Students who appreciate receiving an F: After...

Students who appreciate receiving an F: After Fresno State’s shocking 24-7 upset of USC in the Freedom Bowl, Fresno disc jockey Mitchell Chase wanted a memento of “our school’s greatest football victory.”

Chase asked Anaheim Stadium officials if he could have a jar of dirt. Going him one better, they said, why not take the 4-by-10-foot piece of end-zone sod that formed the letter “F” in Fresno’s name?

Chase gratefully hauled it home and, on Thursday, Fresno State announced it will replant the chunk in an honored place, perhaps in its own end zone.

“We have to find out from Anaheim what type of turf it is,” explained spokeswoman Deena Johnson. “We want to make sure it’s compatible with the grass where we plant it.”

Chase’s station, KTHT-FM, meanwhile, kept enough dirt for itself to fill up 102 “Bulldoggie Bags,” complete with letters of authentication, to give away to listeners.

The deejay doesn’t feel any sympathy for USC.

“We didn’t get very much respect from them,” he said. Chase noted that Fresnans were particularly irritated by the T-shirts of some USC students that proclaimed:

“Our Maids Went to Fresno State.”

List of the day: Our search for the origins of Alfred E. Neuman--inspired by the discovery of his smiling face on a 1932 L.A. postcard and on a 1914 San Francisco lithograph--prompted a note from D. Richard Baer of the Hollywood Film Archive.

Baer enclosed some responses that Mad magazine published in 1955 after asking its readers the source of the “What me worry?” cover boy.

Mad learned that Alfred first appeared on:

* Postcards “created some 30 years ago (1925) by an old friend of mine, the late Harry Spencer Stuff.”

* “Highway billboards around 1915 advertising a patent medicine called Papaya.”

* “Thom McAn ads for safety shoes, 16 years ago (1939).”

* The pages of “our high school biology text (as) an example, as I remember, of a person who lacked iodine.”

* A 1950s TV show hosted by “Garry Moore, who had (the) picture made by taking bits of features from all the members of the cast and putting them together.”

Well, that settles that.

*

What about the separation-of-sex-and-state principle? Daniel Brin of the Heritage Jewish Newspapers noticed an unusual “worship” series listed in West Hollywood’s city calendar (see excerpt). If it’s not a typo, Brin asks, “Is the sex a form of prayer or is it the answer to their prayers? Either way, you’ve got to admire the city’s progressive spirit.”

miscelLAny:

One of L.A.’s greatest rainstorms began on Dec. 24, 1861, and continued with only slight interruptions for 30 days, washing out bridges, drowning livestock and leaving most of the city under water. No doubt some official said afterward that the area’s drought still hadn’t ended.