Infighting over policies of the ABC Unified...

Infighting over policies of the ABC Unified School District in Cerritos has taken on a distinctly cloak-and-dagger atmosphere of recent weeks, with an ACLU First Amendment action in federal court charging that one edition of the Parents-Teachers-Students Assn. newsletter had been fed into a shredder on orders of school administrators.

Whitney High School Principal Robert Beall admitted ordering the issue shredded--but said he only did so because School Supt. Kenneth Moffett told him it should not be distributed. Moffett, however, denied any knowledge of the shredding, although he was not happy about “destructive and divisive” statements in the publication.

The federal action was dropped after administrators promised to make no further effort at editorial control, but school board meetings continue to be lively. No Fawn Hall or Ollie North as yet. The questions, however, have a familiar ring:

Who knew what--and when did they know it?

Seriously, psychologist David J. Abramis thinks everyone’s work should be fun.

An assistant professor at the California State University, Long Beach, School of Business Administration, Abramis recently surveyed 341 Southern Californians, mostly white-collar workers, on how they feel about their jobs--and was taken aback to discover that ony about 10% of those interviewed thought their work was fun.

It’s important, he said, because a happy employee is not only a more productive employee, but also less likely to be out looking for another job.

One big factor in making the workplace a funplace, he said, is pay: Those who earned more than $50,000 a year reported having the most fun at work.

Nevertheless, he said, a lot depends on organizational climate--and worker attitudes.

“Any job can be fun if you want it to be,” he said.

(But it’s harder if your fun job is something like being a terminal care nurse, or guarding a maximum-security prison, or cleaning out restaurant grease traps, or being the inside man at an alligator farm. . . .)

The lawyer for Joan Collins’ ex-husband Peter Holm, who quit when Holm phoned in sick from France instead of showing up for a hearing on his demand for $80,000-a-month alimony last week, is back on the case and wants the matter reopened. Attorney Frank Steinschriber said he is convinced, now, that Holm was really sick.

His client, he said, got a note from his doctor.

For the second time in his career, conservative state Sen. H. L. Richardson (R-Glendora) announced that he is quitting the Legislature--and this time, he said, he means it.

A right-wing hard liner who wields power because of his ability to raise and spend millions of campaign dollars, Richardson, 60, apparently surprised even his own office staff in Sacramento on Thursday when he dictated a two-paragraph announcement saying he would quit after the 1988 session, and then walked out.

In the statement, Richardson said he’s not “retiring from working in the political vineyards--squeezing left-wing grapes is still too much fun,” and aides explained that the senator will still run his direct-mail campaign firm, write, produce educational films and be a continuing thorn in the side of liberals.

It was deja vu for Richardson chief-of-staff Michael Carrington.

“We’ve been through this before,” Carrington acknowledged, recalling that he also was left behind to explain his boss’s intentions in 1982 . . . the first time Richardson said he would quit.