THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Loyal and Hearty : Randy Skretvedt of Buena Park has spent most of his 36 years combing the past to chronicle the history of vintage movies, old-time radio, and dance bands of the early 20th Century. What started as a hobby has become his livelihood.

It isn’t difficult spotting Randy Skretvedt in the throng of Laurel and Hardy fans gathered at the bottom of the famous flight of stairs in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles.

He’s the one wearing the red fez--a fez actually worn in Laurel and Hardy’s “Sons of the Desert,” their 1933 parody of a fraternal organization’s national convention. As Skretvedt says of his gold-embroidered headwear: “This is the crowd for it.”

And the 36-year-old broadcaster and show business historian from Buena Park is the man for the crowd: members of the Sons of the Desert--the international Laurel and Hardy fan club--who are on a pilgrimage to the steep stairway where Stan and Ollie moved that recalcitrant piano in their Oscar-winning short “The Music Box.”

A connoisseur of early 20th-Century-vintage entertainment, Skretvedt is a recognized expert on the legendary comedy duo and the author of “Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies,” his recently updated book chronicling the making of their films.

Skretvedt, himself a member of the Sons of the Desert since he was 12, had been invited to be guest lecturer at the recent gathering honoring the 105th anniversary of the birth of Stan Laurel.

“Randy is certainly among the top authorities when it comes to film history, the history of comedies and especially the silents and comedies of the 1930s,” says Don Northcutt, head of the San Juan Capistrano-based Fixer Uppers chapter of the Sons of the Desert (or grand sheik of the Fixer Uppers tent in the parlance of the Sons of the Desert, whose 150 chapters around the world are named after Laurel and Hardy movies).

But before Skretvedt shares behind-the-scenes stories of Laurel and Hardy during his 45-minute slide show at the nearby San Antonio Winery, he and more than two dozen chapter members stop by the stairway on Vendome Street just below Sunset Boulevard.

And, loyal Sons that they are, most walk--or run--up the famous flight of stairs, counting the steps as they go. Even Skretvedt, no stranger to the stairway, gets into the act--just to “verify” that there really are 131 steps.

“This is one of our few opportunities to do a little time traveling and actually be at a locale where Laurel and Hardy made one of their films,” he says afterward. “You can literally walk in their steps.”

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Skretvedt has been walking in the steps of vintage American entertainers since he first encountered Laurel and Hardy on his folks’ black and white DuMont TV set when he was 4.

Inspired by the background music in Laurel and Hardy and Little Rascals films, he began buying vintage 78s at thrift shops when he was 7. At 9, he started accumulating what has grown into a collection of 250 comedy films on Super 8 and 16 millimeter.

In high school, he screened comedy shorts for students once a week during the lunch hour and even wrote a term paper on “The Evolution of Laurel and Hardy.”

By 19, he had a contract from St. Martin’s Press for his first book--”Steve Martin: the Unauthorized Biography”--one of his rare literary forays into contemporary show business.

Except for a two-year stint clearing tables and serving as host at the steak house at Knott’s Berry Farm in the late ‘70s, he has managed to avoid holding down a traditional job. Instead, the 1982 Cal State Fullerton communications graduate has succeeded in turning his hobby into his livelihood:

* He edits and publishes Past Times, a quarterly 36-page newsletter devoted to vintage movies, old-time radio and dance bands of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s.

* He hosts “Forward Into the Past” on KSPC-FM (88.7) (the Pomona College radio station) Sunday afternoons from 2 to 5 p.m. The 13-year-old program, he says, “is kind of the audio version of the Past Times newsletter,” in which he plays musical recordings and old-time radio shows from the ‘20s through the ‘40s.

* He co-hosts and co-writes “The Sunset Review,” a comedy program that precedes his KSPC show and is set in a fictitious California town called Merkis Palms, “the town that time remembers but people forget.”

* He co-owns a mail-order business, Vintage Sound Works, which sells CDs, LPs and tapes of music from the ‘20s through the ‘40s.

* He has written or co-written three books: The 1980 biography of Steve Martin, which he co-wrote with former Orange County writers Jeff and Greg Lenburg; the Laurel and Hardy book, first published in 1987 and updated last year, and the “Nostalgia Entertainment Source Book,” a 1991 entertainment directory co-written with Jordan Young of Anaheim that lists archives and companies that “have to do with all this great old stuff.”

Locally, Skretvedt is known as the grand sheik of the “Unaccustomed As We Are” tent, the Buena Park-based chapter of the Sons of the Desert. He became chapter head when he was 15 and except for a couple of years off has “always been the guy who brings the films and puts the programs together.”

His more public claim to fame is having been an on-camera expert in the 1991 British TV documentary “Stan Laurel: The Last Laugh,” which originally aired in this country on the Bravo channel and which continues to turn up frequently on A&E.;

Despite the flurry of activities, Skretvedt’s income is modest. The radio shows are done on a volunteer basis. Vintage Sound Works was only recently launched. And the approximately $10,000 a year he receives in royalty checks from his Laurel and Hardy book, he says, is still more than he makes from publishing Past Times: “As a friend of mine says, ‘I enjoy a very low standard of living.’ ”

Skretvedt, who is single, operates with a relatively low overhead: He still lives--and works--in his boyhood home in Buena Park, his parents having retired and moved to Lompoc in 1988.

“I’m not getting rich by any means, but it’s a way to perpetuate these things that I think are important,” he says. “I’m kind of the Johnny Appleseed of nostalgia entertainment to keep people aware of all these things--and to introduce younger people to all these older kinds of music and old films and radio drama.”

He’s also known to do a mean Stan Laurel impression.

Skretvedt’s friends, most of whom share his interest in vintage entertainment, describe him as warm, open and friendly--with a quick wit and a penchant for puns.

He provides the voices of the various townspeople on “The Sunset Review” and easily mimics the rapid-fire Oklahoma twang of the late T. Marvin Hatley, the Hal Roach Studio composer who wrote Laurel and Hardy’s theme music, “The Kuku Song.” Hatley and Skretvedt became friends, which led to Skretvedt’s corralling Hatley’s music in a limited-edition album in 1982.

Skretvedt’s knowledge of vintage entertainment is encyclopedic. And when he name-drops, it’s a name guaranteed to tax even the best trivia champ. He is, for example, writing liner notes and helping design the CD booklets for two reissue albums: One features Gene Austin, “the guy who sang ‘My Blue Heaven.’ ” The other features Milton Brown and the Brownies, a Western swing band from the mid-’30s.

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Skretvedt’s collections and various enterprises have literally taken over his ‘50s-vintage, three-bedroom tract house. Taking a guided tour is akin to walking through an archive.

The living room alone houses about 4,000 LPs--reissues of material originally recorded between 1925 and 1945.

“That’s the key period,” he points out, “because that’s when I think the quality of songwriting was at its highest level and you just had a whole bunch of wonderful, unique entertainers from vaudeville or Broadway or from the movies. It was not a really happy time over all in the country’s history, but for some reason the entertainers of that period were really at a high point.”

His collection of 3,000 78s--dance band and period personality and comedy records--dominates one of the spare bedrooms. His Laurel and Hardy collection--”endless dolls, toys, knickknacks and other ephemera”--are displayed in his bedroom. And 1,500 LPs of old-time radio shows, comedy albums and various other recordings are stored in another spare bedroom.

He calls that room Command Central. It is where he spends more than 40 hours a week writing and editing the newsletter, which has 2,500 subscribers.

His readership--and his fortunes--could soon be on the upswing, however. In exchange for Past Times running a program guide for a nationally syndicated old-time radio show, he’ll gain access to the Chicago-based company’s database of cassette and CD customers: some 175,000 old-time radio fans.

The majority of Past Times readers are in their mid-30s to mid-50s. But some fans of vintage entertainment are even younger--like the two young boys Skretvedt met who are crazy about Fanny Brice and her famous character Baby Snooks.

“It’s kind of fun to see kids that young interested in something from that period,” he says. “It kind of reminds me of me.”

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Skretvedt, an only child, says his parents always supported his fascination with vintage entertainers.

Before he learned to drive, his father would chauffeur him to Sons of the Desert meetings in Los Angeles. And when he became the teen-age grand sheik of the then-only Sons tent in Orange County, his mother would bring refreshments and make centerpieces for the group’s annual banquet.

Spencer and Zelda Skretvedt say they’re not surprised that their son’s infatuation with vintage entertainment has not diminished.

“We always figured he was born 50 years too late,” says Zelda Skretvedt. “The era he’s interested in just seems to be all that he’s ever been interested in.”

Spencer Skretvedt, a retired senior cost accountant for the Brunswick Corp. in Costa Mesa, illustrates his son’s early love of Laurel and Hardy with a story:

A Brunswick co-worker suggested that Randy, then 8, appear in an amateur talent-night contest the employees were holding at a local pizza parlor.

His show-biz-crazy kid put together a Tiny Tim impression, complete with ukulele and wig. But as his son’s time to go on stage drew near, Spencer Skretvedt says, he could see that Randy was getting nervous. He walked him outside to the car for a father-son pep talk and a “modest bribe.”

“Randy, if you do your bit on Tiny Tim, I’ll give you $50 to buy Laurel and Hardy films,” his father recalls telling him.

His son’s eyes widened. “You will? “

Says the elder Skretvedt: “I opened the door and he practically ran back inside the pizza parlor.” And, he adds, “he went over real big.”

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Skretvedt’s interest in preserving show business history took hold not long after he started attending Sons of the Desert meetings. Former Laurel and Hardy colleagues such as comedians Babe London and Mantan Moreland were often guest speakers.

“They always had these guests who were telling these wonderful stories and nobody else was doing anything really to preserve it, and that kind of frustrated me: Here are all these people telling you wonderful bits of history that nobody else could tell you and it’s essentially just going out in the ozone and being lost forever unless somebody tapes it.”

So young Skretvedt began bringing along a tape recorder.

Fellow show-biz historian Jordan Young recalls first becoming aware of Skretvedt at a Sons of the Desert banquet 20 years ago.

Young says he was escorting Laurel and Hardy director George Marshall when he noticed “this kid with this tape recorder sort of hanging around Marshall and trying to get quotes from him. Randy would have been 16 then. I didn’t know what he was up to, but I had done this exclusive interview with Marshall and didn’t appreciate it.”

It was Young’s Moonstone Press (since renamed Past Times Publishing Company) that published Skretvedt’s Laurel and Hardy book. And, until recently, Young served as publisher and executive editor of the Past Times newsletter.

“Randy is a great sounding board for ideas,” says Young. “If you want to brainstorm anything, he’s the first person I’ll go to to bounce an idea off or get a reaction from. I can always depend on him for good, intelligent feedback.”

Skretvedt and Young have teamed up to write an oral history of the comedy and dramatic radio shows of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Over the past six years, they have interviewed more than 100 radio actors, writers, directors, sound effects men, ad agency representatives and network executives.

But while Skretvedt appears to live and breathe vintage entertainment, don’t get the idea he is consumed by the past.

There are people, he acknowledges, “who can have an unhealthy interest in this.” But there’s no need to call a doctor for Skretvedt.

“I enjoy and appreciate a lot of contemporary culture,” he says. “I’m not a real big fan of slasher movies or grunge rock or stuff like that, but I’m glad that I live in the period that I do, because modern technology makes it much easier for us to access these old things.”

“I’m not sitting here wringing my hands and going, ‘Oh, it’s not like the old days.’ ” he says. “These are the good old days as far as I’m concerned.”

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Randy Skretvedt

Background: Age 36, single. Born in Long Beach; lives in Buena Park.

Passions: Laurel and Hardy, old-time radio, the music of the late ‘20s through the ‘40s, broadcasting and writing.

On vintage entertainment: “There is a certain timeless quality to a lot of this stuff. If it’s good, it stays good. There’s a lot of it too that has not dated real well. I’ve got to be honest and say that. But it’s like that with anything. There’s a certain amount that’s wonderful and timeless, and there’s a certain amount that’s not so good.”

On his mission: “My whole motivation really is to get younger people aware of this, because I think that [young] Americans just haven’t been exposed to this period of our own culture. They might know something about the ‘50s with Elvis and James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, but anything prior to that is just ancient history and is not known. I just don’t want this stuff to be forgotten.”

On his continued fascination with Laurel and Hardy: “I know that when I watch a Laurel and Hardy movie now, I see more than I did when I was 5 years old. When you’re 5 and see Laurel and Hardy, all you really react to is the slapstick and the gags, and when you’re growing up as a kid, you are probably more sympathetic toward Stan Laurel, because that’s more whom you’re like, and as you mature and become an adult, you’re probably more sympathetic to Hardy because that’s who you are more like. Hardy is kind of the parent who has to rein in the misfit child. So it’s sort of a thing where you see different facets of it as you mature, and that’s probably why it stays with me.”