Security for Air Force Two Causes Too Long a Wait

At least Al Gore wasn’t getting a haircut.

When a Thousand Oaks man rented a limo to surprise relatives arriving at LAX last week, he was pleasantly surprised himself to see the plane land right on schedule, just as he got to the Tom Bradley Terminal.

So Lance Spears waited. And waited. And the clock on his three-hour limo rental kept ticking.

Aboard the plane, his mother-in-law and 85-year-old grandfather looked out the window and saw an unmistakable white Air Force jet. “I said, ‘Maybe we’ll get to see the president,’ ” said Spears’ mother-in-law, Cookie Seidel. Just as she said so, the captain announced, “We can’t let you off because the vice president is here and for security purposes you have to stay on board”--a procedure routinely followed for the president and vice president.

It was a 45-minute wait to leave the plane, and another 45 minutes for the luggage. So the limo surprise wasn’t confined to Spears’ arriving relatives. He got surprised with a bill for an extra 70 bucks for the wait. “I mentioned that I should bill the White House, and write a note stating they owe me for that extra hour and a half delay.”

Watch for the fund-raiser.

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Who Haul? Prosecutors in the federal case against Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski have been putting together for evidentiary purposes a small model of the 10-by-12-foot homestead that Kaczynski built and occupied near Lincoln, Mont., according to documents filed by his defense attorneys, who find that inadequate.

They want the jury to see the real real estate, which was moved to a Montana Air Force base for safekeeping, and they say the feds aren’t cooperating. A footnote to the defense documents points out, “To date, defense counsel has not been able to arrange for storage of the cabin in Sacramento. Unless we are able to arrange for transportation and storage of the cabin, the defense will ask the court to permit a jury view of the cabin in Montana. Being able to see the actual cabin is essential to understanding the life and character of Mr. Kaczynski.”

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Homicide by Handgun

The handgun is the most common murder weapon in California, accounting for the majority of all homicides since 1989. These numbers include homicides by all handguns, whether they are the cheaply made so-called Saturday night specials or more expensive pistols.

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Handgun % of all Year homicides homicides 1987 1,333 45.5% 1988 1,332 45.2% 1989 1,684 53.3% 1990 1,903 53.4% 1991 2,255 58.2% 1992 2,426 62.0% 1993 2,609 64.0% 1994 2,441 66.0% 1995 2,288 65.0% 1996 1,866 64.1%

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Source: California Department of Justice, Sacramento

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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Garamendi-gigging: And you thought that radioactive leftovers were the only thing hot about the negotiations over the Ward Valley nuclear waste dump. . . .

A U.S. senator from Alaska who accuses the Clinton administration of stalling on the proposed Mojave Desert site in order to curry favor with California’s environmentally minded voters has found his own smoking Uzi: a 1996 memo to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt from Deputy Secretary John Garamendi--California’s former insurance commissioner who ran for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1994.

In the Feb. 21 memo, which Alaska Sen. Frank Murkowski read on the floor of the upper chamber, Garamendi writes, “We have taken the high ground” in the Ward Valley matter, and assures Babbitt, “I do not think Greenpeace will picket you any longer. I will maintain a heavy PR campaign until this issue is firmly won.”

In the heart of the memo, Garamendi fingers Gov. Pete Wilson as “the venal toady of special interests [radiation business].”

Garamendi was traveling and could not be reached for comment. But are biologists atwitter over a rare and newly discovered species in the amphibian world--the term-limited Sacramento venal toady?

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One-offs: Nevada County’s 251-foot covered bridge, built before the Battle of Gettysburg and one of only 14 remaining in California, is getting hurry-up repair work on last January’s storm damage, just in time to beat this season’s expected bad weather. . . . The nonnative bullfrogs that someone probably dumped in a pool outside Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Hotel decades ago are being destroyed because they were crowding out rare native foothill yellow-legged and California red-legged frogs. . . . A Clovis man with a tattoo reading “my skin is my religion” has been ordered to stand trial for allegedly beating a black Fresno State student in the head with a pipe. . . . Less than three weeks before its unveiling, the San Jose Repertory Theatre’s new $24-million building was despoiled by graffiti vandals. . . . An Orange County “Why Say No to Drugs?” essay contest for fifth- and sixth-graders is sponsored by area pharmacists.

EXIT LINE

“Our song here now is ‘Home, Home on the Artillery Range.’ ”

--Evacuated Roseville resident Ed Hinkson, waiting for Army demolition experts to blow up a ton of leftover Vietnam-era bombs that turned up a few hundred yards from his house.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.