Sen. Ted Stevens

Re “Not Exactly Surf City, but Getting There,” The Washington Connection, Jan. 27: Your reporter and, regrettably, Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) and Brian Bilbray (R-San Diego) are sadly uninformed of the California surfing exploits, well before their time, of another member of Congress, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who grew up in Manhattan Beach. In 1949, when I was serving as a newly appointed assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, Jim Carter, the U.S. attorney, was approached by Ted, who requested the opportunity of working in the summer break between his second and third years at Harvard Law School in the U.S. attorney’s office as what has since been established as an intern. Jim prevailed upon the Justice Department to permit the hiring at a salary of $1 for the summer, provided that Ted return the dollar at summer’s end!

Ted was assigned to assist me in preparing a groundbreaking civil income tax suit against actress Bette Davis, in an attempt to establish the principle that a wife, under a sufficient factual showing of control, rather than the husband, could be the manager of the marital community property under California law.

During one summer weekend Ted lured me, a Chicago native, to join him and drive down the coast highway to a bluff at San Onofre, then carry a 90-pound surfboard down the cliff to the beach, where the later-famous surfing pioneers were riding the big breakers. Ted, an esteemed member of that exclusive fraternity, was, to my astonished eyes, as accomplished as any of them. (Although we did not convince the court of the propriety of our legal position of equality of spouses, the Legislature later remedied that inadequacy.)

EDWARD R. McHALE

West Covina

Regarding your article about the surfing congressmen: Let me put it in terms any surfer would understand--Rohrabacher’s a kook!

ERIC M. SEELIG

Redondo Beach