Hail to the (Vice) Chief: Escondido to Roll Out the Avocado Carpet for Bush

Steve Garvey won’t be able to attend, but yachtsman Dennis Conner is supposed to be there. The Republican members of San Diego County’s congressional delegation are being invited to share the stage, and some of the Democrats might get invited too.

Vice President George Bush is going to Escondido on Friday, and everyone is trying to make it a visit fit for . . . well, a vice president.

Mayor Jim Rady says he will be on his best behavior and “will stand wherever they tell me.”

Deputy City Manager Jack Anderson has lined up the public address system. “Four hundred bucks,” he said Tuesday. “We’ll be looking for someone to reimburse us.”

Sweep of Park Planned

And Escondido police will make a sweep of Grape Day Park to dislodge any of the not-so-distinguished locals who wouldn’t know a Mr. Bush from a Meister Brau.

Yes indeed, Escondido is pulling out all the stops for what may amount to a 30-minute stopover by Bush, a favor of sorts to Rep. Ron Packard (R-Carlsbad), who asked the vice president-slash-presidential candidate to visit his home district.

Bush isn’t coming to Southern California just to see Escondido’s new, $15-million City Hall. Hardly. At 2 p.m. Friday, he will officially open Air/Space America ‘88, the first-of-its-kind international air show at Brown Field in Otay Mesa. He’ll be playing the role of vice president, not presidential candidate, his White House staff says.

Lots of Little Flags

Bush will arrive in North County by helicopter at about 3 p.m., and in Escondido about 3:30 or 3:45. He will probably land at a ball field at Grape Day Park, walk 50 yards or so to a restored train depot, and look full-face into a mid-afternoon sun that, if anything like Tuesday’s, may break him into a sweat.

As many as 2,000 people are expected to hunker beneath the park’s shade trees, say organizers and Bush boosters who are lining up banners, balloons and little American flags.

As Bush looks over the crowd, his gaze will fall on the backdrop of a Montgomery Ward Focus department store, the anchor of a once-thriving shopping center that fell on hard times and is being renovated.

Virtues of Avocados

He will probably make some complimentary remarks about the natural beauty of North County and Escondido’s gleaming new civic center, and reference to the city’s 100th anniversary, and maybe talk about the virtues of avocados, according to a Packard staff member who gave the White House some hints about what Bush could say to please the crowd.

Nobody on Tuesday was quite sure just

whom was being invited to share the train station’s porch with Bush, or who would share the microphone. But the presence of Packard is a given. Bush came to San Diego a couple of years ago and helped raise $50,000 or so at a fund-raising lunch for Packard, and Packard’s office boasts that the congressman has been a strong Bush supporter for, oh, a couple of years now.

Packard’s office found a two-hour hole in Bush’s itinerary Friday, while he is flying from Orange County to Otay Mesa and then to Oregon, and Packard sweet-talked the vice president into the Escondido visit, his first to North County.

No Political Stumping

“There was no competition vying for a place for him to visit,” said Clyde Romney, who, as a former Packard staff member and an Escondido lawyer still active in Republican circles, is helping coordinate the visit. “I don’t believe anyone else was in the equation.”

There will likely be no political stumping either, Romney said. Indeed, there is only one contested Republican primary among the congressional races in San Diego County next month, and the party is lying low on endorsements until a winner in that race emerges.

Nancy Mason, Packard’s chief of staff, said she is inviting the county’s mayors, members of the Board of Supervisors and Republican state officeholders from the area, as well as the Republican congressional delegation from San Diego, to participate in the Grape Day Park event.

Waiting for an Invitation

What about the Democratic members of Congress?

“Oh, sure, we’ll extend them invitations too, if I can get around to it,” Mason said. She’s been awfully busy, she allowed.

Also waiting for an invitation, from anyone, to attend Friday’s festivities is Leo Nadeau, a semi-retired building contractor from Ramona.

Nadeau was Bush’s gunner when Bush piloted a Navy torpedo bomber in the South Pacific during World War II, and the two have maintained a relationship of sorts since then.

Met Again in 1984

Nadeau and Bush reconnected in 1984 for the first time since the war, at a Norfolk, Va., reunion of pilots and crew members from their squad.

The reunion marked the 40th anniversary of Bush being shot down; his two other crew members that day perished, and Bush was rescued by a submarine four hours after parachuting into the ocean off Chi Chi Jima Island.

“The whole group of us were sitting in the first row center, and, when Mr. Bush took the stage, his eyes focused on me. He recognized me immediately,” said Nadeau, who through a stroke of fate had been bumped from the fatal mission in favor of an observer who asked to go along.

“I brought my flight log with me to the reunion and asked Mr. Bush if he’d autograph it,” Nadeau said. “He said, ‘I’ll sign yours if you sign mine.’ We were the only two of the bunch who brought our flight logs along.”

Since then, Nadeau said, he and Bush have talked several times by phone, exchanging names and the whereabouts of long-lost flying buddies, and Nadeau lunched with Bush when the vice president was in Old Town last summer.

“I hope to see him again on Friday,” said Nadeau.

“He was kind of quiet back then, not rowdy at all,” Nadeau said.