Error-Prone Team Claimed It Was Distracted by a Woman Photographer

Female sportswriters, as you’ve probably read, have had problems gaining admittance to locker rooms of male teams. Well, Helen Brush Jenkins, a pioneer news photographer at the first (now defunct) L.A. Daily News, recalls when her appearance on the field became an issue at a baseball game in the early 1940s.

Jenkins told a meeting of retired L.A. journalists that, when she was 24, she was assigned to take pictures at a Pacific Coast League game at Wrigley Field. The one provision from her boss was that she wear nothing so salacious (at least for those times) as a sweater. As was the custom with photographers then, she stationed herself near first base, drawing, she recalls, an admiring comment from a spectator named Bing Crosby.

But the Los Angeles Angels evidently were not pleased after they made three errors in the first inning. The next day, she says, her boss told her the team had called “and said it was hard to play baseball with this pretty girl running around on the field. He said to me, ‘I thought I told you never to wear a sweater.’ I said, ‘But I didn’t. I had on a blouse.’ ”

Speaking of the “Front Page” days: I read in the L.A. Downtown News that a possible new occupant of the 88-year-old Los Angeles Herald Examiner building at 11th and Broadway is the YWCA.

Though the hard-drinking, chain-smoking newshounds of the old days were hardly health faddists, a sports motif would be appropriate in some ways. In the 1940s and 1950s, the atmosphere inside the building was akin to that of a track meet at odd moments. That’s because City Editor Agness Underwood kept a starter gun in her desk, and every once in a while she’d fire a round at the ceiling just to make sure everyone was awake.

Unclear on the concept: Kevin Kightlinger of Sunset Beach noticed an ad for an editor in a college newspaper that needed a bit of, well, editing (see accompanying). Where’s that starter pistol?

Don’t write off the Poets: I mentioned that Laguna Beach High’s students voted to discard the Artists nickname for their sports teams and replace it with the more aggressive-sounding Breakers.

But a mild-mannered nickname at another Southland school, the Poets of Whittier College, is in no danger. To begin with, there is history: It’s a reference to 19th century poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

The nickname “makes us unique,” said Athletic Director Wendell Jack. “Besides, you have to be tough to call yourself a Poet.”

And the mascot is not unarmed (see photo). At a Whittier soccer game the other night, Jack heard a spectator cry, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

Thanks for the warning: OK, I couldn’t resist the joke after David Wilkins of Lancaster sent me a shot he took back East of an automotive garage (see photo).

Trials can be painful: “I’ve had my share of bad cases over the years,” writes attorney Jonathan Colman. “But this is the first time a judge decided a case was sick” (see accompanying).

miscelLAny: A driver recently stopped for speeding in Paramount begged the officer not to give him a ticket, explaining that it was an emergency, reports the city’s action-packed newsletter. Asked if the emergency was life threatening, the driver said, “When my wife finds out I got a ticket, it will be.”

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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.