Maybe If His List Had 51 Possible Foul-Ups?

And for the second-prize winner, two weeks in Kiev . . .

It was to have been a special treat for favored advertisers of radio station KSON: 12 days of travel in an exotic corner of the world. Then news of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor fire broke. Suddenly, springtime in Leningrad, Helsinki and Stockholm lost its appeal.

So the station’s travel agents swung into action, rescheduling around the expanding radioactive cloud. On Thursday, advertisers and spouses are set to lift off from LAX. Destination: Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China.

“I’ll tell you something: You can plan for a whole lot of things, and we look at all the contingencies,” said Clarke Brown, KSON general manager. “I had a list of about 50 things that could go wrong. A nuclear meltdown was not on there.”

Could Be a Gutter Ball

It was the Taj Mahal of bowling alleys--cocktail lounges, dance floor, billiard tables, 28 lanes, spectator seating for 400. Conceived by the king of art deco movie theaters, architect S. Charles Lee, it was a glorious celebration of the art deco style, “streamline moderne.”

But now it lies in ruin in the netherworld of lower Broadway, flanked by Pixie’s Coffee Shop, Jean’s tattoo studio and Skylark Cocktails. The seven giant bowling balls of its 80-foot tower are rusting away. The multicolored terrazzo entranceway is grimy with discarded gum.

On Wednesday, a weeklong stay of execution granted the Tower Bowl building expires. Wrecking crews will be free to move in. The 45-year-old landmark between Kettner Boulevard and India Street is set for imminent demolition--to give the trolley room to turn around.

Last-minute efforts to rescue the tower have failed. Tower Records on Sports Arena Blvd. is interested, but the building is too tall for the coastal zone’s 30-foot height limitation. A man with a seafood warehouse has balked at the cost. City officials say Horton Plaza has not taken their bait.

And what if some sentimental sucker for streamline moderne did actually have a mind to rescue the tower? Well, he’d need a permit to close the street, tools to cut the steel base, a heavy-duty crane to lift off the tower, and transportation across town.

To re-erect it, he would need a special historical designation from the Historical Site Board, then an integration and enhancement plan, and finally a conditional use permit from the planning commission. Is idiosyncrasy out of style in America’s Finest City?

As Ron Buckley of the Site Board says of a possible rescue, “It’s do-able. But it isn’t easy.”

On War and ‘Resorts’

The Anti-War Action Committee has some points it wants to make--points about militarism and corporate recruiting at UC San Diego. So it keeps staging sit-ins at the Career Planning and Placement Center, calling reporters in advance and forecasting mass arrests.

But the campus police haven’t been playing along--say, jailing the demonstrators, making them martyrs, that kind of thing. Instead, they scoop them up by the armpits and dump them on the career center patio when the civilly disobedient students go limp.

“I have quite a bit of experience with (pause) disorder management ,” explained John Anderson, campus police chief, er, director of community safety. Arrests would serve no purpose, he said: “All it does is create a forum for their particular cause.”

But Ishwar Puri of the Anti-War Action Committee blames image management.

“This university has a very placid kind of image,” he mused scornfully. “In their brochures, they say they’re ‘the fun and surf campus.’ They say the living facilities are ‘naturally air-conditioned by the cool ocean breezes.’ They’re trying to make it look like an intellectual community but also a resort!”

Dough for Dough Tiff

A recipe purporting to unlock the mystery of Mrs. Fields Cookies is doing the rounds of San Diego in the form of a multimedia chain letter. It’s turning up in doctors’ waiting rooms and radio broadcasts, and on doorsteps from real estate agents drumming up business.

Janice Barron, a real estate agent for Century 21, distributed the recipe to 500 homes in San Carlos this week. She got the idea from five other agents in her office, one of whom got the recipe from her doctor, who heard it on the radio.

The way the story goes, a woman from the American Bar Assn. called Mrs. Fields for the recipe and was told there was a two-fifty charge. She assumed it was $2.50 and put it on plastic. The bill turned out to be $250.

“In order to get her money’s worth, she is passing the recipe out to everyone,” reads the letter from Barron, who said she uses it simply as a way of getting her name around. “Take a copy and give it to a friend with her blessing.”

Mrs. Fields could care less, her associates say.

“I don’t know what it is, but it is not the recipe,” said Kerry Judd, vice president of Mrs. Fields Cookies in Park City, Utah. “It seems to be floating across the country. The recipe has never been sold, nor will it ever be sold.”