In Yuba City, Charitable Publicity Starts at Home

When your reviews stink, there’s only one course left: fight PU with PR.

Yuba City has been trashed by the best of them. Money magazine ranked it 300th--last--among livable cities in 1995, then promoted it to 299th a year later. Six men got busted in May when explosives that one of them had stored in a tree blew up and led the cops to 500 pounds more, stolen from a Montana mining company. And then there were the terrible floods of ‘97, and the buried bodies of ‘72, the murderous crop planted by farm worker Juan Corona.

Unarguable point one: Yuba City and its Gold Rush environs could use a boost. Unarguable point two: They weren’t going to get it from anyone but themselves.

So now comes the full-court press of slogans, billboards and bumper stickers, succinct and cleverly passive-aggressive: “Hug Our Trees, Fish Our Rivers, Kiss Our Buttes.” Lest local billboards seem like preaching pointlessly to the choir, banker Ken Anderson, the driving force in this, says faith, like charity, has to start at home, to convert residents who “ask newcomers why they would ever want to move” to the area.

First on the billboard’s top billboard list, the usual gaggle of geese crossing the road (“Yuba-Sutter traffic jam”) and a vivid sunset over those kissable buttes.

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Cabin in the skyline: Room service? Minibar? Dream on. Not even a flush toilet. And if you pack too slowly, checkout time may be next spring.

But 35 bucks a night can rent a million-dollar view from one of several retired fire-lookout cabins in the Sierras . . . if you have what it takes to get there.

The U.S. Forest Service pretty much went out of the fire-spotting business as high-tech took over, and airline pilots, pleasure fliers and folks with good vision and cell phones began reporting nascent blazes.

Fewer than 100 of the 600 federal lookout stations that were around 50 years ago are still staffed, and then only for the fire season. But that means a fire sale--actually a no-fire rental--on some of the lookout posts with knockout views--a circa 1915 cabin in the coastal redwoods, a hut on a 7,900-foot peak in Siskiyou County, and a cabin on Robb’s Peak where there is no mint on the pillow, and no pillow, but the Forest Service does supply the firewood.

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Bank Heists

Bank robberies--though often in the news this year--have actually been on the decline in California, according to FBI statistics. As of mid-September of this year, 1,202 bank robberies had occurred statewide. Robberies peaked at 3,836 in 1992, authorities say one factor that year was gangs acquired weapons during the Los Angeles riots and turning from robbing convenience stores to banks.

‘87: 2,019

‘88: 2,086

‘89: 2,238

‘90: 2,771

‘91: 3,518

‘92: 3,836

‘93: 3,127

‘94: 2,298

‘95: 2,196

‘96: 2,210

‘97: 1,202 as of Sept. 15

Source: FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office

Researched by Tracy Thomas / Los Angeles Times

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We shall come over: Mother Jones magazine, rating the nation’s top 10 activist campuses, found UC Berkeley, Mario Savio U, Berserkeley, so changed an institution that it was awarded only an honorable mention, for the 22 students who chained themselves inside the campanile after Proposition 209 passed.

Only one California campus made the top 10--Stanford, at No. 5, home of Chelsea Clinton but not home of a Taco Bell franchise, which students rejected because of the chain’s owner’s ties to Myanmar, whose “repressive regime,” as the saying goes, is to ‘90s campuses what apartheid South Africa was in the 1980s: a pariah.

(Stanford students also put on display posters that rated each of 40 campus buildings for accessibility by the handicapped; shortly thereafter, the university began construction to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act.)

The winner: that perennial political volcano-in-the-deep-freeze, the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

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One-offs: Edo, a San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department German shepherd, was run over and killed by a pickup truck whose allegedly drunk driver sped toward the dog and his partner. . . . A Fresno man who said his 2-year-old daughter had inadvertently shot and killed her mother by dropping a loaded hunting rifle has been arrested in the woman’s death. . . . Ceres police knew whom they wanted to talk to after they investigated a home burglary and found the release papers of a local man let out of jail five days earlier. . . . As noted by Times rock critic Robert Hilburn, the Rolling Stones’ first American concert tour was kicked off 33 years ago at the Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino. . . . A new law will let citizens register their complaints to California government agencies via the Internet, (but it does not create a Web site named www dot bitch bitch bitch dot com).

EXIT LINE

“I can do more farming by staying in the hospital a little longer.”

--Modesto farmer Thomas Caswell, whose neighbors and friends began pitching in to harvest his alfalfa and black-eyed peas after Caswell was shot. Caswell had noticed a car stuck on a canal bank near his land, and after he told the three teenagers that he would go get a piece of farm equipment to help free their car, one of them allegedly shot him twice in the back.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.