Student body right . . . or...

Student body right . . . or wrong: The alumni publication Trojan Family quotes columnist Art Buchwald, a onetime USC student, as saying: “Although I never participated on any of USC’s great teams I did make a vital contribution to their athletic program: I took the English tests for the football team.”

This is a serious charge and we call on the Los Angeles City Council to investigate, though, of course, Council President John Ferraro will have to absent himself from the proceedings. Ferraro was a USC football player when Buchwald attended.

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Your basic entry-level job?: KABC-TV (Channel 7) is advertising in--where else?--Daily Variety for a weekend anchor job. Judging from the ad, previous work in front of a camera doesn’t seem to be an absolute necessity.

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Fastest gun in L.A.: It looks like a big year for that noted Angeleno, Wyatt Earp, who died 65 years ago Thursday at age 80 at his modest Mid-City residence. His gunplay at the O.K. Corral has inspired two new movies, “Tombstone” and the yet-to-be-released “Wyatt Earp” (starring Kevin Costner).

But let’s not overlook his L.A. years.

Author Glenn G. Boyer points out that “even in his 60s, Wyatt continued to be involved in his usual blend of gambling and adventure.”

In 1911, Earp and two other men “were arraigned in L.A. for operating a bunco game” at the Auditorium Hotel near Pershing Square, Boyer wrote.

Earp was later “absolved of complicity.” It may be, Boyer says, that Earp “innocently strolled onto the scene where a couple of men, possibly his acquaintances, were running their racket.”

Police, by the way, didn’t know they had arrested a celebrity. Earp initially gave them an alias--William Stapp.

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More on the Wild, Wild West Coast: The gunfighter spent his later period in the Southland as a miner, gambler, horse owner, real estate agent and screen adviser. More tidbits:

* Before the turn of the century, he raced horses at tracks up and down the coast, including the one at Exposition Park (now the site of the Coliseum). Occasionally, he rode in harness races himself.

* He learned to drive an automobile at the age of 70, his wife, Josephine, wrote. She said that on one mining trip through the desert, Earp pulled out a gun and shot a bull. It wasn’t a drive-by, though--the foolish animal had attacked the car.

* Screenwriters working on Westerns occasionally sounded him out for advice but, according to Josephine, he found most to be “damn fool dudes.”

* In 1928, he voted for Al Smith for President at an L.A. precinct because, like Smith, he opposed Prohibition. Up until then, Earp had been a Republican (a law-and-order Republican, we scarcely need add).

* Earp and his wife lived in at least nine residences in L.A.--all rentals. He died at 4000 1/2 W. 17th Street, near the corner of Washington and Crenshaw boulevards, with his boots off. Among the pallbearers at his funeral were Western actors Tom Mix and William S. Hart.

miscelLAny:

Barbara Blaine of Claremont came across a court record of a bankruptcy proceeding being handled by the L.A. law firm of Richard M. Moneymaker.