San Diego — Although their team may be scrambling for stadium money, Padres honchos Larry Lucchino and Charles Steinberg have put together enough cash to buy a luxurious La Jolla Shores condo together. According to a deed filed in county records on September 5, Padres co-owner and president Lucchino and Steinberg, listed on the team's website as "executive vice-president/public affairs," each purchased a 50 percent interest in the condo on Vallecitos for a total of about $816,000, having borrowed $398,000 from Washington Mutual. The unit had formerly been owned by Sanwa Jitsugyo Co., according to the records. This April 5, Steinberg, who once reportedly served as the club dentist to the Baltimore Orioles, in which Lucchino formerly held an interest, quitclaimed part of his interest in a $110,000 condo on Midland Road in Poway to a woman in what the deed listed as a "refinancing" ... Those "Olympic Extra" editions of the Union-Tribune being hawked on downtown street corners by a middle-aged "newsboy" dressed like a football referee haven't been flying into readers' hands, but the promotion, complete with fast-food tie-ins, TV spots, and a billboard attached to a roving flatbed truck, is said to please Copley "editor in chief" Herb Klein, a big Olympics fan. In February 1959 Klein, then editor of the San Diego Union, wrote then vice president Richard Nixon, his one-time political mentor, suggesting that the presidential candidate-to-be schedule a session with a well-known Olympian. "If time will permit, while you are in Los Angeles, it would be a good gesture to invite up for a brief talk Rafer Johnson, who recently was named California athlete of the year and is president of the UCLA student body. He is a very fine young colored lad who, you will recall, won fame by beating the Russians in the decathlon. I think this could be arranged very easily and again would make an interesting picture."

Hollywood's dark cavities

San Diego's anti-fluoridation activist Jeff Green is taking a direct shot at the moguls of Hollywood, in the form of a lawsuit his organization, Citizens for Fair Treatment, has filed against eight major studios. This one has nothing to do with fluoride, though. Instead, Green's suit alleges that Hollywood has engaged in deceptive, unfair, and unlawful business practices by aiming its ads for R-rated movies at children as young as ten years old. Green says the case stems from that recent report by the Federal Trade Commission, which charged that film companies used everything from high school newspapers and teen-oriented magazines to spread the word about the adult flicks. "This unscrupulous, unethical, unlawful and deceptive marketing of violence and adult content to impressionable children was intended solely to reap greater profits at the expense of children and the general public. Intentional marketing to and targeting of impressionable children with adult films depicting sex, violence, and drugs is unscrupulous and unethical, so as to constitute an unfair business practice," charges the suit, filed in Los Angeles.

Plane crash

Forty-eight-year-old San Diego State University biologist Steve Hastings is recuperating in an Alaska hospital after the twin-engine Piper 1040 Navajo carrying him and nine others plunged into the tundra at Nuiqsut airport near the Arctic Circle. Four people, including the pilot, were killed when the Cape Smythe Air commuter plane crashed a week ago Monday during its second landing attempt, according to an account in the Anchorage Daily News. "It was almost like a dream," Hastings told the paper. "I thought, 'Oh, no, he's having trouble getting control of this plane... It was immediately apparent to me we were going down. I don't know how I got out, to be quite honest, because right now I can barely move without pain." Hastings suffered two fractured lumbar vertebrae and bruises, the paper said ... Attempts of San Diego based Vortex Aviation Services to operate helicopter tours of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming have inspired a new bill by Wyoming senator Craig Thomas to ban all such operations in Yellowstone National Park as well as Grand Teton.

Contributor: Matt Potter