Only 25 Snooping Days Left Until Christmas

As Gov.-elect Gray Davis prepares for his transition into power, a tale surfaces about one of his predecessors, from the days of more modest politics. Some 50 years ago, an FBI agent had occasion to send his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, an assessment of San Francisco’s district attorney: “a very pleasing personality, but little political ‘savvy.’ ”

So much for the G-man’s own political savvy: The man he so described was future California governor Pat Brown.

Elsewhere in the nearly 500 pages of files on Brown that were obtained by the Wall Street Journal was this pip: For a few weeks in November 1958, during the pre-Christmas sales rush, Pat Brown, merely weeks from being sworn in as the governor of California, worked as a salesclerk at a J.J. Newberry store in Oakland.

Too bad he didn’t play Santa Claus--as his opponents would later accuse him of doing with the state budget.

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Political flatcats This space reported recently that incoming governor Davis, reaching out for gender inclusion, had made reference to a motto chiseled over a California state building, which he quoted as, “Give me people to match my mountains.” The line cut in stone is actually “Give me men to match my mountains.”

In a straight-faced parody of special interest politics, someone in Ventura County went to the trouble of crafting an organization name and fashioning a letterhead to applaud Davis’ gender-neutral rewrite, but expressing disappointment with his pro-altitude bias.

Reminiscent of the handiwork of California political prankster Dick Tuck, the letter from “California Friends of Our Lowlands,” CFOOL, and its board of directors--all with surnames such as Boggs, Fenn, Glade, Marsh and Dell--pointed out that Davis “continues the pattern of discrimination shown by many public figures toward low-lying topography . . . [doing] nothing to correct the widespread bias against elevation-challenged landscape features.”

The “organization”--whose motto is “Swamps Deserve Our Respect, Too”--suggests that Davis adopt this rewrite: “Bring Me People [Folks or Individuals] to Match My Unspecified Topographical Features.”

And it isn’t even anywhere near April 1.

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Deja voo all over again Even though the California presidential primary is more than a year away, everyone who’s even thought of running is getting onto the public’s radar, including former Vice President Dan Quayle--he of the tuber blooper “potatoe”--who had to send out a spelling correction on an announcement from his political action committee Campaign America.

The announcement named a new vice chairman for the multi-candidate PAC, and quoted Quayle as saying, “I look forward to working closely with him as we prepare for a publican resurgence in 2000.” The correction quickly noted that it should read “Republican resurgence.” In British usage, a publican is a saloonkeeper; even less desirable politically, a publican, in ancient Roman and Biblical usage, is a tax collector.

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Fewer Children Born With AIDS

Improved treatments, such as giving the antiviral drug AZT to AIDS-infected, expectant mothers during their pregnancy, labor and delivery, have reduced the mother-to-fetus transmission of HIV in California and nationally.

Children with perinatally acquired AIDS

1997

CALIF.: 19

U.S.: 432

Sources: California Department of Health Services, Office of AIDS, Sacramento; Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / L.A. Times

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One offs The average California household spends $310 a year on planting and landscaping--a sum that adds up to nearly $10 billion a year, almost half the cost of producing the state’s entire food crop, a UC Berkeley study has found . . . A Monterey woman whose Beanie Baby addiction began with a job stuffing the toys into fast-food kiddie meals will serve a six-month jail sentence for using stolen credit card numbers to buy $8,000 worth of them . . . A Sacramento bail bond company offered a free frozen turkey to anyone turning in a gun to the county Sheriff’s Department . . . An Associated Press review found that in Northern California, one of the most environmentally aware regions of the nation, the U.S. attorney’s office ranks last in the nation in filing criminal charges in environmental cases. Among the charges, allegations of trucking companies dumping sewage in San Francisco Bay, pulp mills pumping waste into the ocean, and nuclear power plants cooking their books.

EXIT LINE

“We don’t put people in jail for being dumb or stupid. I wasn’t hurt. I was embarrassed. Of course, I was glad it wasn’t a frozen cream pie. That might have hurt.”

--UC Davis Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef, the latest public figure to be “pied” by the Biotic Baking Brigade. He said he did not intend to press charges against whoever got him with a banana cream model. San Francisco, on the other hand, is prosecuting the people who threw pies at Mayor Willie Brown, and its police chief worries that pie-throwing escalates the security risk to political figures.

California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.