<i> Snapshot of life in the Golden State</i> : For a Shot at the Top Job, You Have to Get in Line

In the month of January, California has had three chief executives--and no elections.

Republican Pete Wilson went to Asia, leaving Democrat Lt. Gov. Gray Davis in charge. When Davis went to Washington, for the presidential inauguration, Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer, also a Democrat, was acting governor.

Sensing a trend, this column inquired of the secretary of state’s office about the line of succession thereafter. They are:

The Assembly speaker (Democrat Cruz Bustamante), the secretary of state (Bill Jones, Republican), the attorney general (Dan Lungren, Republican), the treasurer (Matt Fong, Republican) and the controller (Kathleen Connell, Democrat).

There are no provisions after that; any disaster that wiped out the first eight must have been so big that there wouldn’t be much of a state left to govern anyway.

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Rocket man: Timothy Leary’s wish to go into orbit one last time has been stuck on the launch pad, but not for much longer.

Last May, the dying request of the 75-year-old cicerone of psychedelia was that 7 grams of his cremated ashes be packed into a capsule the size of a tube of lipstick and blasted into space.

The launch of the Pegasus rocket, postponed for a variety of reasons, is now tentatively set for March 11 over the Canary Islands, says Charles Chafer of Celestis Inc., the Houston company pioneering the ashes-to-stardust program.

The rocket, launched from under the wing of an L-1011 jet, will bear a two-pound canister carrying ashes from Leary, “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry, rocket scientist Krafft Ehricke and space physicist Gerard O’Neill, among others, as Chafer tells it.

Three hundred miles above the Earth, the capsule will orbit as briefly as 18 months or as long as 10 years before it burns up in the atmosphere.

The L-1011 with the Pegasus beneath a wing is to take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Feb. 15, heading for Spain and for the rocket to launch the remains into orbit.

The 7-gram solution costs $4,800 per, and most of those whose ashes are aboard, says Chafer, “wanted to go into space in their lifetimes.” Leary would argue that he already had.

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Infant Deaths

Deaths from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) have declined in California and the nation over the last seven years. Officials attribute the drop to better education of parents about the condition. Here are figures for SIDS deaths for children under age one.

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Year U.S. California 1989 5,634 780 1990 5,417 717 1991 5,349 725 1992 4,891 568 1993 4,669 545 1994 4,073 486 1995 3,279* 398

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* Preliminary

Sources: National Center for Health Statistics, California Department of Health Services

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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A Brown study: While the state of Georgia has been haled into the U.S. Supreme Court over its policy requiring drug tests for political candidates, California’s Supreme Court has already considered mandatory drug tests for government employees.

The court voted yes on drug tests for new job applicants, but not for employees seeking promotions. New Justice Janice Rogers Brown was among three who would have OKd across-the-board drug tests, but her separate opinion was something more than legalese.

If she could undo precedent, she wrote, she would decide the case on the premise that no one has the right to a government job, and anyone who doesn’t like the idea of drug testing can look for employment elsewhere.

That may be an uncomfortable choice, “but that is life,” she concluded. “Sometimes beauty is fierce; love is tough; and freedom is painful.”

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Six down, one to go: At California’s inaugural ball for President Clinton’s second term, the chief exec dropped by to thank California for its 54 electoral votes. “Four years ago, California was in great trouble economically, and I told the people of California that if you sent me to the White House, I’d be there with you.”

So we did. “And then you have floods, fires, earthquakes--everything but a plague of locusts.” To its credit, the crowd laughed.

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One-offs: A stray dog had to be put to death after a Tehama County ironworker, who now faces animal cruelty charges, bit off the dog’s testicles when it tried to mate with the man’s German shepherd. . . . The parents of a teenager who was disabled after he stuck his head out a moving car’s window because he was sick and hit a pine tree branch have sued Shasta County for letting the tree “protrude and infringe”. . . . The Air Force has withdrawn an award and dropped its ties with a retired Riverside master sergeant who lectured about the tragic Bataan Death March as if he had been part of it but who in fact spent World War II supervising airplane maintenance crews in England and North Africa. . . . In weather-related news, a city ordinance in Hanford makes it illegal to stop a child from jumping into a mud puddle. . . . International mover and shaker Warren Christopher may have moved and shaken a bit too much, as the retiring secretary of state fell and broke his wrist while cleaning out his Georgetown garage for his return to Los Angeles. . . . San Francisco’s new director of parking and traffic had to spend his first commission meeting apologizing for joking that “meter maids do eat their young.”

EXIT LINE

“Don’t quit your day job.”

--Advice to wannabe gold panners from Leonard Long, prospecting along the Stanislaus River as storms and floods have opened up the treasure of the Sierra Nevada to gold seekers.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.