This Run for the Border Turns Out To Be a Game

You’ve read about it in the newspapers. You’ve seen it on the television news. If you live in the North County, maybe you’ve attended a dozen or so community meetings to shout at your neighbors about it.

And now there is a board game about it: Run for the Border, which describes the desperate trek of illegal aliens toward Los Angeles, and the cat-and-mouse contest between aliens and the Border Patrol.

Run for the Border is the brainchild of Roland Fisher, Jose Mata and Frank

Rodriguez, who hope to both make a buck and sensitize the game-playing public to the plight of illegal aliens.

Fisher, 29, is a former Border Patrol officer in El Centro and now works at Rohr Industries in Chula Vista. Mata, 30, is a nursing assistant, and Rodriguez, 28, runs an urgent-care center and teaches martial arts; both live in El Centro.

If the U.S. border is easily penetrated, not so the big-time game market. The three friends have formed their own company, Gametime Inc., to handle production and distribution.

So far, the game is available (at $19.95) in video stores in El Centro, Brawley and Calexico, and soon, a video store in El Cajon. More later, maybe.

Run for the Border is a Monopoly derivative, with dice and small markers, good cards (Coyote Cards) and bad cards (Risk Cards), and Borderbucks. The goal is to get to L.A., avoiding deportation, unscrupulous smugglers and assorted rip-off artists.

“People laugh at illegal aliens, but they’ve got no idea how difficult and frustrating their lives are,” Rodriguez said. “Our game is more than just fun, it makes a statement.”

Freeway Foolishness

I don’t make ‘em up, honest:

* Letter from a La Mesa man to the (El Cajon) Californian newspaper:

“Would some pro-life proponent please tell me if a woman who just had a successful intercourse should be allowed to drive in the diamond lane on the freeway?”

* Tufts University this week shelved its “fighting words” disciplinary code for students because of First Amendment problems. A similar code at the University of Michigan was overturned in court.The University of California refuses to budge.

* Calling all Caterpillars. The Building Industry Assn., which is backing a drive to help challenger Bob Trettin in the 1st District, is making a similar effort to save Councilman Ed Struiksma in the 5th District.

* Reporters are giggling over Kirby Bowser, the Lakeside accountant who got but 48 votes in the 76th Assembly District race. That’s bad, but others have done worse, much worse.

Jim Hague, a retired newsman (Associated Press/Washington Post) living in Rancho Bernardo, remembers a Maryland gubernatorial candidate in the 1940s, Stephen B. Peddicord.

In mid-campaign, Peddicord stopped believing his own speeches and instead started telling everyone that the best candidate was the incumbent, Romulus O’Conor.

Voters believed him. O’Conor was reelected, and Peddicord got zero (0) votes.

Gorbachev on TV? Nyet

If you missed his face in the curriculum guide to the Soviet arts festival, Mikhail Gorbachev look-alike Ronald Knapp will be on the “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson on Oct. 26.

He’s also angling for a cover story in Mad magazine (no joke). He’s done a rock video, an interview with Izvestia, and a television commercial for a Boston appliance store. T-shirts are a possibility.

Knapp, 51, a Canadian-born Iroquois-Seneca Indian now living in Huntington Beach, enjoys the confusion. He doesn’t even mind losing several layers of skin every time he uses nail polish to apply Gorby’s distinctive birthmark on his head.

He says the mix-up in the curriculum guide reaffirms a lesson he learned when he started selling real estate: “Things are often not what they seem.”