Tomato Thief Finds Herself in a Pickle When Outraged Grower Gives Chase

What is it with all these reports of produce pilfering? The other day, I mentioned that Laguna Beach police were notified about a pumpkin being snatched from a nursery during a daring daylight theft. Now, the Beach Reporter’s crime report says a passerby in Manhattan Beach reached over a wall and stole a tomato from a resident’s garden.

Although the Laguna merchant noticed his loss too late, the Manhattan Beach grower witnessed the foul deed and gave chase. The thief ran, but she was “pushing a blue, single-seat baby jogger,” the Reporter said. “The man saw a bundle of something in the seat but was not sure if it was a child.”

Obviously she hadn’t planned her escape very well. Anyway, the victim caught the woman, but not red-handed. She claimed she had thrown the tomato on the grass during the chase. The victim couldn’t find it.

Wait, there’s more! Unwilling to give up, the tomato owner--who said he had been beset by produce thieves in the past--chased after the woman again. This time, he had her take him to the spot. Together they located the fruit. (Or is it a vegetable? But I can’t get into that now.) The good news: “No damage was done to the tomato,” the Beach Reporter said. No charges were filed.

Literary allegations: The image of the tomato thief chasing the baby-jogger reminded me of a Sue Grafton mystery in which a hit man pushes around a child in a stroller during his murderous forays throughout the Southland.

This was a plot device I thought of first, but Grafton somehow reached into my mind and stole the idea before I could write what surely would have been a bestseller.

More food for thought: All this talk about tomatoes made me think of a shot by Gary Labb of a restaurant advertising what I always thought was an east-of-the-border dish (see photo).

What’s the name of our other baseball team? With all the excitement surrounding the slugging Anaheim Angels, I had forgotten that the L.A. area had another team until I received a photo of a doll from Dick and Vanessa Deskin of Irvine. They brought the Dodger curio--that’s right, the team is called the Dodgers--from St. Petersburg, Russia, of all places.

Notice the pencil-thin bat the Dodger player is holding, symbolic, I guess, of the team’s weak hitting.

Traffic umpire: “In Monrovia,” quipped Michael Johnson, “we use international hand signals along with our street signs” (see photo).

MiscelLAny: Driving home Thursday, I saw a crow pecking away at a discarded, half-filled coffee-flavored drink on a sidewalk. The idea of a crow having a caffeine high struck me as truly scary.

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Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LA-TIMES, ext. 77083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A. 90012 and by e-mail at steve. harvey@latimes.com.