A Little Tommyrot Gets Point Across

There’s a club in town whose members aren’t just any Tom, Dick or Harry.

Just Toms.

“It’s a spinoff from the Tom Anti-Defamation League,” said Tom (of course) Shess Jr., a writer and public relations consultant. “We’ve gotten an awful lot of bad press, what with Tom turkey, Tom foolery, peeping Tom, doubting Thomas, Tom boy, Tom cat and being associated with every Dick and Harry.”

So, one of the few purposes of the club is to promote more enlightened use of the name Tom, its members say.

“We’re a little concerned, for instance, that there are fewer children being named Tom these days,” groused newspaper columnist Tom Blair. “Too many boys are being named Keith and Shawn.”

Not every Tom in town is a member of the club. Some of the more esteemed Toms, including Tom Page, president of San Diego Gas and Electric; Tom Day, president of San Diego State University, and Tom Payzant, superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District, are not being invited to join. Instead, they’ll be called upon as guest speakers.

Meetings of the Tom Club are held all over town, but nobody’s gotten lost yet. For directions, they refer to the map published by the Thomas Bros.

Naked Truth About Game

When it comes to candid and insightful sports interviews, we can look to Channel 39.

Consider the station’s live--very live--postgame interview Sunday in the Chargers’ locker room, after the loss to the Denver Broncos.

Seems that the cameraman was handicapped by going into a small, hot and humid locker room after spending the afternoon in the cold outdoors. His camera’s viewfinder fogged, the station tells us now, so he wasn’t seeing all that his camera--and the home audience--was seeing.

So while Al Janis in Denver was innocently conducting his postgame interviews for live TV, the rest of us were getting a panorama of posteriors and profiles parading to the showers, a veritable eyeful of locker room life style in the buff.

Anchorwoman Cathy Clark’s eyebrows reached new heights.

“And there we have it,” blushed sports anchor Al Keck, back in the studio. “After an exciting game, an even more exciting postgame interview.”

Some Food for Thought

Some San Diego area hospitals are getting downright boastful about the quality of their food, and some have gone so far as to advertise their meals to bring in cafeteria customers from off the street. Perfectly healthy customers, mind you.

Sharp Cabrillo Hospital in Point Loma, for instance, offers 30% discounts to people 55 and older who want to eat breakfast or dinner in its cafeteria. Reservations for dinner are requested. Sorry, there’s no harpist.

Pomerado Hospital in Poway began offering senior citizen discounts almost a year ago and the cafeteria averages about 25 off-the-street customers nightly. There are two or three entrees every night, the likes of prime rib, top sirloin and stuffed chicken breasts.

“Some people just come in, but some of our fussier folks call first to see what we’re offering,” said Nancy Kohler, director of food and nutritional services.

So, be a hero tonight and offer to take the spouse out to dinner at Chez Pomerado.

Big Break for Event

There’s a fund raiser planned at the Escondido Village Mall on Sunday for cystic fibrosis. Students of taekwondo, a Korean martial art using feet and hands, will break up to 10,000 pine boards. They’ll accept pledges for the number of boards they can break, then they’ll sell the splinters for firewood.

The boards are one inch thick, or “about the width of two human ribs, back to back,” said Cathy Howell, manager of a taekwondo school in Escondido.

Some of the adults will try to individually break 1,000 boards, while some 5-year-olds will be out for their first break, she said.

We hope they’re not practicing at home.

In the Driver’s Seat

In our Department of Happy Motoring, we bring you these somehow related items:

- The California Highway Patrol has finished a study to determine why motorists become disabled. The 14-day survey involved nearly 2,000 disabled motorists.

The findings: 26% had engine failures, 20% had flat tires, 16% ran out of gas, 16% had overheated engines, 2% had transmission trouble and 20% had “other mechanical failure.”

Women and cars don’t mix, right? Sixty-four percent of the stranded motorists were men.

- Are you numbed yet by the proliferation of yellow “Child in Car” caution signs hanging on the back of car windows?

This one got our attention in Escondido: “Caution--Child Driving.”

- Jon Thomas, a writer for the Encinitas Coast-Dispatch, has reported on more than his share of county studies, plans and maps on future roads and highways. The other day, staring at yet another wall-size map with lines showing two-lane roads, four-lane collectors and the major arteries, he sighed, “I feel like a road scholar.”