<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : Hayden Campaign: Reach Out and Nab Someone?

Tom Hayden’s spontaneous combustion campaign for governor created an eleventh-hour scramble for newly minted campaign manager Duane Peterson. The day before what might or might not be the big announcement, Peterson hurriedly rented a campaign office, computers and fax machine, opened a bank account, ordered up some official stationery, found a site for the next day’s news conference (and “finding a function room in the San Fernando Valley was like booking a ballroom in Sarajevo”) and at 11 p.m. found himself standing at an all-night copying shop as they created a 20-foot-long “Tom Hayden for Governor” banner.

Everything in the just-add-mineral-water-and-stir campaign was ready. Except the phones.

Ah, but not for nothing does Hayden come out of the counterculture. In the back of an alternative Sacramento weekly, Peterson found an ad for a voice mail service--they answer their phone lines with your taped message. But numbers turn over so fast that a previous user’s acquaintances hadn’t gotten the word, and for the first few days, the Hayden for Governor campaign “was getting pimps and dope dealers” calling. “If I’d had more time, we could’ve done a great television splash with Tom arresting some of these people,” Peterson said.

California Timber

Nearly 577 million board feet of saw timber were harvested from California’s national forests in fiscal year 1992-93, accounting for sales of $527.1 million, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Below are the five most common species of trees harvested from California’s federal lands:

TREE SPECIES HARVESTED* SALES *White fir 241.8 million $229.2 million *Ponderosa pine 177.2 million 155.4 million *Douglas fir 66 million 44.9 million *Sugar pine 55.8 million 40.3 million *Incense cedar 18.6 million 21.3 million

* In board feet. A board foot is equal to a board one foot square and one inch thick.

Source: U.S. Forest Service, Forest Management Division, San Francisco

Compiled by Times researcher TRACY THOMAS

And the dog ate everyone’s homework: Having followed Bobby Inman in withdrawing his name from nomination (for interim state superintendent of public instruction, though, not for secretary of defense), corporate takeover-meister Sanford Sigoloff accepted an appointment from Gov. Pete Wilson to the newly powerful State Board of Education. However, the first meeting under Sigoloff’s tenure went off without him. Sigoloff was off skiing--at an annual family reunion he had postponed once before, for the superintendent confirmation hearings that never happened. He couldn’t put his family through that again; “I’m willing to work for $1 a year,” he said through a spokesman, “but some commitments I can’t change.”

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Out of bounds: Hitting nine out of 10 would win somebody’s lottery. From the Bureau of Land Management, it wins a $1,500 fine. Over environmentalists’ objections, makers of the movie “Terminal Velocity” were allowed to drop 10 Cadillacs by parachute from a helicopter into the Saline Valley. One of the Cads went off course, landing in the off-limits Inyo Mountains Wilderness Study Area, home to the ancient bristlecone pine, a tree that has been known to live for 4,000 years.

Interscope cleaned up the “virtually undamaged” site with rakes and brooms. The fine probably amounted to one week’s doughnut money on a movie set, and Interscope was scolded for not having wind-monitoring people to keep this from happening, and was made to clean up some spilled antifreeze from another car. Deja vu all over again: Movie-makers on Oliver Stone’s film “The Doors” scandalized preservationists after brush-on fake Indian pictographs that were supposed to vacuum right off the walls of Mitchell Cavern in the Mojave Desert did not, and had to be scrubbed out.

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Storytime: In the year’s first political TV spot, Republican Michael Huffington, half-term Santa Barbara congressman now running for U.S. Senate, extols “The Book of Virtues,” an 831-page collection of classic instructive stories, poems and parables on qualities that seem to have become, for some people, as obsolete as bustles--responsibility, compassion, honesty and such.

It doesn’t hurt Huffington that the editor of the book is William J. Bennett, secretary of education and chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities under Ronald Reagan--and a Republican icon.

One of the moral tales in the book being extolled by the millionaire former banker and son of a wealthy oilman is Herodotus’ story of the pride that went before the fall of King Croesus, once the richest man in the world.

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City limits: The city of Davis, which prides itself on its enlightened, progressive approach to trees, recycling, smoking and nuclear weapons, among other things (it favors the first two, opposes the second two), is puzzling over personal noise: the snoring sound emanating from an upstanding Davis woman who was recently fined $50 for violating the city’s noise ordinance after a neighbor in the next condo complained (although her husband and children have not).

On another PC front, a former Davis mayor and City Council member, James L. Stevens Jr., now a Yolo County Superior Court judge, was reprimanded by the state Commission on Judicial Performance for offensive conduct that included handing his longtime court stenographer a rotting zucchini and then firing her.

EXIT LINE

“If you had asset forfeiture, the federal government would now be operating the Matterhorn.” --Assembly Speaker Willie Brown on the consequences of asset forfeiture, which is occasionally proposed for companies that hire illegal immigrants, which Brown alleged the Walt Disney Co. had once done. Quoted in Harper’s magazine’s February story on Sacramento politics.