Judging from the RSVP, MB is no...

Judging from the RSVP, MB is no FOB: After Bill Clinton was photographed playing beach volleyball in the Santa Barbara area after the election, the Manhattan Beach City Council passed a flowery resolution inviting the President to the city’s summer volleyball tournament.

Recently, the White House “director of scheduling and advance” sent the President’s regrets via a form letter.

We wonder if Clinton was concerned that he was being asked to compete in the event. You may recall that during Spiker Willie’s aforementioned volleyball appearance, a spectator was overheard asking: “Which one is he?”

Clinton called out: “The one with the white legs.”

*

His Eminence, traffic tipster: No sooner had KNX radio’s Bill Keene broadcast a morning report of a traffic tie-up than he was corrected by a listener with a car phone: Cardinal Roger M. Mahony.

“I had said there was a vehicle fire out at the Westlake Boulevard exit of the Ventura Freeway,” Keene recounted. “And he phoned to say there was no tie-up--it was just an overheated car off the side of the road.

“Then I started getting calls from Thousand Oaks tipsters who said it (a disabled car) was backing up traffic on the 23--that’s the little Moorpark Freeway. But I wasn’t about to correct a cardinal.”

Keene knows that Mahony is one of his tipsters, by the way, because he once made the mistake of reporting that the prelate had phoned “from his chauffeured limousine.” Mahony sent Keene a note saying that he traveled about in an “unpretentious Oldsmobile”--and did his own driving.

*

This roscoe for hire: We mentioned the other day that the San Fernando Valley area of Roscoe (now part of Sun Valley) owed its name to the long-ago robbery of a Southern Pacific train. But, as authors Charles Bearchell and Larry Fried wrote, accounts differed “as to whether Roscoe was the name of the robber, the engineer of the train or a brakeman who lived nearby.”

Readers Don Way and Georgia Lee offer another theory that could also be linked to the robbery: Roscoe is a slang term for a gun.

If that was the reason for choosing Roscoe, we can understand why townsfolk elected not to call it Gat.

*

Water, water, nowhere: One of the most talked-about aspects of Dodger Stadium when it opened in 1962 was its lack of drinking fountains for spectators. There wasn’t a single one--a condition that the team corrected at the insistence of health authorities. The other day, a colleague of ours visited Sam Lynn Stadium, home of the Dodgers’ farm team in Bakersfield, and discovered that the ballpark had just one drinking fountain--and it was broken. Felt like old times, he said.

*

No one’s perfect: We misspelled photographer Paul Cate’s name in Tuesday’s paper, so, just to show we can get it right, we’re running another of his snapshots today. The sign, which is outside an Elks’ Lodge, isn’t an exalted example of good spelling, either.

miscelLAny:

Captain Cook, the Grand Poohbah of the L.A.-based National Hobo Assn., sent us a press release announcing: “We have a new Hobo Computer Bulletin Board, 1-619-949-4025, for high-tech hobos.” Just the medium to swap recipes for hobo stroganoff.