Snapshots of life in the Golden State. : Made-for-Campaign Caper Gets Double Exposure

Proving that recyling is practiced even in the highest quarters, the same made-in-Texas, black-and-white, staged footage of a horrific-looking abduction shows up in get-tough anti-crime campaign ads for both our own Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, and Texas gubernatorial challenger George W. Bush, whose party affiliation is what you’d expect with such parentage. Bush’s ad declares, “I do not want Texas to look like New York, California or anywhere else.” Except, perchance, in campaign spots.

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From the Bear Valley Voice: File it under “big stories we missed.”

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Leaf storm: This one surely wins the palm as the most arcane O.J. Simpson-related news to date. New York magazine notes that the cover photo of “Trees of Brentwood Park”--a book ordered up by the tree committee of the Brentwood Park Property Owners’ Assn., with a fittingly exclusive printing of 750--is the lovely lemon-scented gum tree that put down roots . . . on the grounds of O.J. Simpson’s estate.

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Uncle Pete and Aunt Kathleen want you: Computers, those merry pranksters of the ‘90s, spit out this mass-mailing curiosity:

“This is your Membership Card. We will send your official plastic membership card after you join the Governor Pete Wilson 1994 Re-Election Team.” Below, a card designates Ms. Kathleen Brown as a member of the Governor Pete Wilson 1994 Re-Election Team.

Brown, for her part, is recruiting support in another way. Classified ads for “activists” appeared in the help-wanted sections of major California papers offering staff positions in San Diego, L.A., the Central Valley and the Bay Area. That may all be for just one job; those whistle-stop bus campaign tours make for a punishing schedule.

Smoking-Related Deaths

Cigarette smoking, the single most preventable cause of premature death in the United States, killed 42,574 Californians in 1990. That put us in 27th place among smoking-related death rates nationally, with 366.3 deaths per 100,000 people.

Here are the states, plus the District of Columbia, with the highest and lowest smoking-related death rates in 1990 and their national ranking:

State Deaths per 100,000 1. Nevada 478.1 2. Dist. of Columbia 444.7 3. Tennessee 442.1 4. West Virginia 433.6 5. Kentucky 428.7 6. Alaska 398.2 27. California 366.3 49. New Mexico 287.7 50. Hawaii 257.2 51. Utah 218.0

Note: Includes deaths from cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory conditions and burn deaths among adults 35 or older.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Research by TRACY THOMAS

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The music of the night: The law still has not decided whether to take action against an Antioch man who, infuriated by the raucous music blaring (circa 3:50 a.m.) from a radio left on by three sleeping teen-agers, hopped a balcony divider, yanked the radio’s plug and threw the boom-box out the window onto the driveway 12 feet below.

Roger Garrett says he knocked on the wall and on the door, hollered, even tossed rocks to awaken the three young women, and finally concluded that they had departed, leaving the radio on.

“All I wanted to do was get it out of action.”

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The defenestration of Moscow: Idaho will not dignify with an answer--that is, file a response to--a $940,000 claim by a young San Jose man and his parents. The former student at the University of Idaho in Moscow, who was hurt when he “mooned” other students and fell out a window, argued in a lawsuit that the university was negligent for, among other failings, not warning students of the risks associated with upper-story dorm windows. Surely there’s something in the student handbook about gravity and open windows, next to the warning about blow-dryers in the bathtub.

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And on your left . . . An adopt-a-highway stretch between June Lake and Mammoth is brought to you by its donor, whose sign declares him or her to be “another of them June Lake liberals.”

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The long goodby: Bidding farewell to outgoing state Sen. David A. Roberti (What? He’s still here?), his successor to the Senate leadership, Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward), likened the formalities of farewells in the upper house to “attending your own funeral . . . and getting time for rebuttal.” Roberti, the first big California oak felled by term limits, said gallantly of the measure, “The people are sovereign--even when they are wrong.”

And for those for whom political oblivion is still not enough, there is Martin Easton, a Contra Costa County man so miffed at retiring Santa Barbara Sen. Gary K. Hart’s support of anti-handgun measures that he has formed the Californians Against Gary Hart political action committee. Easton was quoted in CJ Weekly: “We want our enemies to know that they can’t just introduce (bills) like this and then think they can retire . . . to spend time with their families.” Not even if it’s quality time, showing the kids how to clean the family arsenal?

EXIT LINE

“We’ve got an agreement that the first guy to fall in down there has got to scream all the way down so we know how deep it is.”

--Bob Zalusky, a retired 747 pilot and adventurer, and member of a team searching beneath Mt. Konocti in Lake County for what they hope is the world’s largest underground cavern. Quoted in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.