INS Chief Sees a Different Kind of Run for the Border

For just a few moments there, it might have been renamed the Immigration and Au Naturel-ization Service.

INS Director Doris Meissner was out here from Washington a while back, on one of those frontera fact-finding trips. She was getting the grand border tour in a carful of other border big shots when they saw . . . him.

“We were going around a right-hand curve on a mountain road that goes up to 4,000 feet,” recounted sector chief Johnny Williams.

The driver abruptly braked to a halt. There ensued “five seconds of absolute silence” as a fine specimen of a man, completely naked except for shoes, jogged nonchalantly past and on down the mountain road.

Now this car was full of border veterans, people who, in Williams’ words, have “seen everything known to mankind” in that internationalized zone. (In fact, a Texas Border Patrol helicopter was waved down recently by a border-jumping Honduran clown in bright blue nose, rainbow wig and clown costume; he was tired after his long trip and wanted to be sent home.)

But on this occasion, even the driver “was absolutely speechless. He turned crimson red as a Washington apple,” Williams said.

As the jogger passed from sight, the passengers burst out laughing. “The commissioner”--Meissner--was “probably laughing the hardest,” Williams said.

Once the mirth subsided, “she commented on the tan lines.”

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Dig we might: More than 40 years after its last grave was dug, the veterans cemetery in Yountville--the last stop for 4,711 veterans of the Mexican War, Civil War and Spanish-American War--may reopen on an ashes-only basis.

The antique burial ground was shut down in the 1950s because the rocky earth made for such strenuous grave-digging, but better excavation techniques have made Jay Vargas, the state’s Veterans Affairs secretary, think about reopening the cemetery to cremated ashes of veterans.

A visiting inspector from the Veterans Affairs Department’s cemetery system called it “a gem,” set as it is among valley oaks, within sight of mountain peaks and vineyards.

Among the graves are those of three Medal of Honor recipients--and an unknown soldier, a Civil War veteran whose remains were discovered as workers excavated the foundation for a hospital building at the nearby veterans home, a half-century ago.

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What a drag: This festival ain’t big enough for the both of ‘em.

Two years ago, the Philip Morris tobacco company began ponying up $25,000 to sponsor the Riverside County Fair and National Date Festival--and got a Marlboro booth in a choice midway location. The county’s own tobacco education booth and its anti-smoking character, Joe Cancer, have been moved off the midway after two decades.

Bob Peterson is senior health educator for the county health department’s tobacco project, and he sometimes climbs into the Joe Cancer costume--a ratty camel suit--and, wearing a white dinner jacket, rolls around in a wheelchair, alternately sucking from an oxygen tank and hacking his lungs out, an unmistakable sendup of Camel’s mascot.

But at this year’s fair, Joe Cancer was grounded. “He was told to keep his hump and his oxygen tank out of sight.”

Peterson’s figures show that Riverside taxpayers “cough up about $100 million to pay for cigarette-related health costs. To us it makes no sense to promote that product on taxpayer property. . . . It’s like if you’re a chicken farmer, and you raise foxes on the side.”

The head of the agency that runs the date festival told the Desert Sun that sponsorship decisions are made on business and economic considerations, not health.

Of fair-goers who managed to find Peterson’s booth, about 1,500 signed a petition asking the county to say no to ciggie sponsorships.

On the last day of the fair, Peterson says, some Marlboro honcho “came by our booth and kind of shouted, ‘See ya next year.’ ”

“We said, ‘Don’t count on it.’ ”

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California HMOs

Here is a look at California’s top ten health maintencance organizations, ranked by membership. Our state is the largest HMO market in the nation, with more than 14 million residents enrolled:

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RANK HMO 1996 enrollment 1 Kaiser 4,821,196 2 PacifiCare 1,425,514 3 Health Net 1,328,739 4 CaliforniaCare 982,891 5 FHP 929,831 6 Foundation 754,635 7 CIGNA 449,095 8 Prudential 441,015 9 Aetna 423,883 10 Blue Shield 352,286

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Source: California Assn. of Health Maintenance Organizations

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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One-offs: Assemblyman Scott Wildman (D-Burbank) is the first legislator with an off-the-rack electric vehicle as his official state car. . . . Escalon police are investigating a rash of bull semen thefts from local dairies. . . . Two years ago a hunter who shot himself in the foot made up a tale about being attacked by mountain lions, and now Fish and Game officials are doubting the story of an Albany man who says a mountain lion jumped on his back, ripping his jacket as he was riding in his four-wheeler. . . . As many people moved into California last year as left it, according to a moving company that had seen five years of out-migration from the Golden State.

EXIT LINE

“I’d hate to be on duty if that ever happens. We’d all be brought in and interrogated.”

--Livermore firefighter Jim McCraw, at the prospect of the city’s fabled lightbulb burning out. The bulb has been glowing nonstop (with a 23-minute break in 1976 to move to a new building) since 1901. Even Thomas Edison only lasted for 84 years.