Voice From the Wilderness

For those who thought one-time regulator Ed Gray would slip meekly into a new job in south Florida, think again.

Gray is the former San Diego public relations man who spent four controversial years as chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, which governs savings and loans. Much of the industry ridiculed him in private while Congress ripped him in public. But Gray is now pronouncing himself a prophet without honor.

In tandem with testimony last week before Congress, Gray is circulating a thick document containing dozens of his public warnings about industry lending practices. The S&Ls;’ deposit-insurance fund, the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp., now faces a possible taxpayer bailout.

“The world was on notice,” Gray, now a Miami thrift executive, told The Times. “Red lights were flashing. I was the messenger. The FSLIC crisis didn’t happen overnight or in a vacuum. . . . Where was everybody when I was ringing alarm bells?”

Easing Foreign Exchange

Shopping is a universal language, but sometimes shoppers can use some translation. Some malls are helping out.

At the suggestion of the Japan Travel Bureau, South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa is publishing a brochure in Japanese, its first foreign language shopping aid. When Japanese buy gifts for folks back home, merchants hope they’ll spend money at the 300-store shoppers’ paradise.

“We discovered that most Japanese tourists were doing their shopping at the last minute at the duty-free shops,” a mall spokesman said.

Meanwhile, at Beverly Center in Los Angeles, an information booth now provides shopper assistance in Spanish and Japanese. At the mall’s 185 stores, 28 different languages or dialects are spoken. Spanish is the most widely spoken, followed by French. Farsi, Japanese and Korean also are common.

Beverly Center stores are adding plaques telling what languages are spoken within.

It Pays Cops to Advertise

When you’re in trouble, call a cop. But when the cops are in trouble, who are they supposed to call? How about an ad agency?

That’s what the Los Angeles Police Department did in 1982, when it was having trouble recruiting minority police officers. After a 1974 lawsuit, the courts ordered the LAPD to step up efforts to hire female and minority police officers. The department sought help from the Los Angeles office of the Salt Lake City ad agency Evans Communications.

Now, a new ad campaign the agency recently created is paying off big. The television and print advertisements--in both English and Spanish--show pictures of mostly minority police officers above this slogan: “Our cops only come in one color. Blue.”

On June 1, when the ad campaign broke, there were 1,000 inquiries.

Give a Mile, They Take Inch

Somebody, please, give the New York Times a map.

Judging by coverage of the insider trading scandal surrounding a Business Week column, the publication seems a little lost when it comes to Southern California geography. In a July 30 story, it indicated that an R. R. Donnelly printing plant in Torrance is “not far” from a Prudential-Bache branch in Anaheim.

OK, they’re only 21 or so miles apart. But by last Monday, the paper declared that a second printing plant in Ventura was being investigated because of trades made through that same Prudential-Bache branch in “nearby Anaheim.” Distance: 95 miles, almost the stretch between New York and Philadelphia.

Marshaling More Space

Fifteen years ago, Marshalls introduced off-price clothing to the California market with a store in Canoga Park.

Now, the nation’s largest retailer of discounted apparel has remodeled that same location into its first “super store,” with 42,500 square feet of selling space--which is being touted as the nation’s largest off-price location. The store’s size is nearly double the average of the company’s 300 other stores.

Look for Marshalls to add 55 stores statewide to the current base of 45 during the next couple of years, Chief Executive Francis H. Arnone says, with California part of a “pivotal strategy for growth.”