BEARING THE HATCHET

I realize you didn’t want the cover story on Rick Dees to sound like a four-page ad, but I think your hatchet got a little too sharp at times (“All About Dees,” by Dennis McDougal, Feb. 3).

Does it really matter that a radio personality “cannot look you straight in the eye and talk to you”? Did you really have to identify Julie Dees as his second wife every time she was mentioned?

Did we have to hear twice (from former colleague Liz Fulton, now doing radio in San Jose) that a man who doesn’t smoke, drink or do drugs will be dead in three years? From ambition and hard work? Whatever happened to the American Dream?

Sure he protects his custom sound effects and hand picks his vacation replacement. You don’t pull a 10 share of the L.A. radio market by sitting back complacently and counting your money. He probably doesn’t know how much money he makes--and good for him!

Boo, Calendar.

BEA SHAW North Hollywood So what if Dees is a competitive, driven workaholic who has the audacity to want to maintain control over his work-product? That is no evidence whatsoever that Dees is spiteful, petty, or “just plain nasty.”

I am sure that Dees is no more possessive of his tapes than McDougal must be of his own favorite tool of his trade: his hatchet.

JEFFREY MODISETT Los Angeles

I’ve always felt that Rick Dees (along with KABC-TV’s Steve Edwards) represented the ultimate Los Angeles personality. He’s cute, he’s got a nice smile, he’s stridently unfunny and he’s gifted with that sterile unspontaneity that somehow passes for talent around here.

For shrewdly providing mindless entertainment for a ready-made audience, Dees deserve everything he’s got (including his neuroses).

TOM MATTHEWS Burbank Thanks for the article on Dees. He’s the personification of the American dream come true via hard work, tenacity and talent.

Some of Rick’s co-workers don’t like him and stoop so low as to steal his material, then cover up their dirty deeds by knocking him.

Rick is a rare diamond. The rest are just jealous zircons.

We love you, Rick.

DIANNE BENNETT The Hollywood Reporter Many, many more letters about Dees are on Page 82.

RECALL VOTE

Judith Michaelson’s recollections are confused (“Some Recollections of Robert Kennedy’s Times,” Jan. 30): She remembers Jesus Christ, not Robert Kennedy.

EDWARD ANDREW MANN Beverly Hills DOGGEDNESS

How presumptuous of Calendar Letters to suggest that Nancy West’s little dog fetches the entire Sunday paper (Calendar Letters, Feb. 3) .

West only acknowledged reading “Doonesbury” and the Book Review. Obviously, the dog has been trained to:

1--retrieve paper which is lying in the only wet spot on the lawn

2--remove two or more strings tied in a Gordian knot

3--pull out center hunk of paper along with half a pound of ad circulars

4--extract center page from Comics

5--flip Calendar open to center and remove Book Review.

Only two things puzzle me:

Does the dog bring Book Review in right-side-up or upside down? Monday thru Friday, does the dog bring in View, and how does it find “Doonesbury” on Saturday without checking the front page index?

LORI K. HEYMAN San Dimas A REAL PRINCE

I imagine Prince has not really endeared himself to many people since the American Music Awards. It seems to be that it wasn’t too long ago that he was pelted with garbage while opening for the Stones. I also remember his receiving more than his share of hostility by going onstage in his BVD’s and a lame jacket.

If Prince is not Mr. Warmth and Openness at the moment, maybe it’s because some of us weren’t so friendly when this new and different human arrived on the scene. Come to think of it, the Pop Eye article (Feb. 3) states that “he was the lone absentee from the star-studded” Ethiopian record session.

Well, I missed a few more, like Dolly Parton, David Lee Roth, Loretta Lynn, any member of X, and what about Grammy nominee Pia Zadora? It would be an act of kindness to hold off the righteous indignation and let the guy unwind in his own time.

LAYLA O’DAY Chatsworth Has Prince redeemed himself? See Pop Eye, Page 74. ETHIOPIA

OK, the children of Ethiopia are starving; that is a fact.

The television appeals by media stars for our money to feed them are endless; this is also a fact (“TV Charities: Let the Giver Beware,” by David Johnston and Jennifer Leonard, Jan. 20).

But here are some facts that KABC-TV’s Larry Carroll and the others will never tell you while they ask you to dig a little deeper into your pocket:

1--In the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, across from the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, stands a 12-foot-high statue of Lenin. Giant portraits of Brezhnev, Marx and Castro hang from the buildings.

2--All forms of political and social freedom in Ethiopia have been crushed by the secret police, which is run by the East Germans.

3--It was the Ethiopian government that plowed up the Awash River to cut off water to the nomads of the Afar valley, causing the starvation of thousands in that region of Ethiopia.

Surprised?

Such a reaction can be expected, given that the media stars keep forgetting to mention that Ethiopia, like Afghanistan, is now a puppet state of the Soviet Union. And, as in Afghanistan, nomadic god-fearing goat herders are being forced--by gunpoint or starvation--to come out of the hills and become comrades on the collective farms and praise Karl Marx.

Oh, and one other fact: Last year the Reagan Administration donated 1.2-million tons of food to the sub-Saharan African region. The Russians gave only 12,000 tons.

On the other hand, they have sent more than $1-billion worth of guns, ammunition, tanks and rocket launchers over the last five years, so maybe that makes up for the lack of Russian rice and powdered milk.

So the next time Larry Carroll or Julie Andrews comes on with a tearful appeal for food money for the Ethiopians, write out a big fat check. But take an extra minute and write a letter to the Soviet Embassy in San Francisco, too.

Tell them you are angry. Tell them to start acting like the responsible Superpower they are supposed to be. Tell them to get the hell out of Afghanistan and Ethiopia.

DOUG SHEPPARD Torrance