A Few Cardinal Rules of Stanford Lore for Chelsea

Dad was a Hoya, Mom never had a college mascot, and Chelsea Clinton will be . . . Cardinal. Not even a Cardinal, just Cardinal.

No daughter of the Clintons would be matriculating at a university whose mascot was the politically ill-advised “Indians,” as Stanford’s once was. But having expelled the Indian, Stanford became “Cardinal,” and singular, as in, “now taking the field--the Stanford Cardinal.”

Cardinal being too abstract to rouse sports fans, Stanford added The Tree, a fully-branched costumed human twirling its roots on the sidelines. An odd choice, considering that the real football trophy at Stanford isn’t the Heisman, but The Ax.

Stanford introduced it 98 years ago, in its cross-bay rivalry with UC Berkeley, with the chant, “Give ‘em the ax.” Berkeley fans stole The Ax after the game. Then, in 1930, the “Immortal 21,” posing as Berkeley students, stole it back as it was being moved from an armored car to a secured vault. Negotiations on the order of Mideast conflict resolution determined that The Ax would go each year to the winner of the Stanford-Berkeley game.

In 1995, The Tree tangled with The Bear, and both had to be thrown out before The Tree got torn limb from limb.

Are you taking notes, Chelsea? This will be on the test.

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Donating Organs

The critical shortage of organ donors was underscored by National Organ and Tissue Donor Awareness Week in April. Last year people who needed organs outnumbered donors by nearly 10 to one, more than 50,000 to 5,411. The next-of-kin can grant permission to donate if a person has made their wish to be a donor known to their families. Below are the numbers of Californians and other Americans on waiting lists for organs as of March 31.

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ORGAN CALIFORNIANS U.S. Kidney 5,747 35,298 Liver 1,764 8,009 Pancreas 9 336 Kidney/pancreas 147 1,487 Intestine 5 88 Heart 354 3,793 Heart/lung 41 225 Lung 230 2,361 TOTAL WAITING 8,297 51,597

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Source: United Network for Organ Sharing, Richmond, Va.

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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No catcher in the rye: If there are baseball fans doting enough and desperate enough to watch the grass grow . . . they can. Between Oakland As games, a stadium Web site fills its many empty hours with a Webcam’s 24-hour-a-day vista of stadium grass.

And San Francisco’s June 3 election on a proposed stadium for the 49ers will have to go on without the support of the Multimillionaires for Corporate Welfare.

A judge ruled that their “endorsement” was in fact meant to influence voters to reject the stadium measure. So the Multimillionaires’ ballot argument will move to the “no” column in the voter information pamphlet.

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Mayday, mayday! May in California is the officially designated month for:

Teen pregnancy prevention, drowning prevention, motorcycle safety awareness, bicycle safety awareness, California water awareness, Selective Service awareness (who’s aware we still have one?), missing children and Asian/Pacific Islander heritage.

Gov. Pete Wilson also proclaimed May 1 to be law day and a day of prayer--or, if you want to save time, a day to pray for lawyers.

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And their little dogs, too: Lassie rescued drowning victims, and a cocker spaniel saved a political career.

Checkers may be exhumed from the Bide-A-Wee Pet Memorial Park in Long Island and reinterred near his old master at the Richard M. Nixon Library & Birthplace (and private burial grounds) in Yorba Linda.

Library spokesmen are keeping muzzled about the matter, but it is worth noting that September marks the 45th anniversary of the fabled “Checkers” speech. It was mawkish, it was maudlin, but people ate it up. It restored VP candidate Nixon to the public’s good graces, and thereby to Eisenhower’s, and to the Republican ticket.

In the televised speech to counter rumors that a secret political slush fund was filling his pockets, Nixon invoked his own poverty (his wife’s “respectable Republican cloth coat”) and admitted accepting one gift: the solemn-faced spaniel his daughters had named Checkers. “Regardless of what they say about it”--and here Nixon was the picture of fatherly defiance--”we are going to keep it.”

Checkers’ political forebear was FDR’s Scottie, Fala. Among the criticisms against him, FDR chose to answer the rumor that Fala had been left behind in the Aleutians after a presidential visit, and that FDR sent a destroyer back to retrieve him.

Unlike Nixon, FDR used sarcasm over sentiment: FDR declared that Fala’s Scots soul was “furious” at tales of the million-dollar rescue mission, and “he has not been the same dog since.”

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One-offs: Before he was recaptured, a cross-dressing convicted murderer and robber who escaped from Vacaville prison mailed a postcard to his former jailers. . . . In good news for Castroville, researchers found that an artichoke extract called silymarin reduced the formation of tumors in mice who had it rubbed into their skin before being zapped by ultraviolet rays. . . . The Franco-California wine wars may have been settled: The label on a 1995 merlot from “The Monterey Vineyard” admits that it is a “product of France.”

EXIT LINE

“I’m an old lady and I can amuse myself doing whatever I like.”

--Carmel Valley resident Patricia Walsh, who found a 4-inch beach rock shaped like the head of Gen. Douglas (“I shall return”) MacArthur, and spent $6,000 to get it properly kitted with the old soldier’s sunglasses, cap, corncob pipe and a commemorative plaque, all in gold.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.