The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 139

-COLOR- uiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii HilllllllllllllltlllllMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIHIIIIIIIIIIHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMIIIIHIIUi I ARTHOPPB HERB Only Game in Town The Wizard of Oz Chronicle Publishing Co. 1979 Apr. 8 1979 AND SO IT WAS that Dorothy, after many adventures, came at last to the golden city of Oz. Oz was ruled, of course, by the Wizard of Oz. The People of Oz worshipped the Wizard.

When it came to wizardry, there was no one more wizard than the Wizard. It was widely known that he was all-wise, all-powerful and absolutely irrefutably infallible. In fact, when pressed, he said so himself. So everyone did exactly whatever the Wizard told them to do, even though most of the time they couldn't understand what he was saying. That was because the Wizard spoke wizard talk.

For example, it was the Wizard who Unlocked the Secret of the Atom. equals emcee squared!" cried the Wizard in his thunderous voice. And everyone said wasn't It wonderful have the secret of the atom, whatever that secret might be. Naturally, the Wizard, who loved perforni-ing feats of wizardry, used the secret to make the biggest bombs the world had ever seen, "Don't worry," the Wizard told the people who couldn't quite comprehend how they worked, "they're for your own good." And he had lots of fun exploding them all over the place to see what would happen until everyone's hair started turning green. After that, the Wizard stocked the bombs In big piles so the people would feel safe.

"What if they go off accidentally?" asked a nervous Nelly. "How could they?" demanded the Wizard. "I made them myself and it is widely known that I am all-wise, all-powerful and absolutely irrefutably infallible." "BASEBALL IS A country all to itself. It is an old country, like Ruritania, northwest of Bohemia and its seacoast. Steam locomotives puff across trestles and through tunnels.

It is a wrong-end-of-t he-telescope country, like the landscape people build for model trains, miniature in distance and old age. The citizens wear baggy pinstripes, knickers and caps. Seasons and teams shift, blur into each other, change radically or appear to change, and restore themselves to old ways again. Citizens retire to farms, in the country of baseball, smoke cigars and reminisce, and all of a sudden they are young players again, lean and intense, running the base paths with filed spikes." THAT DELIGHTFUL passage is from a piece by Donald Hall in an equally delightful hook titled "Baseball I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life," published by something called North Atlantic Books at Amador Richmond, California 94805. Trice $9.95.

Why a company so close to the Pacific is called North Atlantic Books is a pleasant mystery, as is the survival indeed, the flourishing success of the archaic sport it celebrates. This book, "a sort of Whole Earth Catalog of baseball culture," takes you on "a more enjoyable journey through the game than Roone Arledge could ever imagine," says Steve Wright in a blurb on the back cover. Steve is saying a mouthful there. LIKE A LOT of old-timers, I find an uncomfortable amount of hype in the game today, thanks or no thanks to the Roone (rhymes with Arledges (read TV). I resent Day-Glo uniforms, invented for the color camera.

I hate salad-bowl look-alike stadiums with artificial turf, which photographs better than grass and clay. A pox on Mickey Mouse "The vote for an Islamic republic is Editorial Comment an CP)ronidr Richard T. Thloriof, Editor end Pvblhhor Chariot do Young Thiorior, Publithor 1955-77 Goorgo T. Camoren, Pvbliihor 1915-55 Foundod 1865 by Chariot and M.H. do Young Political Piggybackers SO WHEN DOROTHY ASKED to see the Wizard, who was also widely known to be ten feet tall and to glow with wisdom, the people of Oz looked at her strangely.

"But no one has ever seen the Wizard," they said. "He dwells jn the Tower of Ivory, guarded by positrons', quarks, millirems and all manner of strange things." Dorothy, how ever, was not to be denied. At last she gained entrance to the very Throne Room of the Wizard himself. "Wrhat do you want?" he shouted from behind an impenetrable screen of verbiage. just want to go home to Kansas as quickly as possible, please, sir," said Dorothy.

"Hmmmm," said the Wizard, who liked challenges. "All right, I shall Harness the Atom for Peace and make you a magical nuclear reactor." "It sounds dangerous," said Dorothy dubiously. "How could it be?" demanded the Wizard. "I will make it myself and it is widely known that I am all-wise, all-powerful and absolutely irrefutably infallible." "These contributions were given in good faith but were received in bad faith," Senator Rains charges. Over $81,000 wound up in the pockets of those running the appeal.

The so-called 'Friends for Hayakawa' took in tions of nearly $55,000 but the future senator got only $982 of that to promote his campaign. Rains lays out his case against these high-pressure computerized direct mail operations without naming the names of the operators. But readers of columnist Jack Anderson's Merry-Go-Round will recall that last summer he revealed Howard Jarvis of Prop. 13 fame to have been in on the Friends for Hayakawa committee that did so much for the promoters and so little for the candidate. Senator Rains' bill proposes to: Extend existing prohibitions against the unauthorized use of party names to include a prohibition against the use of the names of candidates or office holders unless authorized specifically for fund raising.

Prohfbit the use of false statements in soliciting contributions. Place a limit of a 30 percent of total contributions on expenditures for fund raising costs. THIS IS AN OFF-YEAR for statewide political campaigns, a quiet year and so a very good time for deliberating over political reforms to make our system work better. We would like to call public attention to a legislative bill of considerable merit along that line, SB 537, which sets out to protect Californians against misleading or fraudulent political fund raising appeals. There is no reason why the state of California should let citizens be victimized by political con men who engage in fraudulent or unethical fund raising practices, particularly through direct mail appeals for contributions to named candidates ithout their authorization or even their knowledge.

Senator Omer L. Rains, Democrat from Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, wants to put a stop to this kind of boiler-room operator who piggybacks on legitimate fund-raising efforts to make a killing for himself. "The need for this legislation is manifest," says Rains. "In 1976, for example, two Los Angeles men raised over $170,000 through misleading fund raising appeals. Purporting to raise money for the 'Friends of Reagan, 'Businessmen for Ford', and Triends for Hayakawa', these individuals successfully solicited substantial contributions from a vice-chairman of Fluor the chairmen of both Standard Oil and Mobil Oil, a Los Angeles city councilman, the law firm of O'Melveny Myers, the Shell Oil employees' political action committee and from various executives of Carter-Haw ley-Hale, Union Bank, California First Bank and Ashland Oil.

SO THE WIZARD happily built a huge nuclear reactor which he called Three Mile Island. As the people of Oz gathered to watch in awe, he pushed a button from high up in his Tower of Ivory. Steam shot out, bells clanged, sirens wailed, the ground trembled and everyone ran for their lives. The Tower collapsed and out tumbled the Wizard, who was five-foot-two and wore bifocals. "But you're not ten feet tall," said Dorothy.

"You're just an ordinary little man' "Don't worry," said the Wizard, dusting himself off, "I'll build you another and this "Thank you, I think I'll walk," said Dorothy'. "After all, anything a man can make can break." Needless to say, the people of Oz never blindly trusted any wizard ever again. So the story has a happy ending. scoreboards that shoot fireworks and say "Welcome to the Pismo Beach Lions Club." A hex on Astrodomes, wherever they may rise. Baseball is not for plutocrats in "luxury" boxes with their own bars and toilets.

The clock doesn't matter in baseball. Time stands still or moves backward. Theoretically, one game could go on forever. Some seem to. I CAN'T RELIEVE women love baseball.

Mabe it's because I still cringe, remembering the time, some 40-hmmm years ago. I asked this delicious blonde if she liked baseball, and she screwed up her face in distaste. "You mean that awful SPITTING game?" she said. Men love baseball because they played it as kids, relive their youth and ill feel to their dying day that they can still hit better than whoever is standing at the plate. "The country of baseball" survives because boys grown old can still imagine playing it.

where they cannot imagine playing basketball a vertical game or the controlled mayhem of football. "When the game is done," writes Donald Hall, "football dracasses itself to a bar and drinks blended whiskey, maybe seven and seven, its mouth sour, its bellv flowing over its angrv belt." THE SECRET fear of diehard baseball fans is that the game is BORING. "Only bores are bored," writes William Saroyan in a dissent, sounding a little like the Walter Winchell who (dined such elliptical lines as "It's nice to be important but it's more important to be nice." Defenders of the came insist it is "subtle." Well. That's an alluring, loaded word. One wouldn't want to be thought so thick that he failed to grasp the "subtlety," such as it is.

and there isn't all that much. "A game of inches." etc. What isn't, including the grandest game of all? "Constant movement." Yes and no, but that pitcher is driving me crazy, standing out there and fidgeting. If you call that movement. ONE OF THE amazing side effects of baseball is its appeal to writers.

Kevin Kerrane, co-editor of this book I mentioned, notes that his "one-time love for the majors has diffused into an odd conservatism, a resistance to almost any change in the game, that seems to have no correlative in other parts of my life (I'm not nostalgic for two-lane highways or medicine before pencillini." Tom Clark ends his poem "To Nelson "Little man, you were so tough that when you went into the hospital last fall to die of cancer you told everybody you were feeling fine." Clark's tribute to Roberto Clemente (1934-72): "won't forget his nervous habit of rearing his head back on his neck like a proud horse." IF CITIES WERE ballplayers, suggests Charles North, this would be the lineup: "San Francisco, ss; Munich, cf; Paris, If; Rome, Madrid, 3b; London, rf; Athens, ib: Istanbul. 2b; New York, (Sorry, Dodger fans). Charles Barasch rhapsodizes on "That curveball, that terrible hummingbird, dropped over the plate so soft, SO REAL, like a pear or breast, striking me out. I love the pitcher. I sit on the bench cursing him.

That curveball was the wheel, was wine, was cooked food, was Stonehenge." Winthrop Watson's "Fastball" ends: "It gets about as big," Ty Cobb said, "as a watermelon seed. It hisses at you as it passes." Donald Hall again, listening to the car radio as Peewee Reese hits a home run off Hubbell and the Dodgers beat the Giants: "Sitting there on the front seat, 11 years old, I clap and cheer. Then I hear my father's strange voice. I look across my mother to see his knuckles white on the wheel, his face white, and I hear him saying 'The punk! The With astonishment and horror, I see that my father is crying." I LIFE IS like sometimes, in the country of baseball, where Pete Rose, still I dripping with World Series sweat, can say, I mid mean "I wish opening was SIGNS OF INTEREST in this reform are coming from the California Fair Political Practices Commission, the guardian of purity and virtue in campaigns. It has recently concluded that misleading contribution appeals are simply a consumer rip-off and fraud for which remedial legislation is needed.

The Senate Select Committee on Political Reform will hold a hearing on this measure April 9 in Los Angeles. Thereafter we hope to see the bill sent on its way through the Legislature to passage. Art's Gallsry Ait fuity A Communist Nod to Plato THE LOST CONTINENT of Atlantis may have been turned up by a Soviet research ship off Gibraltar. And there's some special interest in this sighting because that's just about where Plato said it would be some 2400 years ago. In his dialogues, Timaeus and Cri-tias, Plato put Atlantis just beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

The Soviets have taken photographs that purportedly show vivid lines of brick, fragments of wide steps and walls on the flat top of an underwater peak known as Mt. Amper. Like the Loch Ness monster, however, we rather hope that Atlantis will keep its briny secret through eternity. Confirmation would only stir the droning Law of the Sea Conference into action. They'd have to draft laws for a generation of deep-diving archeologists.

BART's Back NOW THAT BART is again funning through the transbay tube into San Francisco, it seems time to commend the state Public Utilities Commission for sticking with its demand for full assurance of safety for the public before turning on the green light. The Commission had closed down BART's transbay service two days after the January 17 fire that took the life of an Oakland fireman. A lot of criticism of the PUC was sounded by downtown San Francisco merchants and by voices in the media for not getting the system going again right away. Their impatience can be understood, but the lives which might have been lost in some future accident and which predictably can be saved by the new safety procedures to be instituted seem to us to comprise the best response to such critics. 1 )- immemti 1 Pill I vm Don't whisper, sir Preparation WHAT? rocrjcrxprococ! tomorrow..