In Bay Area, These Guys Aren’t the Grateful ‘Dead’

The “Baby Jane” tale of an Oakland anti-drug crusader burned in an arson fire that burned her home, of the governor putting up a $50,000 reward, then word of police finding the body of her sister, the real anti-drug crusader, tucked in a freezer like a side of beef . . . astounding as it is, it’s not the Bay Area’s only report of death confused, or, in Mark Twain’s words, exaggerated.

A few days after giving money to a fund to help a dead friend’s family, a San Francisco man ran into his supposedly defunct pal on the street. “I just paid $10 for this guy, and he’s alive,” John R. Lovelady, a lieutenant of inspectors for the Alameda County district attorney, quoted the man as saying.

The Oakland chapter of the Vietnam Chinese Mutual Aid & Friendship Assn. stands accused of collecting $118,788 for 13 members it falsely claimed were dead. (Such societies are informal insurance firms, collecting money--usually around $10--from other members upon an associate’s death.)

The casual street encounter may have proved the small-world maxim; investigators say that only L.A. and San Francisco chapter members were billed death fees for the 13 “dead” Oakland men, whose friends would presumably have known better.

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Card sharp: And now on deck for the big cloture vote, it’s Jaaaaames Rogan, a rookie out of Glendale, playing assistant majority whip for the Golden State GOP in Washington. . . .

If serial killers and S&L; badmen can have their own trading cards, why not Beltway Boys?

Rogan is a Republican, onetime assemblyman and a believer in former New York Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton’s maxim that everyone should have the chance to be on a baseball card. Rogan is one of four or five congressional patrons of Bouton’s New Jersey trading-card company, whose business, says Big League Cards manager Karen Wilson, “is to put anyone on a baseball card.”

Not that the legislator with the Will Rogers haircut needs to blow his own horn. Barely two weeks after he took office, MSNBC named him one of the Top 10 political stars of the next century, although with typical Beltway-centric geography it listed Glendale as on the “outskirts” of Los Angeles.

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Scaaaaab: Reports of revived union vigor have reached Mills College in Oakland, where a stalwart of Teamsters Local 70 spotted hundreds of scab workers clearing brush and laid down the law: Either the college compensates the union for all that scab labor, or the goats join the union.

Teamsters Local 70 Secretary-Treasurer Chuck Mack said that if the college wants to dodge a formal grievance, it has three options: Pay the union $10 an hour per goat for lost wages and benefits; talk to the union before contracting any further goat work; make the goats sign union cards.

Notwithstanding the fact that the goats do not bag the brush, but eat it, blackberry brambles, poison oak and all, having 500 goats chewing brush from the hillsides violates an agreement with the college, he says. Mack told the San Francisco Chronicle it was a “humorous reminder” of the college’s contractual obligations.

Memo to Mills: Pay up. Imagine having goats on a picket line.

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Yellow fever: For 37 years it’s rid Moorpark of mosquitoes. Now it can’t bear to get rid of itself.

The Moorpark Mosquito Abatement District board could not muster enough votes to do what local officials want it to do: disband and hand over its $1.4-million reserve to guess who.

Mosquitoes were practically the official airline of Moorpark in the days when turkey and chicken ranches and egg farms were the local cash crops. Now it’s subdivisions, and at the same meeting that the board voted to stay in the pest business, it applauded developers for helping to do away with those pest farms of yore in favor of nice clean housing tracts.

Lemonade Time

As you sip cool lemonade this summer--or even use lemon-scented furniture polish or air freshener--note that California and Arizona grow virtually all of the nation’s lemons for produce and for processing into juice and oils. Here, in tons, is how the states’ lemon trees have borne for the last 10 years.

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YEAR CALIF. ARIZ. ‘86-’87 817 270 ‘87-’88 646 139 ‘88-’89 615 144 ‘89-’90 600 106 ‘90-’91 563 159 ‘91-’92 573 193 ‘92-’93 775 167 ‘93-’94 787 197 ‘94-’95 760 137 ‘95-’96 798 194

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Source: National Agricultural Statistics Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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One-offs: By December, the last of 7,000 truckloads of spent bullets--80 years worth, fired into Ft. Ord’s sand dune practice ranges--should be carted off for recycling. . . . In an example of another life saved because Americans are smoking less, a Parkfield man is alive after a rival allegedly choked him unconscious, then poured gasoline on him but could not find a match to set him afire. . . . At least half a dozen years after it has become passe elsewhere, the potbellied pig is now a legal pet in Fresno households.

EXIT LINE

“Can any plausible excuse be found for the crime of creating the human race?”

--Mark Twain’s handwritten notation in his personal copy of Charles Darwin’s “Journal of Researches.” More than 125 volumes from Twain’s personal library--originally kept in Hollywood by Twain’s daughter, Clara--were bought at a San Francisco auction for $200,500 by the Hartford, Conn., museum that was Twain’s home.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.