Live From Down Under

All-news radio listeners in Southern California for years have heard daily Wall Street and business reports coming “live from the Pacific Stock Exchange in downtown Los Angeles.”

Monday through Wednesday mornings last week, KFWB’s Jim Newman was coming live from the financial district in Sydney, Australia. Not exactly the best time to be staking out a hot tip; it was between midnight and 4 a.m. Sydney time.

As it turns out, Newman was on vacation, but he camped out in a 24-hour Sydney brokerage so he could monitor the Dow Jones wire in the wee hours and phone in his reports.

KFWB News Director Ken Beck said Newman typically calls in reports the first few days he goes on vacation and has done the same thing from such exotic locales as Hong Kong and Tokyo.

“He likes to keep his hand in things by staying on the air as much as possible,” Beck said.

Rite of Spring

Occidental Petroleum is subtly distancing itself from its late chairman, Dr. Armand Hammer, who died Dec. 10 at 92. Last week, the Oxy proxy revealed that the company scrapped a sequel to Hammer’s 1987 autobiography that would have cost $480,000 to publish. And it barely paid tribute to Hammer in its annual report.

Occidental is also putting distance between its annual meeting--scheduled May 9 this year--and Hammer’s birthday. For years the Westwood oil company always held its annual stockholders meeting on or within a couple of days of the May 21 date.

Don’t count on the company’s spring meeting being moved to Hammer successor Ray R. Irani’s birthday. It falls on Jan. 15.

Pulling Rug Out From Milken

Few lives have been scrutinized as closely as Michael Milken’s, the junk bond wizard from Encino serving time in federal prison for securities violations.

But a never-before-told story emerges about Milken’s hair--or lack of it--in Business Week writer Anthony Bianco’s new book “Rainmaker.”

The book is a biography of disgraced Wall Street investment banker Jeffrey Beck, who was publicly humiliated after making up phony military, athletic and business careers. Bianco relates an account of a meeting of Beck, Milken and an institutional investor, in which the financier’s hairpiece suddenly shifted.

“There was no doubt it. Milken’s toupee had slid down an inch or so onto his forehead. The thing was crooked, too. You’d think a guy with his own capital market could afford a decent hairpiece,” Bianco writes.

Briefly . . .

The next Honus Wagners? Pacoima toy maker Spectra Star says the most popular of the 300 cards in its “Desert Storm” collection are of President Bush, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Gen. Colin L. Powell, King Fahd and Saddam Hussein . . . Oakland-based Golden West Financial, known for having the tightest purse strings in the savings and loan business, paid a $1 premium to assume the deposits of a failed Florida thrift . . . A Los Angeles furniture store advertises a “Postwar Sale At Prewar Sale Prices.”