Battle of the Britches: Rival Claim to Levi Legacy Arises

Everybody trying to get a leg up on California, Chapter LXVII. In this case, two legs.

Remember that century-old pair of Levi’s that turned up in Colorado and turned out to be one of the two oldest in existence? Levi Strauss paid $25,000 for them and put them on display in its San Francisco headquarters.

Now there’s a Nevada upstart claim that the prototype for the Levi legacy was stitched up in Reno about 127 years ago for a fat woodcutter (waist 56 inches, thigh 29) whose wife asked the tailor to make something durable.

For $3, Jacob Davis reportedly fashioned a pair of riveted pants from light-colored duck twill he bought from Levi Strauss & Co.--a rugged fabric Davis had used to make wagon covers as well as tents.

The Reno Gazette quoted Nevada state archivist Guy Rocha, who speculated that if they’re still out there, socked away in some miner’s hideaway, the Nevada pants could fetch more than the Colorado pants. And that’s without the jacket.

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The meter is running: Shelley wrote that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

In California, of course, the polarity is reversed, and a former legislator is the poet for the state.

Since he left the Assembly more than three decades ago, Charles B. Garrigus has been welcomed back each year to share his verses in a chamber where the language more often inclines to the stilted or the insulting. Former Gov. Pat Brown used to say he showed up at the Legislature’s last session just to hear Gus Garrigus’ poem. Monuments around the state bear some of his verses.

And, on a medium less durable than marble, Robert Haas, the nation’s eighth poet laureate, is quoted in the Berkeley phone book, commending it for including the verses of local students:

“What we say to our neighbors, our exchange with the grocery clerk, our ballots cast to elect our local officials--all these are made of the same ordinary words that compose poems. Presenting the poems of Berkeley students cheek by jowl with the phone numbers we call again and again for pleasure or business, for community or mutual aid invites another kind of conversation, another kind of neighborliness. Thanks to the folks at the Berkeley Phone Book for their genius in giving us another way to connect.�

One of the poems, “Question an answering machine,� by Berkeley student Junichi P. Semitsu, reads in part, “Hi/you reached/the number you just dialed/After the tone/please leave a poem/cuz tired and uninspired/I can’t pick up the phone . . . Snowball’s chance in hell/I pick up/cuz I have cheap friends/who call collect . . . So after the beep/you better keep my faith/in humanity/bury my apathy/wake me from my slumber/and leave your name and number/cuz I been waitin’ a while/for you to dial/and take my life/off hold.�

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Cashing in, cashing out: San Francisco is following the example of trendy South Orange, N.J., and issuing its own credit card.

Each transaction means two bits in the city coffers for park maintenance, and officials say hopefully that the whole deal could net them $850,000 over five years.

South Orange’s cards show its village hall; San Francisco’s will depict cable cars or the Golden Gate Bridge.

Don’t jump off without it.

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One-offs: The proposal to limit tourists’ cars on the floor of Yosemite Valley has not come soon enough to save four black bears--including two cubs learning their mother’s larcenous ways--that were destroyed by the National Park Service for breaking into cars and posing a threat to visitors. . . . Although residents of a rural area near a Susanville prison complained that security lights are so bright they can see their own shadows at night even three miles away, prison officials say they won’t dim the 1,000-watt bulbs mounted on 150-foot standards. . . . Three Santa Rosa men face jail and a $10,000 fine if convicted of trapping and killing a pregnant mountain lion and mutilating it for souvenirs. . . . Taking a cue from the O.J. Simpson trial’s “Camp O.J.,� the news media encampment for the Theodore Kaczynski Unabomber trial in Sacramento has named itself “Club Ted.�

EXIT LINE

“They could get in serious trouble. They must love what they’re doing.�

--Scott Zeliff, a record store clerk in Santa Rosa, where Jazz Rogue Radio, a low-power, unlicensed underground radio station, has been broadcasting contemporary and classic jazz in defiance of Federal Communications Commission regulations.

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California Dateline appears every other Friday.

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Sweet Potato Season

The sweet potato is among the New World Foods that Americans’ holiday tables celebrate, particularly on Thanksgiving, when sweet potato consumption peaks. California ranks third nationally in growing this root vegetable, which is rich in potassium, beta carotene and Vitamin C. Here are 1996 production figures for the Top 10 states.

Pounds of sweet potatoes, in millions

1. North Carolina: 434

2. Louisiana: 336

3. California: 216

4. Mississippi: 130

5. Texas: 74.3

6. Alabama: 73.1

7. Georgia: 40

8. South Carolina: 20

9. New Jersey: 15.6

10. Virginia: 7

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times