State Jingling Small Change for a Bunch of Big Names

By PATT MORRISON

Dec. 14, 1999 12 AM PT

Attention holiday shoppers! The state of California’s Christmas Club is up and running and there’s no telling whose name will be in it.

Last week, The Times reported that legislators, including state Sens. Tom Hayden and Martha Escutia, could lay claim to funds in the state’s unclaimed property program, a matchmaking effort administered by Controller Kathleen Connell. The fund tracks forgotten dollars from utility refunds, abandoned safety deposit boxes, pension benefits, unclaimed wages and moribund bank accounts.

But those aren’t the only well-known names on the list of more than 5 million people who are due $2.6 billion.

Comedian Jay Leno is owed $600 by Warner Bros. Los Angeles politicians Richard Riordan and Zev Yaroslavsky, actress Jane Fonda, and former Times Publisher Otis Chandler made the list. All have a little something coming from various insurance companies and employers. There’s $52.50 from Pacific Bell with the late President Richard Nixon’s name on it, and a cashier’s check for $200 awaits Ronald Reagan.

San Quentin prison owes $33 to Robert Alton Harris, the first man executed in California in nearly 30 years.

Click on https://www.sco.ca.gov/col/ucp/. You may already be a winner. . . .

Cooking for bread: It is not the Anarchist’s Cookbook, the classic underground volume on revolutionary techniques, but you can bet that some folks are already calling it that.

Sara Jane Olson, arrested this year on a 1976 indictment for allegedly conspiring to put pipe bombs under two police cars, has published a collection of her own and friends’ recipes in “Serving Time: America’s Most Wanted Recipes.”

Some of the take from the $21.95 book will go to the defense fund for Olson, the former Kathleen Soliah, who faces trial in Los Angeles next year on the charges. In the years since the Symbionese Liberation Army practiced its own off-kilter brand of revolution with the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, Olson had married, had children, done volunteer work here and abroad, and studied the culinary arts, acquiring a reputation as a foodsmith.

The book, whose cover shows Olson with a spatula in one hand and handcuffs in the other, details her life as a foodie, from cream-and-butter meals on her grandparents’ North Dakota farm to her work with a Bay Area organic food co-op. She touches on her meeting with a prisoner during a hunger strike in Northern Ireland’s Long Kesh Prison, and her work for a well-baby clinic in a part of Africa where “the availability of food was used as a weapon.”

The recipes are weighted to the Midwest--macaroni and cheese pie, pumpkin bread--with a few exotic touches like ceviche and spicy peanut sauce. As she signed copies over the weekend at Minneapolis’ Mayday Cafe, Olson admitted, “It’s not exactly a situation for fun, but we all can’t be morose all the time.”

H-too-too-solid O: The poor Salton Sea, the Rodney Dangerfield of inland waters.

A state Fish and Game warden noticed it first: urban junk dumped on the shore near a doctor’s weekend duck-hunting cabin. Ten million pounds of industrial waste--metals, shredded plastics, paper--had been shoveled into the already less-than-pristine water by two men, each of whom has been sentenced to 30 months in federal prison.

The source of the waste, Inland Container Corp. of Ontario, volunteered to pay about $1 million to clean up the mess, authorities said.

The two dumpers were evidently sub-sub-subcontractors, hired by a trucking firm, which was hired by a “trash broker,” which was hired by Inland Container.

One-offs: In a cart-before-the-horse moment, Democrat Todd Tatum hired a political consultant for his campaign for a vacant San Bernardino state Senate seat, but failed to get enough nominating signatures, and won’t be on the ballot. . . . A 16-year-old Grass Valley oboist who is fighting cancer got her wish granted, and played alongside the New York Philharmonic’s principal oboist.

EXIT LINE

“You can pray for your soul, have a drink and order your tombstone here.”

--Robert Casaurang, owner of Hillspride Inn in Knowles, one of two San Joaquin Valley towns anticipating a baby-boom demand for headstones from two local quarries operated since the last century by the Raymond Granite Co. Quoted in the Fresno Bee.

California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.

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O, Christmas Trees’

California is decorated with 564 Christmas tree farms, ranking the state 10th in the nation, according to the 1997 U.S. Census of Agriculture. Trees produced last year earned close to $10.5 million for growers. Here are the 10 counties reporting the highest total value in Christmas trees:

County: 1. San Diego

Value to growers of tree harvest: $1.8 million

County:2. El Dorado

Value to growers of tree harvest: $1.6 million

County: 3. Santa Clara

Value to growers of tree harvest: $875,000

County: 4. Riverside

Value to growers of tree harvest: $705,300

County: 5. San Bernardino

Value to growers of tree harvest: $686,900

County: 6. Orange

Value to growers of tree harvest: $637,800