Cheese burglar?As if the Southland’s image hasn’t...

Cheese burglar?As if the Southland’s image hasn’t suffered enough, we now learn there’s a rival claimant for the invention of the cheeseburger.

American Heritage magazine, as we have previously pointed out, gives Pasadena the nod. The magazine related how a chef named Lionel Sternberger daringly tossed a slice (variety unknown) on a burger in the early 1920s “and lo! the cheeseburger sizzled to life.”

The inspiring story still brings a tear to our eye.

But Diane Balkin, an extensive collector of cheeseburger knickknacks, wrote to point out that Denver has a granite monument stating: “On this site in 1935 Louis Ballast created the cheeseburger.”

She sent along a newspaper article recalling that, before turning to cheese, Ballast had experimented “with sauces, tomatoes and other variations. He even tried peanut butter and chocolate bars in search of the perfect topping. One customer, he said later, became so enamored of the peanut butter burger that he would eat nothing else.”

Ballast even is said to have registered cheeseburger with the secretary of state’s office although Balkin, a chief deputy district attorney in Denver, says she has been unable to verify that claim.

We plan to do some investigating ourselves. What about the possibility that Sternberger’s trade secret--admittedly not that complicated--was passed on to Ballast? Also, while we’re at it, how legitimate is Denver’s claim to the omelet?

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Mystery of the Day: Only in L.A. will reach into its Cave of Wonders and pull out some fine gifts for the first fax-sender (213 237-4712) and the first letter-writer to identify this model of a would-be L.A. landmark. It never got off the ground.

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No snow jobs here: Of the big chill in the East, Kevin Cowherd of the Baltimore Sun writes: “The good thing about the terrible winter we’ve had is that it gives the people in Los Angeles something to laugh about. . . . People in L.A. can pick up the paper and see a picture of some poor slob shoveling snow in Baltimore and think: “God, can you imagine living there? Why don’t those people just move?”

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Nothing like a batch of tasty oatmeal quakies: The Jan. 17 wake-up call has inspired a whole line of earthquake products, so why not some 6.8 sweets? Toni Duncan of Hidden Hills says that the quake “dumped food from our pantry and refrigerator onto the middle of the kitchen floor--flour, sugar, oatmeal, milk, eggs.” Duncan scooped up the mess, poured it “onto a cookie sheet and baked it.”

We presume her kitchen floor is usually clean enough, as the saying goes, to cook on.

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His ratings for this performance aren’t in yet: A caller to KNX radio who warned of a traffic jam in Malibu was Chevy Chase, the former talk show host.

miscelLAny:

The Anxiety Disorders Assn. of America sent Christine Wash of L.A. a somewhat anxious “special bulletin” noting that its March 18 conference in Santa Monica has “added a special plenary session . . . ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the Los Angeles Earthquake.’ ”