ELECTIONS : Candidates Crisscross the Region in Last Weekend Push : Halloween campaigners visit malls and synagogues and cruise their districts in motor homes and flat-bed trucks.

They campaigned in shopping malls, synagogues and along Ventura Boulevard. They button-holed voters at their homes and on the street. They sought the politician’s favorite Halloween treat--votes--and remained watchful for last-minute dirty tricks.

With Election Day nearing, candidates for public office busily crisscrossed the San Fernando Valley region Saturday, exhorting precinct-walkers, chatting up the undecided and making last-minute campaign preparations.

A Democratic congressional candidate handed out calculators disguised as portable phones with his name on the back. A Republican state Assembly candidate visited local synagogues to reassure Jewish voters that she was not, as her opponent claimed, soft on Israel. Another GOP Assembly hopeful cruised Ventura Boulevard in a rented flatbed truck, wearing a cowboy hat and calling to voters over a loudspeaker.

It was a day of promise and frustration, of high anxiety for some, confident relaxation for others. Here is how it went for a few of them:

RICK PAMPLIN

Rick Pamplin, an independent candidate in the 25th Congressional District, began his day in Palmdale by launching a 72-hour barnstorming tour in a motor home loaned by a supporter. It was a comfortable choice of transportation: the vast district encompasses the Antelope, Santa Clarita and northern San Fernando valleys.

Escorted by a 1950 Packard festooned with flags and banners, the motor home pulled up to a Wal-Mart store, loudspeakers blaring. A squad of campaign workers spilled out and thrust candy bars and flyers into the hands of startled shoppers.

Pamplin, a rotund screenwriter who backs Ross Perot, went off like a verbal machine gun:

“Hi, I’m Rick Pamplin. I live in Palmdale and I’m a Perot supporter. I talk to Dallas everyday. I’m the only non-politician in the race. I’m running against a wealthy attorney and millionaire businessman. I’m the only Antelope Valley guy running for this. Abortion? It’s a woman’s choice. Gun-control? I’m opposed to it.”

He even chatted up a man outside the store seeking contributions for a veterans group. “You a vet?” he asked.

The man shook his head no.

Undeterred, Pamplin unleashed another round: “I’m the only guy who doesn’t want to cut military spending. You heard about how they want to tear down the VFW in Santa Clarita? Terrible, terrible.”

One shopper was more interested in Pamplin’s wife, Cindy, a former television wrestler dressed in a bright red suit, than in the candidate. “I’d rather talk to you, pretty lady,” the man said to Cindy.

“Vote for me and you’ll see a lot of her,” Pamplin told him.

JAMES H. GILMARTIN

As about 40 campaign workers milled around him at a Democratic Party office in Canyon Country, James H. Gilmartin, the party’s nominee in the 25th Congressional District, rewarded each of them with an unexpected gift: black plastic calculators in the shape of a cellular phone. His workers seemed delighted with the gadgets, which were donated by a supporter. The public was sometimes a harder sell.

After also picking up white plastic bags stuffed with campaign literature, Gilmartin and his volunteers hit the streets. Gilmartin, an attorney who owns a 30-acre horse ranch, soon encountered a man wearing a T-shirt depicting a sailboat and lettered: “St. John’s Bay.”

“Ah, St. John’s Bay--I’ve been all over the world, but I never heard of that,” Gilmartin said.

“Me neither. I got it at Penney’s,” the man said, climbing in his car to go fishing.

Spotting a fancy white dress hanging in a garage, Gilmartin told housewife Angie Siguerza that his wife recently pulled her wedding dress out of mothballs, only to find it did not fit anymore.

Actually, Siguerza confided after Gilmartin strode down the block, the white gown is a First Communion dress.

Then Gilmartin ran into an acquaintance who manages the Probation Department office in downtown Los Angeles. “I’m registered as a Democrat, but I don’t vote a straight ticket,” Julie Connor told him.

Later, she confided to a reporter: “I don’t vote for attorneys if i can possibly avoid it. They are true politicians.”

Unfazed, Gilmartin predicted he will win. “This year,” he said, “no one knows which way it’s going. “

HOWARD P. McKEON

Republican Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, widely regarded as the front-runner in the GOP-friendly 25th District, had the least physically strenuous day.

Walking into his campaign headquarters in a Canyon Country storefront Saturday afternoon, the first question McKeon asked was: “Did we get any mail?”--meaning any contributions, his campaign manager, Armando Azarloza explained.

McKeon then pulled out a leather-bound copy of a recent poll of 350 likely voters that showed him winning the race.

But McKeon is not taking the poll results for granted. As dozens of volunteers called voters and canvassed neighborhoods, he glad-handed voters at the Valencia Town Center, which contains one of the Western clothing stores McKeon and his four brothers own.

“Your mom must have fed you good,” said McKeon, standing in his store and talking to a particularly tall young man in a cowboy hat.

“We want you to come in here and buy boots and buy hats and then go vote for me.”

HORACE HEIDT

In the 40th Assembly District, a heavily Democratic area in the central-south San Fernando Valley, Republican Horace Heidt cruised Ventura Boulevard in the back of a flatbed truck, exhorting voters to back him.

From his truck a voice blared: “Vote for Horace Heidt! A new voice in the Valley!” His truck also blared a recorded song performed by his father, bandleader Horace Heidt, called “Get Out and Vote.”

Candidate Heidt attracted mixed reviews.

An elderly man wearing a baseball cap didn’t need much convincing.

“I worked with his dad at NBC,” said the man, who declined to give his name.

“Horace who?” asked a woman in her 20s.

Heidt’s Democratic opponent, Assemblywoman Barbara Friedman, did not appear in the Valley on Saturday, a spokeswoman said. Instead, she attended a large rally in Westwood sponsored by an abortion rights group.

Heidt complained that Friedman, a one-term lawmaker who is running in the Valley because her Los Feliz-area district was eliminated by reapportionment, “has done nothing” and “thinks she has it made.”

But he conceded he has an uphill struggle in the 40th District, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 54% to 35%. He added that he hasn’t been able to do as much campaigning as he wanted because of his job as bandleader for the Los Angeles Raiders.

CHRISTINE REED

In the 41st Assembly District, which covers the southwestern Valley, Republican Christine Reed stalked from synagogue to synagogue, trying to counter a mail brochure accusing her of not supporting Israel, sent to Jewish voters by allies of her Democratic rival, Assemblyman Terry B. Friedman of Encino.

In flyers delivered to rabbis at congregations in Woodland Hills, Agoura Hills and West Hills, Reed accused the Friedman campaign of a “last-minute smear attack.” Volunteers left the flyers on hundreds of car windshields throughout the district, which includes the Westside and is heavily Jewish.

The mailer, signed by Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky and Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) accused the former Santa Monica city councilwoman of voting against a 1982 city resolution that supported Israel’s right to secure borders.

Reed responded that she opposed the city taking positions on foreign policy issues and frequently voted against such resolutions as a matter of principle.

Reed said she supports Israel as “an important and valuable ally” in the Middle East. She included a letter from the head of a Jewish congregation in Venice calling her a strong supporter of Israel and friend of the local Jewish community.

But Friedman spokeswoman Karin Caves defended the mailer. “The vote speaks for itself,” Caves said. “She took a position against Israel. Now she wants to turn back the clock.”

DON ROGERS

For state Sen. Don Rogers, it was as though he was hardly running at all Saturday in the huge 17th Senate District.

A Republican in a heavily GOP area, Rogers made only one campaign appearance--a nighttime Mardi Gras parade in Barstow. The district includes parts of the Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys, all of Inyo County, eastern Kern County and western San Bernardino County.

His Democratic rival, Bill Olenick, a Los Angeles probation officer, didn’t campaign much either.

Olenick gave a pep talk to precinct-walkers in the Santa Clarita Valley, politicked briefly at the Valencia Town Center mall and later dropped off an ad at a Santa Clarita radio station. But today, he promised, he planned to hit a Wal-Mart in Victorville, a Target store in Hesperia and another Wal-Mart in Lancaster.

Asked what he planned to do today by way of campaigning, Rogers replied: “I usually try to keep that clear to go to church.”

Times staff writers John Chandler, John Johnson and Jeffrey L. Rabin contributed to this story.