Superstitious L.A. : Nobody really believes a rabbit’s foot brings good luck. Do they?

WE MODERN-DAY Angelenos think of ourselves as a calm, cool, rational crew. But when it comes to an everyday belief in superstition, it turns out we’re not all that different from our ancestors of the Middle Ages. We may not still believe that toads cause warts or that when teen-age girls lose their virginity, tiny clefts in the ends of their noses disappear, but plenty of other illogical notions remain.

Last month, for example, members of the psychology department at Pierce College in Woodland Hills flew into an uproar when the administration assigned the number 1300 to their building; they were afraid that superstitious students would refuse to take psychology courses there.

Nor are we suffering from any shortage of new superstitions. Immigrants are pouring into Los Angeles, throwing their beliefs into the cultural stew. And what with microwave radiation, AIDS and complex new technologies, we have many new things to be superstitious about. The only difference is, we don’t so much call them superstitions anymore as valid psychological insights or hard-won strategies for coping with urban life.

If you eat the end of the watermelon, your father will die. --ARMENIAN IMMIGRANT

FROM TURKEY

Don’t ask your dog a question. If he answers , you will die.

--IRISH IMMIGRANT

If you take a picture with three people in it, the person in the middle will die.

--KOREAN-AMERICAN WOMAN

FROM MONTEREY PARK

IT’S A WARM morning in the overstuffed UCLA folklore archives, and Frances Cattermole-Tally, a busy but friendly folklorist and executive editor of the soon-to-be-published “Encyclopedia of American Popular Beliefs and Superstitions,” is showing off the long rows of file cabinets bursting with more than a million index cards, each of which contains a different scrap of folklore or superstition. The archives were established in the 1940s by Prof. Wayland D. Hand, who hired students and research assistants to gather information from written and oral material; other universities, many outside California, also contributed over the years. The largest categories deal with such eternal concerns as love, death, health, luck and money. “I had someone tell me,” Cattermole-Tally says, “that if you buy purple towels, your marriage will break up.”

Surely, we ask, the woman didn’t believe that?

Perhaps not, says Cattermole-Tally, but “she didn’t buy purple towels.”

The folklorist says she doesn’t know whether modern-day Angelenos are more or less superstitious than our pre-industrial ancestors. “It would be hard to prove one way or another. But considering people and the way they operate, I would say there is not much difference.” She cites an example from the files, a woman who made her kids watch television from behind bales of peat moss so they wouldn’t absorb any radiation.

If the woman was that worried about it, we ask, why didn’t she just get rid of the TV?

“Most people don’t think very logically,” says Cattermole-Tally. “All you have to do is read the political pages to find that out.” Most people, in fact, don’t even consider themselves superstitious. “You want to know my definition of superstition?” asks Cattermole-Tally. “I have beliefs. You have superstitions.” Superstition is a reflection of the way we think under stress, she explains. It’s a “belief with no reality.” It’s not a rational process.

One way old superstitions survive through the ages is by adapting to the times. Many people, she points out, still believe that the groom shouldn’t see the bride before the ceremony on their wedding day.

Why is that?

“Virgins are very powerful. You never look a goddess in the face. Actaeon looked at Diana in her bath and was torn apart by dogs. It is dangerous to look at genitalia. In medieval Europe, it was thought that a woman could stop a storm by raising her skirts.”

She tells another story about a student who thought that if a man looked at you a certain way you could get pregnant.

What way was that?

The student didn’t know. “She said, ‘My mother never told me,’ ” Cattermole-Tally says.

Over the next hour, Cattermole-Tally gives dozens of other examples of modern superstitions, including the belief that red cars get more traffic tickets and the supposed tendency of airplane crashes and entertainers’ deaths to occur in threes. “And in World War II there were men carrying the pubic hair of their girlfriends to keep (their women) faithful.”

Why are so many people willing to believe undocumentable things?

“I hate to say, ‘That’s the way people think,’ ” she says, “but they do. People don’t care what the facts are. They cling to fantastic notions. They don’t want to hear what really happens.” The truth is, she says, “they don’t want to know.”

Whenever using chopsticks, never point the index finger out. The parent who is pointed at may die.

--CHINESE-AMERICAN

WOMAN FROM LOS ANGELES

It’s bad luck to wash your husband’s morning coffee cup until he comes home again at night.

--SILVER LAKE HOUSEWIFE

If a man wishes to practice witchcraft, he must ask his mother to have sexual intercourse with him. If she accepts, she dies. If she refuses, he dies.

--”KUANYAMA AMBO MAGIC,”

A STUDY OF AFRICAN FOLKLORE

MOST PEOPLE regard superstitions as quaint notions left over from the Middle Ages about black cats, broken mirrors and not walking under ladders. Psychiatrists and psychologists, on the other hand, believe that superstition arises anew in every age in response to anxiety or universal longing on the part of mankind for some kind of predictability about those aspects of life that are generally beyond human control: life, death, love and money.

“Human beings are always trying to make sense of the world,” says Pitzer College anthropologist Donald Brenneis. For most people, the thought that we might live in an indifferent universe is so frightening that they prefer to blame their bad luck on something they either did or didn’t do. The value of superstition is that it reduces anxiety; by making the universe predictable again, says Brenneis, it restores one’s sense “of comfort and control.”

It’s bad luck:

To look back when getting on an airplane.

To count the cars in a funeral cortege.

To read yesterday’s newspaper.

To hang a towel on a doorknob.

To take the cat with you when you move.

To let your wife pack your parachute.

To let a rocking chair keep rocking after you get up. To take off your wedding ring.

To say, “I’ll be seeing you” to an undertaker. ACCORDING TO former White House aide Michael K. Deaver’s new book on the White House (“Behind the Scenes”), even Ronald Reagan is “incurably superstitious. If he emptied his pants pocket you would always find about five good-luck charms. I am sure he reads his horoscope every day. (Reagan is an Aquarius.)” Not only does the President not scoff at the paranormal, Deaver says, but Reagan also once told him that his dog Rex runs around the White House barking at Lincoln’s ghost. A group of friends who purchased a Bel-Air home where the Reagans will live when they return to Southern California in January changed the address to 668 St. Cloud Road from 666 (666 being “the mark of the beast”--Satan).

It’s good luck:

To hang baby shoes from your rear-view mirror.

To die on screen at the start of your movie career.

To buy your lottery tickets from a hunchback. MANY superstitions are passed down through cultures or families, and people practice them for no other reason than that it would make them nervous if they didn’t. USC senior Gina Catan, who is of Mexican descent, says that in her family, it was always traditional to purse your lips and blow lightly three times whenever something bad happened. She still does it, but she doesn’t know why. “It was just something we were taught to do.”

Other people were taught never to light more than two cigarettes on a single match. But what’s now a quaint superstition practiced in singles bars made a lot more sense, says folklorist Cattermole-Tally, if you were caught in a trench in WWI and worried about being spotted by a sniper.

Actually, according to Carol Potter in her 1983 book “Knock on Wood,” the superstition predates WWI by quite a while. In the 10th-Century Russian Orthodox Church, it was customary at funerals to light three candles from one taper in order to help the departed soul into eternity. Since this ceremony was only performed by the clergy, it soon became bad luck for a layman to light three of anything on a taper or a match.

But though these superstitions hang on, it’s not quite accurate to say that people are totally uncritical of them. As anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski discovered in his study of New Guinea’s Trobriand Islanders, there’s an inverse relationship between superstition and self-confidence. The islanders who fished in the sheltered lagoon had little use for superstition, but those who dared the towering waves of the open ocean had a deep respect for fetish and ritual. In similar fashion, it’s modern risk takers like actors, athletes, gamblers and stockbrokers who tend to be the most superstitious, since they know better than most people how much of a role luck plays in their lives.

This is true not only of the most hapless people in athletics but the most gifted as well. When John Wooden was coaching UCLA basketball, he used to take a daily 5-mile walk around the track, picking up hairpins as he went as part of a good-luck ritual. “There was a tree outside the track, and when I came out I would stick them in the wood. It was an old baseball superstition-- ‘find a hairpin, stick it in the nearest wood and get a base hit.’ ”

When passing a cemetery always touch your hair. --GINA CATAN, USC STUDENT

If a pregnant woman is outside during an eclipse, her child will have a cleft palate. --ISABEL CASTRO, FORMER ACTING DIRECTOR, PLAZA DE LA RAZA

It’s bad luck for a man to put his hat on a bed. --PALOS VERDES ESTATES MAN

A STUDY reported in Psychology Today a decade ago seemed to bear out the psychologists’ theory that the primary function of superstition is reducing anxiety. It found that 70% of college students surveyed resorted to some kind of magic--wearing lucky socks, sneakers and blouses, using lucky pens or always studying at the same library carrel. Furthermore, the study showed, the overwhelming majority of students found that using such magic usually made them feel more relaxed and less anxious.

Some of the most superstitious people of all are gamblers. Because they have so little control over the outcome of events, they often resort to random numerology: betting their odometer readings, their license-plate numbers, their children’s birthdays, their wedding anniversaries. Stephen J. Conway, a 32-year-old electronics worker from Sonoma County, won $11 million two years ago in the state Lotto contest by betting the jersey numbers of such athletes as Mickey Mantle, Terry Bradshaw, Roberto Clemente and Bill Walton. Many horse-racing fans, says one local track writer, use the Holy Ghost system: If the same-numbered horse wins more than one race early on a racing card, then the fans bet that number for the rest of the day on the grounds that nature loves to complete a three (as in Father, Son and Holy Ghost.)

At the Normandie Casino in Gardena, some of the Asian players buttress their luck by wearing jade, which is one reason, says Kenneth Lee, the manager of the pai gow (Chinese poker) games, that he doesn’t allow any of his dealers to wear it. “If a dealer were to come into a game wearing a jade ring, (the players) would get up and leave (for fear) the dealer’s ring would hurt their own luck.”

But superstitious as gamblers and athletes are, their beliefs are small potatoes when contrasted with those of the people who trade on the country’s financial markets. One successful Los Angeles broker believes that the market always does better on days he isn’t there. So when his clients’ portfolios begin to drop, he leaves for a couple days. A Brentwood attorney never plays the market on Monday or Friday.

Mitch Pindus, a 30-year-old stockbroker who works in Century City, says he recently made a lot of money trading entirely on the basis of how a fellow broker dresses. For reasons of charity, Pindus calls the man Fred Smith. It isn’t enough to say Smith is a bad dresser, Pindus says. “He is pathetically uncoordinated.” He wears plaid slacks, polka-dot ties and Hush Puppies. “He has the only brown pinstripe three-piece suit I’ve ever seen. I used to think he was colorblind.” But the crazy thing, Pindus says, is that the worse Smith dresses, the better the market does. “I’m serious,” he says. The correlation is uncanny. Pindus calls it the FSCI (Fred Smith Clothing Index).

“This past January,” says Pindus, “he came in with a green tie that was so wide he didn’t even need a shirt. It covered his chest completely.” Smith was wearing brown shoes, white socks, tan slacks, a green blazer and a blue shirt. “And the market was up 76 points. (Then another time) he came into the office and I think (someone else) must have dressed him, because he was wearing a black sweater and a white shirt, and the market was down 23 by 8 a.m. “If he’s dressed badly, I buy, and if he’s looking good, I sell. In the two months I’ve been charting him, I’ve been 100% right. I’m not kidding. I turned one $140,000 account into $240,000 trading the FSCI.”

It’s good luck to put a shirt on backwards.

--USC SENIOR

When water tastes good to you, you won’t live much longer.

--JAPANESE-AMERICAN WOMAN

FROM ANAHEIM

IT’S A GRAY morning in north Pasadena where Al Seckel, the founder of the Southern California Skeptics Society, lives in a big comfortable house with dark hardwood floors that nicely set off his collection of antique furniture. In person, Seckel is calm, thoughtful and low-key until one gets to the subject of irrationality--he is positively apoplectic about that.

The problem, Seckel says, is that some people have such an emotional need to have an answer they’d rather have a wrong one than none at all. Right after the Oct. 1 earthquake last year, he says, the Spanish-language newspaper Noticias del Mundo ran a front-page headline quoting a psychic’s prediction of another quake. “It terrified a lot of people. Not only were they jittery over the recent earthquake, they have in the backs of their minds the Mexican earthquake or the El Salvador earthquake. Representatives of Caltech called up the writer and asked him why he ran the story. He said that he had called Caltech, and that they didn’t know when the next earthquake would occur. And this psychic did. That’s news, and people want to know, he said. That’s why they printed it.”

Seckel leans forward on the couch. “What does that tell you? What do you think about that?”

People want answers and they don’t care where they come from.

“That’s what I’m telling you. (The writer) said, ‘The Caltech people didn’t help. This woman did.’ ”

Democrats win presidential elections in years when the National League team wins the World Series.

--UCLA FOLKLORE ARCHIVES

If you take a phone off the hook, someone in the family will die.

--USC STUDENT

Hold your breath when passing a graveyard or you will be the next to die.

--UCLA FOLKLORE ARCHIVES

MOST superstitious people instinctively rely on the conservation-of-momentum principle--if something is going right, don’t change anything, including your clothes. As a result, some baseball players refuse to shave during a hitting streak or to change their shirt or pants. Former San Diego Padres pitcher John Montefusco once told The Times that he used to wear the same pair of underwear as long as he was winning. (If he lost, he threw it out.) Stockbrokers are notorious for this kind of thinking, says former Bear, Stearns broker Marc Shenkman. If they’re sitting in front of a terminal with their feet up on the desk watching the stocks scroll by, and their stock begins to go up, they literally won’t move. “They won’t go to the bathroom; they’ll send a secretary out for lunch; they’re almost afraid to breathe. They think if they put their feet down, the stock will go down, too.”

The number 13 is considered so unlucky that TWA once reported that its load factor (percentage of occupied seats) fell 5% on a Friday the 13th it studied. It’s a fear that goes back to primitive people, according to author Carol Potter. When they added up their fingers, they got 10; then when they added their two feet they got 12, the highest they knew how to count. Anything after that was the terrifying unknown--13. Thirteen’s reputation grew more fearsome, says Pitzer College anthropologist Brenneis, because 13 people sat down at the Last Supper, where Judas betrayed Jesus.

Santa Monica doesn’t have a 13th Street (when city officials named the streets, they went from 12th to Euclid to 14th). Likewise, there is no 13th Street in Long Beach. In Los Angeles, modern hotels like the New Otani and the Bonaventure still don’t have 13th floors. And one Orange County hotel that does, the Westin South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, has found that in the intensely competitive meeting and convention business, some of the other Orange County hotels try to use that against it.

What they do, says the hotel’s former marketing representative, Penny Elia, is tell potential customers that the South Coast Plaza is bad luck--not only does it have a 13th floor and a room 1313, but it is also located at 666 Anton Blvd. However, Elia says, “I’m not aware that we ever lost any business because of this.”

According to critic and film writer Michael Medved, people in the movie industry are naturally superstitious because “they know better than anyone that the notion of their becoming a star had less to do with talent than timing and luck.” Los Angeles screenwriter Rowby Goren says a late friend of his would, if he happened to drop a page from his screenplay, always immediately retype it, lest this lapse somehow jinx the sale. Dick Cavett once said he touches every eighth parking meter when walking down the street. Henry Fonda reportedly used to cross his fingers when he saw a dwarf. Bette Davis once told Playboy, “If your nose itches, you’ll kiss a fool.”

Since the driving force behind superstition is anxiety, it’s not surprising that many superstitions concern money and financial transactions. One Sherman Oaks woman who wanted to sell her house a few years back consulted an astrologer, who told her to put up the For Sale sign on Easter Sunday between 5:20 and 6:41 a.m., according to the Wall Street Journal. So the woman set the alarm clock and put out the sign, whereupon the house sold on the first day for $270,000--$5,000 more than she’d hoped to get.

Some Chinese families won’t buy a house that has a road running directly at the property, says Glendale real estate agent Peter Du, because it gives evil spirits direct access to the home.

And at one Mercedes dealership in Alhambra, Taiwanese buyers tend to avoid the Mercedes model 420 because four means death in their culture, salesman John Rigler told The Times last year. On the other hand, they love the Mercedes 560 because six in their culture is a very auspicious number.

The botanicas of East L.A. sell La Buena Suerte, green aerosol cans of good luck emblazoned with dollar signs to use when playing the lottery. “You spray the room,” says poet Marisela Norte, “and then you scratch off your tickets.” According to Plaza de la Raza former acting director Isabel Castro, an itchy palm means you are going to get a gift or money. “Last year, I had an itchy palm for a week.” And shortly thereafter, the center received an inheritance, a corporate grant and a donation of pre-Columbian artifacts.

For many people nowadays, technology is so threatening that a whole range of beliefs have grown up in the narrow gap between superstition and empirical plausibility: Sitting too close to the TV makes your eyes change color. If you curse your computer, it will trash your files. Photocopying with the cover up gives you cancer. Even if someone else just pushed the elevator button, the elevator won’t come unless you push the button, too. When caught in a traffic jam, the lane you end up in will always be the slowest.

If you keep Easter eggs for over one year there will be a death in the family.

--UCLA FOLKLORE ARCHIVES

If the TV is not turned off or the channel changed before the opening overture of “Perry Mason” is over, everyone in the room will die.

--MALE FROM NORTH CAROLINA

WE REALLY are less superstitious than our ancestors in the Dark Ages, says Alan Dundes, an internationally known folklorist from UC Berkeley, but that’s just because science has helped replace superstition.

“This is not to say there aren’t tons of examples of modern superstitions, and I don’t just mean Tarot cards,” he says. “Half these new diets are superstitions. All these beliefs connected with sports: not mentioning a no-hitter; not letting the team be with women the night before a game; professional sports people crossing themselves before shooting the foul shot or coming up to bat. The idea that (if you’re a college professor) you don’t mention that you have put in a grant application for fear you won’t get it. People still think if you take the umbrella, it won’t rain; or if you wash your car, it will.” If you think about, says Dundes, that last superstition is really a startling conceit in personal omnipotence--the idea that what you do with your umbrella or car controls the weather for everyone in Los Angeles.

As for advertising, he says, it couldn’t function without superstition. “There are these secret ingredients in products--the new, improved whatever-the-hell-it-is. They have secret ingredients in gasoline and motor oil, usually with three initials--that’s the magic number.” One reason for the prevalence of superstition, says Dundes, is that “to some extent there has been a loss in organized religion, and people have sought alternatives: Hare Krishnas, secular humanism, harmonic convergence. There are tons of little cult groups. . . . The newspapers are full of astrological forecasts. Yuppies have magical beliefs in success. ‘Dress for success. Saying something will make it happen. . . .’ People are afraid the boss will appear if they just criticized him. (Such beliefs) are like Murphy’s Law: ‘If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.’ It is a way of scientifically codifying error. All I’m saying is, we can’t limit superstitions to black cats crossing paths.”

But the main thing to remember about superstitions, says Dundes, is that they are caused by anxiety about fundamental issues like love, death, money and health. “And when science fails--’Sorry, there’s no cure for this’--that’s when you go down to Mexico and get the apricot pits. The bottom line is that there will never be a time when people do not believe in superstition.”