Estes said. “It will make people interested in the movie. The war will help me. . . . Irony is a bitch sometimes.”

A couple of miles away, in Hugo’s, a West Hollywood cafe frequented by television and movie people, Phillip B. Gittelman paused from his breakfast to chew away at another piece of irony.

“We have never had to run to bomb shelters or put on gas masks. But we provide millions of people their only images of war. We’re so good at special effects, we’ll rebuild Baghdad for the screen,” said Gittelman, who provides management services for actors and directors.

Without wars, it is fair to say, Los Angeles would not be the same today. World War I helped launch the careers of directors such as King Vidor and Lewis Milestone with movies like “The Big Parade” and “All Quiet on the Western Front.” World War II made the city an industrial giant, with one-third of the nation’s aircraft business manufactured in or near Los Angeles.

Through the mid-1940s, the city’s population grew by 400,000 and the county’s population doubled, in large part by the arrival of war workers and the return of veterans.

With USO tours, patriotic films and movie stars stumping for war bonds, Hollywood helped turn the drudgery of war on the home front, with its shortages of gas and and shoes, into a stirring crusade.

Thursday, as the city came to grips with the country’s latest war, there were renewed signs of patriotism as dozens of blood donors crowded the beds at the Red Cross. At the blood bank on Vermont Avenue, business was better than ever.

“After the first firing yesterday afternoon, the activity increased,” Red Cross spokeswoman Peggy McGinley said.

And there were the strains of martial music to be heard, here and there, in the voices of hawkish residents.

“This country was born in violence and sustained in violence, and it will always have to be capable of resorting to violence,” said Charles Angell, a writer who talked while exercising Woofer, his bouvier des Flandres, in the Laurel Canyon Dog Park.

At Lockheed Aircraft, employees had a special reason for closely following the events in the Persian Gulf. The highly publicized F-117A Stealth Fighter, Lockheed’s creation, was flying in combat. In addition, three other Lockheed planes, the C-5, C-141 and C-130 transport carriers, were in service.

James Ragsdale, a spokesman for Lockheed Aeronautical Systems in Burbank, said that although the firm has yet to receive official Air Force reports as to how the F-117A is performing, Lockheed employees have taken note “with pride” each time Pentagon officials mention the aircraft in press briefings.

After knocking off early Wednesday afternoon when news of the war broke, a lot of people all over the city found it hard to return the next day to routines, and instead they found themselves lingering over morning news reports and talking to colleagues. Breakfast table conversation made references to “Saddam’s Republican Guard” or to the code names of complex weapons system as if we were talking about Sigalerts or the latest innovations in lap tops.

“I don’t want to know anything about war,” said a security guard at the Los Angeles International Airport, circling away from a television set noisily reporting.

But for most people, there was business, as usual, to contend with.

The filming of a movie for cable television resumed at the Houdini Mansion in Laurel Canyon. Producer Alan Poul said the cast quit three hours early on Wednesday when news of the war dampened their spirits.

“There was a scene involving doing the Charleston,” Poul explained, “and people really didn’t feel like doing it.”

A spokesman for Universal said the studio’s famous tours were drawing more customers than usual. Budd, a salesman at Murray’s Tickets on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, said the day started slowly, but picked up.

“I knew last night when I got the sad news that people were going to want to think and meditate and this and that,” said Budd, a man in his 60s who would not identify himself further. “It’s slow because of the world situation, but, still, I can’t even get out of here.”

The big sellers?

“Today it’s the Super Bowl,” Budd said. “We do ‘Phantom (of the Opera’) every day, of course, but basically it’s Super Bowl.”

It was back to work as well in skyscrapers, where office executives the day before had huddled around television sets. But many minds were elsewhere, thoughts wandering to the events on the other side of the world. More solemn reflection was starting to replace earlier emotional outbursts.

“Everyone seems a little subdued today,” attorney Matthew Millen said from his office in a glistening 24-story building in Westwood. “(Usually) people are a little more open and talkative. I mean, we’re at war.”

Two families visiting families refused to let world events get in the way of a special day.

Mark and Melissa Hoiland of San Diego and Lois and Michael Krutz of Phoenix sat at a cafeteria table at LAX’s international terminal, celebrating the arrival of the two Korean babies they were adopting.

“Nothing would have stopped us from coming here today,” Melissa Hoiland said. “Despite what’s going on in the world, this makes it a beautiful day,” and she held up her newly named baby boy, Edward George.

For better or worse, life in Los Angeles . . .

The coroner’s office received reports of 45 new corpses. The Sheriff’s Department arrested 44 alleged prostitutes and Johns in El Monte. Judges dispatched 280 arraignments, drunk drivers and other traffic violators in the metropolitan branch of Los Angeles Municipal Court.

At a coffee shop in Hollywood, four Jordanian emigres made a game effort at nonchalance.

“We just come here to eat lunch, that’s all,” said Muhammed Walid.

But their dour faces gave them away, and it didn’t take much for them to say what was really on their mind.

“What good does it do to speak up,” Walid said. “America has made up its mind. It’s going to be the subjugation of the people of the Middle East to American wishes.”

The normalcy, such as it was, would be short-lived, of course. As the day came to a close, there were reports that Iraqi missiles had apparently fallen on Tel Aviv, and workaday Los Angeles convulsed again.

A noisy waiting room for jurists at the Santa Monica courthouse fell silent. About 200 jurists put down their books and magazines and huddled around a small black and white television.

“Everyone knew it was going to escalate,” one young male juror said anxiously.

Wrapping up the day, the jurors quickly left the courthouse.