And Amoebas Don’t Fight Fair, We Hear

The Great Amoeba Invasion of L.A. was broadcast by KFWB four decades ago, but Chuck Blore remembers it well. After all, he staged it.

Blore, the program director in the station’s Top 40 music days, got the idea for the gag when he tuned in to KFWB one morning and discovered that his deejay had a case of the blahs.

“I called him on the hotline and I said, ‘You’re on the radio, jerk! After the next record, I want you to say there is an amoeba loose and ladies with butterfly nets are chasing [it],’ ” Blore recalled over the weekend at a reunion hosted by historian Don Barrett at the Museum of Television & Radio.

The deejay not only made the amoeba announcement but he added further developments.

“In the middle of the next record,” Blore said, “he stopped the record, which was absolutely against any policy, and said, ‘More information on the amoeba. It was seen going over the side of the Pasadena Freeway.’ We did it all day long. By noon that day, it was like Orson Welles”--who terrified radio listeners in 1938 with a fake account of a Martian invasion.

“The front page of the L.A. Herald Examiner featured a cartoon of a guy on a lamppost holding a radio to his ear looking down with a frightened look on his face. Out of the radio came, ‘The amoebas are coming, the amoebas are coming.’ ”

ON THE ROAD: Carol Trudelle of L.A. saw a vehicle just perfect for a Halloween party, except that the creepy name in its title is really an acronym for Brockton (Mass.) Area Transit (see photo).

“DUH!” WARNING: Bill Stark of Pasadena came across some words of wisdom for those unfamiliar with the dangers of fire (see accompanying).

FLAVORS OF THE CAMPAIGN: Only in L.A. doesn’t try to be a bully, really. When this column announced its presidential ice cream flavor poll several weeks ago, it wasn’t trying to intimidateGlendale-based Baskin-Robbins, which conducts a similar campaign every four years.

Well, the other day, a Baskin-Robbins rep told me the company has canceled plans to name presidential ice cream flavors this year. The official explanation was something about the company being involved in other projects. But obviously B-R knew it couldn’t match the suggestions of this column’s readers.

Here are the winning varieties:

Al Gore inspired Al B Fund Raisin (submitted by Kelly Fogarty), George W. Bush brought forth Mangled English Toffee (Kent Lee), Ralph Nader inspired Lemo-Nader (Laurel Hall), and Pat Buchanan was honored with Plum Nuts (Leo McElroy).

Libertarian backer Steve Kelley also won for acknowledging that no flavor sounded appetizing for his candidate, Harry Browne.

CLOUDY PLOTS: Three movies in which TV weathermen are the main characters:

* “L.A. Story” (1991), starring Steve Martin, who pronounces Pasadena as “Pa-sad-na.”

* “Snow Job” (2000), starring Chevy Chase, who, out of frustration, hijacks a live broadcast of a rival who has better ratings.

* “Lucky Numbers” (2000), starring John Travolta, who teams up with the TV station’s Lotto girl to try to rig the state lottery.

miscelLAny:

Talk of noteworthy tombstone epitaphs in this column brought this note from Fred Wright of Agoura: “Like Faulkner and Bukowski, I have spent some years working for the post office. Unlike them, my writings are largely undiscovered. However, I did glean an epitaph from those years that is specified in my will: a postal term, MLNA, which stands for ‘moved, left no address.’ ”

And, on that note, Happy Halloween!

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Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LATIMES, Ext. 77083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A., 90012 and by e-mail at [email protected].