“Man-on-man coverage,” an expression usually reserved for...

“Man-on-man coverage,” an expression usually reserved for the athletic arena, could apply in a different sense to downtown Long Beach.

A local business group wants to hire blazer-clad college students who would shadow panhandlers and ask passers-by to donate money to charitable agencies instead.

Manny Jones, executive director of Downtown Long Beach Associates, hopes to install the “downtown public emissaries” by summer.

City Councilman Wallace Edgerton was not as optimistic, saying there may be questions about the plan’s “practicality.”

Edgerton, whose district includes downtown, said a no-camping ordinance that he favors would be a more effective deterrent. (The councilman also has abandoned another idea that he once advanced--the licensing of panhandlers--as “unrealistic.”)

One question raised by the DLBA plan is whether college students would want the potentially argument-prone job.

“Work downtown?” said Michael Dela Cruz, president of Sigma Delta Chi fraternity at Cal State Long Beach. “I can only speak for myself but you’d never catch me down there.”

For years, the L.A. Sheriff’s Department purchased friendly ads in the Eight Ball Final, the Greater L.A. Press Club’s annual magazine. But recent press investigations of alleged brutality and corruption among deputies have cooled relations, as the ad (above) in the latest Final makes clear.

Our recent item about airlines (and other companies) reluctant to accept cash sounded familiar to Don Mann of Malibu.

“I was buying a one-way plane ticket to Oakland, $62,” Mann said. “When I started to pay with cash, the clerk said, ‘Don’t you have a credit card?’ They took the money but they required two forms of picture ID and wrote down my license number and other detailed information.”

The clerk told Mann that a positive ID is made of every ticket buyer for several reasons, including the possibility that someone might try to smuggle explosives aboard a plane without actually making the flight.

L.A. businesses that you’d be unlikely to find in Dubuque:

1--Film City Pawnbrokers

2--Cinema Spa Apartments

3--Celebrity Auto Body

4--Celebrity Cleaners

5--Celebrity Cab

6--Celebrity Escrow Corp.

7--Celebrity House Cleaning

8--Celebrity Locksmith

9--Celebrity Mattress Company

10--Star Auto Wrecking

When we published a shot of Elvis’ 1975 driver’s license after its purchase by a Tarzana collector, we mentioned our suspicions about the listing for his weight (170).

Elyse Verse of West L.A. notes, however, that the year of expiration (1977) was correct, on a couple of levels.

miscelLAny:

L.A. has the third most members in the National Assn. of Teachers of Singing, ranking behind Dallas and New York. Long Beach is No. 72.