Snapshots of life in the Golden State. : State Has Hearty Helping of Potential Political Parties

As the Reform Party inches toward life on the ballot, let us not forget the also-runnings: a dozen more political parties trying to get the secretary of state’s seal of approval, just as Ross (“I’ve trained my voice to sound like fingernails on a blackboard”) Perot’s party appears to have done.

In second place, “close but no incense,” is the Natural Law Party, whose loyalists, followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, had 45,000 registrants last month, more than halfway to the qualifying line.

The Puritan Party ( not a contradiction in terms, apparently) had 36 registered loyalists. And the Patriot Party had 456, the Real American 15, the Conservative 132, the American Christian 42, the Christian Heritage 15 and the Constitution Party 19. In another political universe, the Environmentalist Party registered 73, the Humanist Party 463, the Rock and Roll 70 and Unlimitism 2. Odd, that last one, because, according to the San Francisco Examiner, Unlimitism’s platform includes mining the asteroid belt with robotic technology to guarantee, among other munificences, a $100,000 minimum annual wage.

The Apple State

Last year California, with 10.7 million apple trees, was third in the nation in apple production, after Washington and New York. Granny Smith is the state’s most common variety. Here are the top apple-growing counties, ranked by 1994 tonnage. Value depends on such factors as age of trees and whether the apples are sold fresh or pressed for juice. *--*

COUNTY TONS VALUE 1.Kern 119,100 $56.2 million 2.Sonoma 71,841 $8.1 million 3.San Joaquin 58,600 $37.5 million 4.Santa Cruz 51,240 $8.7 million 5.Madera 34,047 $17 million 6.Fresno 31,400 $22.3 million 7.Stanislaus 26,600 $7.8 million 8.Tulare 19,000 $12.1 million 9.Contra Costa 18,310 $6.5 million 10.S.L. Obispo 16,420 $7.4 million

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Source: state Agricultural Statistics Service

Research by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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Family values: He may never be President, but boy, can he be a godfather.

Seven women in the Wilson Administration--either they or their husbands are in the “horseshoe,” the hallways around Gov. Pete Wilson’s inner sanctum--are pregnant, and three more have just given birth. The expectancy club lunches on alternate Fridays. One speaker was Kevin Sloat, the guv’s top legislative aide and a father. Topic: “When the Water Breaks,” and he wasn’t talking about the California Aqueduct.

“Something in the water” jokes have made the rounds, as have remarks about all the husbands traveling on the short-lived Wilson presidential campaign. Even more interesting would be whether the cluster has any relation to Wilson’s controversial veto of legislation that would have required insurance companies to cover some FDA-approved contraceptives for women employees. . . .

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Short takes: Security scanners at Fresno Air Terminal (luggage tag designation: FAT) X-raying the lunch bag of an L.A.-bound passenger found a foil-wrapped handgun stuffed inside a roasted chicken. . . . Under a new Disneyland labor contract, custodians who are tied to the roof to clean the top of Space Mountain will get an extra 50 cents an hour. . . . “This isn’t Palm Springs,” huffed a Pleasant Hill council member upon seeing that plans for a new hotel in the definitely Bay Area town called for landscaping with palm trees. . . . Policy statement from big-picture Democratic deal-maker and the craftiest, most accomplished political mind in Sacramento, Assemblyman Willie Brown, now mayoral candidate in San Francisco: “I support parking meters taking nickels, dimes and quarters.” . . . Also now accepting nickels, dimes and quarters from its renegade but magnanimous meter-feeding clown is Santa Cruz. Tired of all the jokes about busting a local clown, “Mr. Twister,” for defying the meter-ic system, the City Council donned squeaking red clown-noses and voted unanimously to repeal its ban on feeding other people’s meters.

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MIA culpa: Just in time for Bosnia, Berkeley has atoned for Vietnam. On Veterans Day, the city whose council members stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance during the war, and whose residents thronged Telegraph Avenue in protest and lofted a Viet Cong flag, reached a peace of its own, unveiling a hand-lettered memorial scroll to the 21 locals who died in the war.

“Berkeley? Our Berkeley?” was the reaction of the Oakland chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America, says its president, Bill Hodges. Council member Dona Spring, walloped by a police officer in a protest over the bombing of Cambodia, says this is “not an apology for our anti-war activity,” but recognition of war dead and a moment for “healing and closure.”

And Berserkley’s best-known anti-warrior, Woodstock and Navy veteran “Country Joe” McDonald, he of the anthematic “Fixin’ to Die Rag,” now finds that there are no “good guys or bad guys anymore. There’s just a lot of victims on all sides.”

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Many separations of degrees: Creating a new academic angst--tassel envy--American Demographics magazine lists Stanford as the nation’s No. 1 brainpower town. California partisans can cheer that Harvard and Yale aren’t even on the list of “101 Smartest Spots,” but it would be wrong: “Smartest” carries mostly small communities that have the highest percentage of adults 25 and older with at least a bachelor’s degree, and those Ivy titans don’t dominate their hometowns as others do.

At Stanford, the figure was 91%--the national average is 20%. Stanford-vicinity towns rated well: Portola Valley was fifth with 74.1%, Los Altos 27th place, Atherton 34th and Palo Alto 71st. Berkeley did not rate, but two of its wealthy bookend towns did: Kensington was 11th and Piedmont 71st.

EXIT LINE

“He never fired any rounds at anybody and he had no intention of doing so.”

--Attorney Lionel Hvolboll, filing a claim against Contra Costa County for $5 million on behalf of his client, jail escapee Michael R. Covey. Covey was shot six times by police because he didn’t drop his gun, even though he did come out with his hands up. Covey couldn’t drop the weapon, says Hvolboll, because he had taped it to his wrist.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.