<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : One Last Smoke Screen for Tass and Tobacco Backers

Two goodbys to warriors of the Cold War and the Smoke War.

Money problems are forcing the old Soviet news agency Tass to close the San Francisco bureau it has maintained since 1976. One thing has not changed: They’re still keeping secrets. New York bureau manager Yuri Romantsov would not comment on the San Francisco decampment: “We would rather not have this see the light of day at this time.”

Ditto the Tobacco Institute, the lobbying agency of the “stinking fume” industry, as a long-ago king of England called smoking. The institute has shuttered its Sacramento office and moved its staffer to Indianapolis.

Why leave a place that you’ve put more than $2.6 lobbying millions into over 17 years? From Washington, institute spokesman Walker Merryman: “We don’t regard that as anyone’s business but ours.” Anti-smokers should not read any kind of victory in this, Merryman warns: “Anyone who underestimates the industry’s or the institute’s ability to vigorously defend itself will be making a mistake indeed.”

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Ready for My Close-Up, Mr. De Mille: Willie Brown, star of podium, news conference, fund-raiser and California Channel, a man about to hit the term-limits wall, may have a career in TV, not unlike politico-video chameleons Pat Buchanan and Dave Gergen.

Speaker Brown, a San Francisco Democrat, has signed for a five-day-a-week talk show on KCRA, Sacramento’s NBC affiliate. He’s taped five pilot episodes, which the station will show to focus groups before deciding whether to debut the program at the end of next month, right after the “Today” show.

Some would argue that “The Willie Brown Show” has already been playing in the Assembly for the last 13 years.

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Fat City: Not here. People coming ashore from the ferry to Sausalito are greeted by signs reminding them just what kind of town it is. The Marin County hamlet has been nuclear-free and cholesterol-free for years. The first has worked--you don’t see the International Atomic Energy Agency hammering at the gates of Sausalito City Hall, do you? As for the second, it is still just a goal. But you might want to check any weapons-grade plutonium and sausages at the dock.

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Tree Season

California is the sixth-largest producer of Christmas trees in the nation. Here are the top six states, ranked by the total number of Christmas trees harvested in 1992. STATE: NUMBER OF TREES 1. Oregon: 7.9 million 2. Michigan: 6 million 3. North Carolina: 5.5 million 4. Washington: 3.7 million 5. Wisconsin: 3.2 million 6. California: 1.5 million Sources: State Christmas tree associations

Compiled by researcher TRACY THOMAS

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Stop the Music: No more will Jody Hansard have people yammering “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” at him every Yule. The Santa Barbara man’s front choppers were knocked out during horseplay when he was 11, and the replacements washed away 10 years later in a surfing wipeout. He never could afford new ones and learned to eat corn on the cob without them.

The only annoyance was that confounded song. “It’s always just bugged me no end.” Then one foggy pre-Christmas day, Santa Barbara dentist Ron Dinning heard the same song as he was shopping, and later saw Hansard’s gap-grinned picture on the wall of a Santa Barbara scuba shop.

“I don’t know anyone else without front teeth. I’ve never seen it before, especially in California.” Dinning decided to play both Santa and Tooth Fairy. He and his lab donated labor and materials so Hansard could spend Christmas with his family in New Mexico with a full set.

Hansard, who sells carpets and curtains to property management companies and hopes to open his own business, was stunned. “I can’t believe I’m actually gonna get some teeth. The big thing for me--I’m actually gonna be able to bite an apple.”

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Cool Aid: You’ll remember Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the Riverside County cryo-preservation firm that will keep a posthumous you on ice for a price, pending some future thaw. Now there’s a winner in Alcor and Omni magazine’s essay contest, Why I Should Be Preserved for Future Revival

James J. Baglivo of New Jersey, seriously injured in a car crash as a teen-ager, wrote that he wants to die with “the hope that I will awaken healthy and healed.” His prize: being preserved at minus-320 degrees Fahrenheit at Alcor, where more than two dozen bodies and heads are already in storage. The award is valued at $100,000 and is not collectible until death. Whether the tax man will wait until then for his share of the prize is unknown.

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EXIT LINE

“I went in there in good faith. I gave it my best.”

--Convicted felon Dickie Lynn Hibbitts, in the Riverside Press-Enterprise. Prosecutors are trying to figure out how, scant days after his probation ended on a felony conviction, Hibbitts wound up serving as jury foreman in a murder trial. Hibbitts’ jury found the man guilty.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.