“60 Minutes” blows a scoop: It isn’t...

“60 Minutes” blows a scoop: It isn’t the most serious charge leveled against Police Chief Daryl Gates. But Richard Kales of Santa Monica noticed that Gates failed to wear a seat belt when he was driven through riot-torn L.A. with reporter Leslie Stahl on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”

Kales, who wrote to Gates, shared the chief’s reply with “Only in L.A.”

Gates pleaded guilty--with an explanation. Before the interview began, the chief wrote, he did indeed buckle up. But “since Leslie Stahl and the camera were both in the back seat, I turned around in my seat and was nearly strangled by the three-point safety belt. My car does not have a simple lap-belt system so I removed my seat belt.”

Kales let Gates off with a warning.

Does Caltech know about this? “Fugitive Nights,” Joe Wambaugh’s latest cop novel, is set in the Palm Springs-Desert Hot Springs area. One character gets so drunk that when he attempts to stand he is “astonished by the movement under his feet, like maybe a 6.2 earthquake had jolted the San Andreas Fault.”

The novel hit the bookstores a couple of months before the 6.1 quake hit the Palm Springs-Desert Hot Springs area.

“Use a Comb, Go to Heaven”: That’s the bumper sticker displayed by a Palm Springs barkeeper in Wambaugh’s novel.

In real life, the cryptic slogan first appeared in a Sunset Boulevard bar that is a hangout for police officers. It was inspired by an incident in the joint involving a would-be robber who held what appeared to be a gun under his coat.

Little did the intruder know that one of the customers was a plainclothes cop, who shot him to death. Afterward it was discovered that the dead man was holding a comb, not a gun.

Even his wristwatch is worth less than a dollar: Hank Kovell of L.A. saw this inscription on a van belonging to the 99 Only Store chain:

“Driver carries only 99 in change.”

Riot reminder: Alan Hill of Torrance notes that the fellow in a billboard ad on La Cienega Boulevard is running for good reason.

Evidently he knew that part of the sign was torched.

Long wait for a short railway: “I’m getting impatient!” writes Zoila Conan Rickard of West L.A., who wants to use her book of Angels Flight tickets.

She’s been waiting 23 years for a ride. The 315-long, not-so-rapid transit system was dismantled in 1969 by the Community Redevelopment Agency, ending a 68-year huff and puff on the side of Bunker Hill. The trusty black-and-white wooden cars, the Sinai and Olivet, were packed away to make room for the make-over of Bunker Hill. The CRA promised to reactivate the line in two years. Then five years. Then . . . the most recent estimate is late 1993.

Rickard, an actress who recalled boarding Angels Flight to get to a 1926 rehearsal date for a vaudeville act, says: “It’s terrible that it was taken away. It was fun--like going to Disneyland.”

But would it work for heart experiments? A bumper sticker seen on a car in Encino proposed: “Experiment on lawyers, not animals.”

miscelLAny:

Get ready to celebrate Sexto y Septimo de Junio. The annual Cinco de Mayo celebration, postponed because of the riots, has been rescheduled for June 6-7 at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument.