Car Thieves Take the H but Leave the onda

What the H is going on around here?

I’m missing mine. The guy across the street lost his. A colleague’s across the office disappeared, too.

Our Hs are gone. Pried right off the backs of our Honda automobiles.

The stylized logo stands for Honda. But the H seems to represent hot in the eyes of thieves.

They are heisting them by the hundreds in the Los Angeles area. And the Hs cost up to $18 to replace--with those for Preludes, naturally, costing more than those for Civics.

“We get 10 calls a day from people missing them,” said a parts department clerk at Honda of Pasadena.

“We go through a ton of these things,” said a busy parts salesman at Robertson Honda in North Hollywood.

“They’re not falling off. They’re being stolen,” added a clerk at Honda of Hollywood.

“There’s a gang whose name starts with H. They’re the ones taking them,” speculated Mickey, a Honda parts man in Woodland Hills.

Suggested Joe, at the Honda service desk in North Hollywood: “Kids take them to make necklaces out of them.”

I’d like to make a necklace for whoever snatched mine at a supermarket parking lot. And neighbor Michael Lee, a studio artist, would like to get his hands on whoever swiped his outside a shopping mall.

“I’ve never seen anybody actually wearing it as jewelry,” Lee said. “But you used to see it with Mercedes emblems.”

What would make a Honda emblem chic? Maybe the recession’s to blame, Lee said with a laugh.

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Theft of Mercedes hood ornaments reached epidemic proportions in the late 1980s--at least in the eyes of Mercedes-Benz owners.

The three-pointed stars were popping up all over Los Angeles, hanging from teen-agers’ necks, used as key chains and as belt buckles.

In self-defense, some Mercedes owners began buying removable hood ornaments that they could take with them when they parked.

Cadillac owners weren’t left out. Their cars’ laurel wreath ornaments were so prized by thieves in 1989 that some Cadillac dealers were counseling that they not be replaced unless protected by an alarm system.

One dealer explained that junior high school kids were collecting Cadillac and Mercedes hood ornaments as a club initiation rite. The requirement: one gold emblem or three chrome ones.

These days clubs have given way to gangs. A Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman said there are “quite a few” gangs that have names starting with the letter H.

But the department’s policy is not to identify them.

Police say that few drivers bother to report car emblem losses to them. That means there are no official statistics available on H thefts.

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Chris Marshall, a spokesman for Honda of America in Torrance, said his company has no such statistics, either.

He said there has been no surge in dealer orders for replacement Hs.

There is so far no alarm system specifically designed to protect Hs, like those that emerged for Mercedes and Cadillac emblems in the late 1980s.

The best way to protect yours: “Park in a garage,” recommended a San Gabriel Valley Honda parts man.

Colleague DeWayne Johnson, who noticed his H missing one night after working as a copy editor, doesn’t plan to be a repeat emblem buyer. He used heavy-duty glue on his replacement.

“I put it on with Goop,” he said. “That’s Goop, with a capital G.”

Gee.