Life’s Canvas Can Often Change Its Hue on Cue

One of the things reporters do during the political season is check the official biographies of people running for office.

It’s always interesting to find out what a candidate is emphasizing, embellishing or deleting from his or her background in hopes of impressing voters.

Take the case of Helen Rowe, 50, a San Diego attorney seeking the Republican nomination in the 78th Assembly District (the seat formerly held by Lucy Killea).

She and her husband, Charles, are law partners. Rowe says she offers advice to small businesses but is not a courtroom attorney.

Rowe’s campaign bio shows solid Establishment credentials: governmental advisory boards concerned with small businesses, ties to the University of California and Western State University, and membership on the county Bar Assn. board of directors and several Republican groups.

But there are some things the bio doesn’t mention:

* Rowe’s major experience running a small business was as executive vice president of Body One Inc., a health and beauty products business in Beverly Hills. ( It went bankrupt .)

* Rowe was a director of Terry Cole-Whittaker Ministries and Cole-Whittaker’s Church of Religious Science in La Jolla, with responsibility for setting policy and overseeing the budget. ( She says she left before the ministries folded with $400,000 in debts .)

* She was a Ph.D. candidate in human behavior at unaccredited La Jolla University. ( She attended in the days when students got doctoral credit for reading the newspaper .)

* She once listed her interests as transcendental meditation, est, self-hypnosis and Science of the Mind retreats. ( She now says she hated est. )

* She once listed as personal references Cole-Whittaker, two hypnotists and one of her husband’s law partners.

All of this has appeared on previous resumes Rowe has used--in a 1982 lawsuit and in 1986 when she applied for a spot on San Diego’s Small Business Advisory Board.

It’s all in the public record at City Hall and Superior Court.

I asked Rowe, a former newspaper reporter, if she was trying to remove from the public record things that might detract from the desired image of a feet-on-the-ground Republican with an unbroken record of success in the business world.

She said no.

She said she has revised her resume over the years to highlight those things that are relevant to what she is doing or to the position she is seeking.

“I think what I’ve done (in preparing a campaign bio) is pertinent and appropriate to my candidacy,” she said. “A biography is not a script of one’s life. It’s an overview.”

Rowe is running hard before the April 10 special election. If no one gets a majority, the top vote-getter from each party will face off on June 5.

Rowe is walking precincts and introducing herself to voters. She hands out red, white and blue business cards with her picture.

At the top, the cards ask, “Who is Helen Rowe . . . ?”

Up Against a Wall

Press on.

* Gorby, you’re not going to believe this.

Rancho Santa Fe 2000, a civic committee working on a master plan for the woodsy paradise, has voted 9 to 3 to exclude reporters from its meetings.

That’s in line with the Rancho Santa Fe Art Jury, which functions as a planning commission and also prefers privacy.

The Rancho Santa Fe Review struck back with an editorial cartoon showing the Berlin Wall crumbling and the Rancho Santa Fe Wall taking its place.

* The North County chapter of the National Organization for Women has turned down an offer of free space for four half-page ads in the San Diego Reader.

NOW has urged an advertising boycott since the weekly newspaper ran an ad telling how jurors could use “jury nullification” to acquit anti-abortion demonstrators accused of trespassing.

Publisher Jim Holman, an anti-abortion activist who served two weeks in jail, said he made the free-space offer on the condition that the ads not criticize the Reader or mention specific locations of abortion clinics.

A NOW spokeswoman said the offer was tantamount to censorship. She said the boycott will continue, although Holman said it has not been effective.