Just when L.A. was making pretensions to...

Just when L.A. was making pretensions to becoming a cosmopolitan city--building a large Pacific Rim trade, erecting a 73-story skyscraper, acquiring a Van Gogh--it took Police Chief Daryl F. Gates to keep us rooted with our frontier past.

Gates, who said Wednesday that pot-smokers “ought to be taken out and shot,” is the latest in a long line of colorful, tough-talking chiefs of this pueblo.

James (Two-Gun) Davis and Roy (Strongarm Dick) Steckel, for instance, were two LAPD bosses who often found themselves in the limelight in the 1920s and 1930s.

Davis, who liked to say that constitutional rights were of “no benefit to anybody but crooks and criminals,” was responsible for the so-called Bum Blockade, stationing officers at the eastern border of the state during the Depression to turn back Dust Bowl immigrants.

Author Bruce Henstell (“Sunshine and Wealth”) notes that Steckel’s men once claimed to have found a kidnaped boy and, when the mother said he was not her missing son, “the police insisted he was, and that she take him and try him out.” The mother subsequently was proved correct. Steckel was later demoted.

More recently, of course, when Ed Davis was chief, he asserted that airline hijackers should be hanged at the airport. Gates, who has pondered running for political office, might have been trying to emulate his predecessor. After all, Davis has since been elected to the state Senate.

How’s this for juxtaposition? One day after Gates’ scattershot remarks, the L.A. City Council approved an LAPD plan to pay a consultant $99,600 to teach police officers how to defuse tense situations and avoid violent confrontations. It’s called “verbal judo.”

The winner of our weekly Dueling Signs competition--it’s a three-way duel--was submitted by Linda Mann of Northridge. Fortunately, the signs don’t confront motorists, only visitors walking through the Andres Pico Adobe in Mission Hills.

Curator Elva Meline says the threesome is on display as a reminder of the era when each was a stagecoach trail leading to the nearby San Fernando Mission.

Incidentally, streets with those names exist in the Antelope Valley--but not in such close proximity.

Only in L.A. Menu Item of the Week, courtesy of California Chicken Burger in Santa Monica: Mexichicken Burger. This being the Westside, we assume it’s a free-range Mexichicken.

Even some of the bad guys seem to be practicing water conservation.

The other day, someone stole one of the sprinklers set out overnight by Charlie Turner, the 85-year-old caretaker who’s trying to revive Dante’s View, the burned-out garden spot on Mt. Hollywood. The water was running at the time. The thief tied the hose into a knot, shutting off the flow.

miscelLAny:

The official city flower of L.A. is the bird of paradise, which, like a lot of the residents, comes from somewhere else (it’s a native of South Africa).