The Good Old Days: Baseball, Blow-Dryers and Spacemen

Who cares about Barry Bonds’ 700th home run ball as a souvenir? How about the first blow-dryer used by a major leaguer in a clubhouse?

The 1960s-era hair dryer of ex-Yankee Joe Pepitone is on display this month at the Burbank Central Library in an exhibit titled “The Times They Were A-Changin’: Baseball in the Age of Aquarius.”

The proud owner of the blow-dryer is the Baseball Reliquary, a group that takes a whimsical view of baseball and its traditions.

Because this is an election year, the group made sure to include a section on ex-major league pitcher/hippie Bill “Spaceman” Lee, believed to be the first Burbank native to run for president.

Lee’s campaign slogans on the 1988 Rhinoceros Party ticket included, “No guns, no butter -- they’ll both kill you,” and, “Don’t vote -- it only encourages them.”

Horsepower doesn’t cut it: While in Nome, Alaska, Linda Jones of Northridge found a warning to drivers of motor vehicles (see photo).

This complicated world: Rodger Howard of Valencia noticed that a senior center in El Monte has invented a new parking classification (see photo).

“Don’t worry,” Howard added, “there were ‘totally’ disabled parking spaces too.”

This complicated world (Part II): As if driving in L.A. isn’t demanding enough, comic Marty Ingels spotted a series of dueling arrows just to make things more confusing (see photo).

Finally, some fresh commentary: I noticed that a revival of “The Will Rogers Follies” was being presented by the Downey Civic Light Opera, and I got to thinking of what an astute 21st century political observer Rogers was -- back in the 1920s and ‘30s.

A sampling of some of his wisecracks:

* “The more you read about politics, the more you have to admit that each party is worse than the other.”

* “I am not a member of any organized party. I’m a Democrat.”

* “I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report facts.”

* “The man with the best job in the country is the vice president. All he has to do is get up every morning and say, ‘How’s the president?’”

* “If you ever injected truth into politics, you’d have no politics.”

Then there was the time Rogers became the first honorary mayor of Beverly Hills, and it was pointed out that he was a humorist and not a politician.

Said he: “I never saw a mayor yet that wasn’t comical.”

miscelLAny: Will Rogers also had a good understanding of number crunchers. He once said: “An economist’s guess is liable to be as good as anyone else’s.”

Steve Harvey can be reached at (800)LATimes, 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.