Good Start Comes to a Dead End

Paul Ramirez, 6, came to the end of the road when he front-ended a picket fence in Santa Monica. His car is said to be the best-selling vehicle in America. It’s fuel-efficient and low-maintenance, but the range is limited.

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WALK THAT WALK: Hollywood Boulevard may be disappearing into a huge sinkhole, but the star-making machinery is still grinding.

A stab at sidewalk immortality is in the offing for hunky David Hasselhoff of the “Baywatch” TV show; slinky singer Whitney Houston; and Florence Henderson, mom of all moms of “Brady Bunch” fame.

The three were among a dozen entertainers who emerged triumphant from the deliberations of a top-secret committee headed by Johnny Grant, chairman of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce’s Walk of Fame Committee.

Meeting on June 30, the committee sifted through about 200 nominees to come up with their choices, including composer Elmer Bernstein and actors Danny Glover and Cicely Tyson in the motion picture category; Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz for TV; jazz guitarist George Benson in the recording category; actors Buddy Hackett, Hal Holbrook and Ray Walston for theater, former rock ‘n’ roll DJ Bob Eubanks, once host of TV’s “Newlywed Game,” for radio. Now it is up to the honorees, or their fan clubs, to come up with the $5,000 fee to install the mementos.

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THE WAXMAN FILES: Rep. Henry A. Waxman(D-Los Angeles) has found a new strategy for taking on King Tobacco.

Before the November election, Waxman regularly attacked the industry as chairman of a House subcommittee on health. But the Republicans took over and tossed out Waxman and his crusade. This week, Waxman took to the floor of the House with a stack of secret Philip Morris documents. The paperwork showed, he said, that the nation’s largest cigarette company tracked hyperactive third-graders as potential future smokers and gave electric shocks to college students to determine if it would make them smoke more.

Waxman called for regulation of tobacco to protect children from becoming addicted to it.

In a statement, Philip Morris said it could not respond directly to Waxman, since it had not seen the documents in question, but in general defended studying the reasons consumers buy products. “In fact, we would be criticized as irresponsible if we had not conducted these studies,” the company stated.