<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : Natural Resources Library Will Not Become History

Unlike the grizzly bear on the Bear Flag Republic banner, the state’s natural resources library--a 130-year record of Califlora and fauna--will not become extinct.

When word came that the Fish and Game Department’s venerable research library would shut its doors at 3 p.m. on the last day of the fiscal year, scientists staged a kind of genteel rebellion: “part of a terrible, anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-learning fad that is sweeping the country right now,” Fish and Game biologist Dennis McEwan denounced the closing to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Only a dozen people a day use it, the $225,000 annual funding had dried up, and--in a critique on the species campus packrattus that has brought him hate mail--Fish and Game official Jeff Weir added, “Those professors, have you ever seen their offices? They have books all over the place. They need more?”

Some science guys hinted that the closure threat was not so much about saving money as a try at undermining endangered species programs; one can’t make sound resources policies for the future without knowing what existed in the past.

Horsefeathers, replied Weir: “The only thing the Wilson Administration is not being accused of these days is the JFK assassination.” The library will not be closing; state librarian Kevin Starr will consider the best way to handle the archives henceforth.

Another venerable institution really is handing in its badge: the California State Police.

It’s as if the National League were being absorbed by the American League. The 109-year-old agency will become part of the 66-year-old California Highway Patrol next week. The CSP flag will be ceremonially lowered, and its colors will be struck in another way, too: Its 271 officers will change their green-striped CSP pants for blue-striped CHP ones (but not in public). They’ll still protect state constitutional officers and visiting dignitaries, and guard state buildings. Please, no remarks about the California Hallway Patrol.

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Follicle follies: You thought Hillary Rodham Clinton’s hair was more controversial than either Henry or Vince Foster? Try Doris Allen’s ‘do, redux.

After the hair’s-breadth vote that elevated the Orange County Republican to be the Assembly’s first woman Speaker, co-partyist Bill Morrow (R-Oceanside) snipped, “The first thing she ought to do is her hair.”

Who says Allen isn’t in line with her party’s agenda? Barely two weeks after taking office, she took Morrow’s advice. “I needed a more businesslike look,” she said in an interview. The longer, fluffier coiffure was “too much trouble to care for” given her new schedule. “Now I’ve got a wash-and-wear style. It’s great. I love it.”

The man Allen aced out for the job, Republican Leader Jim Brulte, also has an impressive head of hair. But the varying hirsutism of legislative pates might, in the manner of the departed Eva Gabor, divide the Assembly into two new parties: Tories and vigs.

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Franking privileges: Santa Cruz, stomping grounds of the fighting Banana Slugs, the city where Rush Limbaugh’s book sold big only after a bookstore pledged most of the cover price for the local National Organization for Women chapter and a Santa Cruz AIDS group, is once again boring from within.

Sales of the Richard Nixon postage stamp were doing about as brisk a business as sunlamps at Zabriskie Point until Thom Zajac, publisher of the local Cartoon News, began selling envelopes that show a full-color headless man in jail. Stick on the Nixon stamp and quicker than you can say “un-indicted co-conspirator,” the former President appears to be a prisoner. Thousands of orders have persuaded him to work on a copyrighted Marilyn Monroe stamp/envelope combo. Whence the brainstorm? “One of the virtues of marijuana,” he says.

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Cornier Than Kansas

Eating corn on the cob is a summertime pleasure and California ranked second only to Florida, growing more than 151,785 tons of fresh market sweet corn for the nation, in 1993. Here are the top 10 corn-producing counties and the dollars per ton their ears fetched that year.

County Tons of corn Dollars per ton 1. Riverside 30,806 $377 2. Imperial 24,351 $264 3. Fresno 24,000 $239 4. San Joaquin 17,500 $287 5. Contra Costa 15,300 $283 6. Santa Clara 8,750 $325 7. Ventura 7,645 $330 8. Orange 4,902 $344 9. San Benito 4,555 $273 10. Kern 3,800 $241

Source: California Agricultural Statistics Service

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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Air Clovis: The first heli-telethon on record raised about $100,000, five bucks at a time, for Fresno law enforcement to buy its very first helicopters. “Operation Skywatch” on Fresno-area TV channels broadcast a 900 number that drew “so many calls in the first 10 minutes that a lot of the phone lines went out,” said Police Chief Ed Winchester. They’re still about $1.2 million shy, so the next campaign to buy the F28F-P Sentinels is “Change Fresno”--soliciting spare change for the copter fund.

If they buy three copters, city police and the county sheriff have worked out a kind of time-share arrangement. If they can’t afford all three, Winchester admits, “we’ll have to go back to the table.”

EXIT LINE

“Everybody brings some food and we have a big picnic.”

--Carroll Donner of Burwell, Neb., on the reassuring BYO basket practice at the annual reunion of the descendants of the Donner Party.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.