Scholarly Prank
About 300 “ransom notes” have been mailed to San Diego County community and business leaders warning them that they will be kidnaped Feb. 14 and demanding that they ante up $1,000.
It is not a master crime, but part of an unusual fund-raising effort by the UC San Diego Friends of Music to benefit the group’s scholarship fund.
Only those sending in the $1,000 will be “kidnaped,” according to Gail Connors, a Friends of Music committee member. The “victims” will be picked up in a limousine and taken to “an elegant estate in Rancho Santa Fe for wining and dining,” Connors said.
The fund-raising technique has worked in other cities, but has never been tried here, she added.
No Co-Pilot Paul C. Barkley, PSA Inc. president and chief executive, is winging it alone these days, with no immediate plans to bring a second-in-command on board the corporate ship.
Barkley, 55, was named chief executive just a couple of months before the death in May of William Schimp, PSA’s chairman and former CEO.
The heir-apparent issue hasn’t been of top priority at PSA, what with the lengthy and controversial process to win employee approval of a wage-cutting and profit-sharing proposal. But now, said Barkley, “I’m beginning to work on that.”
Because companies favor evolution over revolution, however, there is no rush to find a No. 2.
“It’s still a little bit cloudy as to what kind of person should be No. 2,” said Barkley, whose background as an accountant served PSA well during a five-year, $1-billion fleet retooling that is nearly complete.
Out of the Picture San Diego Sockers Coach Ron Newman saw the picture in The Times’ business section last week of Padres chief financial officer Richard Freeman--alone among hundreds of seats at the stadium--and couldn’t resist a jab.
“That looks like the crowd at an outdoor Sockers game,” quipped Newman, whose team canceled its outdoor play because of poor attendance.
Freeman paid his own price for The Times’ photo, however.
His La Jolla Rotary Club colleagues jokingly fined him $25 for having his picture in the newspaper.
Positive Press After a year of rather negative national publicity, San Diego received some positive press early in this new year.
In Time magazine’s Jan. 7 “Man of the Year” issue, Hybritech chairman and chief executive Howard (Ted) Greene was profiled along with six others.
Time chronicles Hybritech’s history--from a firm with only an idea and a rented laboratory in La Jolla--to its position as the nation’s leading researcher and marketer of monoclonal antibodies.
