The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 33

ECHOES OF THE PAST At left, Don McCoy handles controls of miniature locomotive he restored; same train is shown at right negotiating loop at Windward Ave. in Venice in photograph taken in early 1900s. Times photo at left by William S. Murphy Brown Is Man to Beat, Venice Railway Back in Saved From Scrap Pile, It Thrives in Running South El Monte Most Democrats Agree Secretary of State Appears to Have Sizable Lead in Race for Gubernatorial Nomination CC PART II 2t MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1973 BY KENNETH REICH Times Political Writer BY WILLIAM S. MURPHY Times Staff writer The Venice Miniature Railway, which in the early years of this century was the pride of the local seashore community, has been rescued from the scrap heap and is now a thriving line in South El Monte.

Don McCoy, an amateur machinist, first saw one of the railway's two old steam locomotives rusting in a downtown Los Angeles junk yard in 1935 when he was a chiid. Five years ago he purchased it and a couple of cars from an amusement park for $.1,000. "The engine was in pretty bad shape," McCoy, who works for the county, recalled. "Even the boiler had been condemned as unsafe. It took a year to take the whole engine apart.

We had parts scattered all over the yard of our San Gabriel home. "My sons, Jeff and Mike, helped on the project. At the end of four years, the job was done. The locomotive was in as perfect operating order as the clay it was delivered to Venice, which was probably about Venice's period of rococo elegance had begun a year before that when Abbott Kinney, a shrewd promoter, founded what he hoped would be considered a duplicate of Venice, Italy. The counterpart, south of Santa Monica, had canals complete with imported Italian gondolas piloted by Italian gondoliers.

Venice, according to Kinney's tire less press agents, was the most romantic city in the West. The railroad was Kinney's idea. Two locomotives were built in Los Angeles, each one-third the size of the model from which they had been scaled, a contemporary steam locomotive called a Prairie. Each of the small locomotives pulled several open-air coaches. Kinney incorporated his railway under California law, naming his son, Carlton, the youngest railroad president in the world.

The boy was 9. For a while, Venice flourished. But a number of setbacks, including the loss of the Venice amusement pier in high seas, brought hard times. By 1927, the lagoon from which the network of canals had been fed was paved over and the waterway dried up. So did Venice.

Much of the community's elegance ended up on the scrap heap, including the Venice Miniature Railway. But both locomotives and several trains were rescued and refurbished. One chugs around a park in Los Ga-tos; the other, with McCoy at the throttle, around the Whittier Narrows Recreation Area in South El Monte. McCoy's line, which he calls the Venice Railway, runs along a two-mile, tree-shaded route bordering Legg Lake. "Sure, a lot of our riders are kids." McCoy said, "but you'd be surprised how many are older folks who come out on a Sunday and make the run.

Just six months ago, she was a Los Angeles-based free-lance writer with a novel to sell. As she made her way to the publishing houses around town, she happened upon the men of Holloway House Publications, a firm with a line of black-oriented books. The men, who evidenced little interest in furthering the course of American literature, proposed instead that she help them put out. a black-oriented girlie magazine. "Next thing I knew, all systems EDITS MAGAZINE AIMED AT BLACK MEN The Ms.

Is a Connoisseur of "It's quite common for someone to come up and say something like: 'Why, we rode this same train in Venice when we were on our honeymoon, and that was back in The locomotive, which uses oil for fuel, has a maximum speed of 30 ro.p.h., one which McCoy never attempts to reach on so short a length of track. "But the county is talking about expanding the track," said McCoy, who has a concession to operate the railroad in the park. "I've got. a couple of miles of track stored away in case we can." One day recently, as he does on most weekends, McCoy fired up the boiler, hooked up the cars and slid in behind the throttle. Passengers boarded the train at Legg Lake Depot.

McCoy opened a valve, pumping water from the tender to maintain steam pressure. Flames danced in the firebox, and oil specks peppered his face. He opened the throttle. The train began to move, its steel trucks clicking rhythmically against the burnished rails. McCoy tugged the whistle cord, and a long, mournful wail, once so common across America, echoed over Whittier Narrows.

The locomotive gathered speed. "We're running close to 600 passengers a day on weekends," McCoy called, easing back on the throttle as the train clattered around a curve. "As a railroad, we're in good shape. Heck, we're doing better than Amtrak." Female Nudes were go," she recalled recently, looking back to more innocent times. These days, Ms.

Coleman is preoc cupied with color slides of nude women, copy that attempts to make them fascinating and the problems of telling centerfold hopefuls with stretch marks they are out of luck. She is the editor and sole editorial employe of Players, a magazine that appeared on newsstands last month. In a small cubicle, one door down from a science fiction magazine and two doors down from a history magazine, Ms. Coleman entered the wilderness of magazine production last April and emerged the mother of a glossy, 98-page magazine. Ms.

Coleman is 26, bright, friendly, serious about her work and (her sex aside) generally not the kind of person one imagines editing a magazine aimed largely at male chauvinists. For one thing, she seems to favor clothes on women plunging necklines and see-through blouses are not her style. For another, she seems to be a lit-x tie too much of an intellectual very serious about her writing, with a penchant for poetry. But she saw the job as a challenge a chance to prove that a young woman with little experience in the field could put together a successful magazine from scratch. As a magazine, Players is Playboy In basic black movie reviews, book reviews, interviews with celebrities, capsule profiles of people on the rise, fiction, cartoons, nude starlets, nude nonstarlets, and nude-draped men displaying expensive clothes and cars.

In street language, the word "player" can mean pimp, but Ms. Coleman says that the name implies "the game, and the game is life how you play it and whether you are going to win it." Although the Players format is almost identical to Playboy's down to a black-skinned, while-Afroed version of the "femlin" Ms. Cole-Please Turn to Page 4, Col. 1 It is still very early the situation may change dramatically but the key question now in the developing contest for the Democratic nomination for governor is whether Secretary of State Edmund G. Brown Jr.

will stumble. Interviews with candidates, campaign personnel, pollsters and independent political experts- in the last week have found wide agreement that at this point Brown, on the strength of name identification and popular image, has a sizable lead. Those interviewed fall into two schools. One group believes that in a crowded field Brown will prevail, that the public is inclined to go with a candidate untainted by scandal and identified with campaign reform and that, as the son of a former governor, Brown, is on very solid ground. The other group believes that as time passes and the electorate comes to know him better, Brown's image will be tarnished, that he will come to be perceived as immature and not ready for the governorship, as someone who doesn't speak or act like a governor.

In other words, this theory goes, the 35-year-old Brown will falter and someone else will win. With more than six months to go until the June primary, and with more than 11 months until the general election, the California electorate may be excused if its interest in the race is, at this point, low. But, for political activists, the contest has been under way for some time now, the first trends are manifesting themselves and the first, tentative conclusions about it can be drawn. The advance preparations and maneuvering have been more intense than usual because, overwhelmingly, the Democratic aspirants and their aides are convinced that 1974 will be a Democratic year in divides trial area ond spectator benches California and that the party's candidate, whoever he may be, will go on to recapture the governor's office, which the party lost seven years ago. The interviews, in addition to making it clear that Brown is the focal point of the early campaigning, also reflected wide agreement on these aspects of the present situation: San Francisco Mayor Joseph L.

Alioto is running second at this stage and may benefit in terms of positioning by being perceived as a relative conservative in a flock of liberals. But Alioto is apt to find trouble 'in vote -heavy Southern California Avhere, judging by his early effort his campaign style may not go over well. In addition, he has complicated image problems. X. The most likely comers in the race are Rep.

Jerome R. Waldie of Antioch and Assembly Speaker Bob Moretti of Van Nuys. Waldie has been solidifying hi3 support among the most committed liberals, but he lacks adequate financing. Moretti, building on his success against Gov. Reagan's tax limitation initiative, is tough, will propose his own tax reform plan and seems the most likely to take Brown head on; The political situation is volatile because of the fallout from the Watergate affair and the energy crisis, and the outlook may change with dramatic suddenness.

Some of those interviewed felt that should Moretti, Waldie or someone else clearly be perceived, through polls or some other means, as a comer early enough, say by April, and Brown seem to be fading, the whole complexion of the race would change. Others believe there will be a Please Turn to Page 2, Col. 1 in newly constructed courtroom. Times photo by Joe Kennedy BY CELESTE DURANT Timet Staff Writer Wanda Coleman is all for realism, but she draws the line at stretch marks. A well-placed vaccination mark, a few photographic goose pimples, OK.

But stretch marks? Definitely out. In matters concerning the photography of the nude female form, her taste is becoming impeccable. There was a time when such things didn't matter. Escape-Plot Trial ill Open Today in Bulletproof Room BY WILLIAM FARR Times Staff Writer A mother of five and the young "revolutionary" who was her next-door neighbor in Paio Alto both accused of taking part in an escape plot that left one Chino prison guard dead and another wounded are scheduled to go on today in a bulletproof Los Angeles courtroom. Defense attorneys plan to formally object, to the holding of the trial in the newly constructed high-security courtroom on the ground this would have a "horrendous" prejudicial effect on the jury.

Jean Hobson, 45, and Robert Sea-bock, 22, are charged with murder, assault with a deadly weapon and assisting the escape of Chino inmate Ronald Wayne Beaty. Beaty escaped when guards Jesus Sanchez and George J. Fitzgerald were ambushed on a back road about three miles from the prison as they were driving the prisoner to San Bernardino for a court appearance on Oct. 6, 1972. Sanchez, 24, was killed and Fitzgerald, 36, was wounded.

They were unarmed at the time, according to Donald Feld, San Bernardino County deputy district attorney, who has been assigned to prosecute the case here. Please Turn to Back Page, Col. 1 SHIELDED Bullet-proof glass 1 i -i i i ij Jl 1' if I if 1 Vs 4 N. Av THE BOSS Wanda Coleman fields phone call in Players office. Times photo by Michael MalJy.