1972 Year

There was a time when Robert J. Dixon bought shirts and scarves by the armload, jetted to New York City for ballet performances and dazzled his City Hall colleagues with his connoisseur tastes. His trilevel in Huntington Beach was awash in opulence. There were $3,000 suits, jewel-encrusted accessories, top-of-the-line steamer trunks and pricey artwork, even a Robert Maplethorpe photogravure titled "A Season in Hell." Then came his arrest, his conviction, his prison stint.

Oil export revenue for OPEC countries is expected to slide to $101 billion this year, down 32% from last year and the lowest since before the oil crisis of the early 1970s, a U.S. government report said Tuesday. The sharp decline in world oil prices has thrown the budgets of many Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries members into chaos as they cut costs and take other steps to control budget deficits, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said in a report on the cartel.

NFL rushing leader Larry Johnson made the Denver Broncos' fifth-ranked run defense look ordinary. Johnson ran for 157 yards, Lawrence Tynes kicked four field goals and Kansas City inaugurated the league's new Thanksgiving tripleheader with a 19-10 victory over the Broncos on Thursday night. The Chiefs (7-4) charged into a second-place tie with Denver in the AFC West and gave the Broncos (7-4) their first two-game losing streak since late in 2004.

The newest addition to the local-woman-makes-good category is San Diegan Rosemary Mariner, who, at 37, is about to become the first female to command a Navy aviation squadron. Cmdr. Mariner's achievement should be an occasion for unreserved congratulations and acknowledgement of another step in the progress of feminism.

In another century, he was a Los Angeles sports icon--the city's first Los Angeles-born world boxing champion. Solly Smith, born Solomon Garcia Smith in 1871, already had won and lost his world featherweight championship, in 1897 and 1898, before he was usurped on the Los Angeles popularity scale by Jim Jeffries, who won the heavyweight championship in 1899.

Hawaii has been a good-luck charm for CBS. During the 1980s, CBS scored a great success with the lighthearted "Magnum, P.I.," starring Tom Selleck as a Vietnam vet turned Honolulu detective. No sooner had "Magnum" packed his bags in 1989 than the network moved its popular detective series "Jake & the Fatman," with Joe Penny and William Conrad, to Hawaii for two seasons. CBS is back in the 50th state this summer with its martial-arts series "Raven," which also looks to be a hit.

Mary Thom, an early staffer at Ms. magazine who rose to executive editor and later wrote an insider's history of the groundbreaking, mass-market chronicle of the women's movement, died Friday in a motorcycle crash in Yonkers, N.Y. She was 68. Her death was announced by the Women's Media Center, a nonprofit New York-based organization founded in 2005 by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan and Ms. co-founder Gloria Steinem. Thom was editor-in-chief for the center, which publishes features on women's issues in addition to offering media training and advocacy.

McRat in McSalad? It hasn't been the best of months for the Todd Haley family. The Dallas Cowboys' passing-game coordinator found himself in a shouting match with receiver Terrell Owens, and now comes a stomach-churning McLawsuit. Haley is suing McDonald's for $1.7 million in damages, alleging that his wife and the family's au pair found a six-inch dead rodent in their salad, according to the Dallas Morning News website.

Much has been made of the decade-long shift that has brought Latinos into numerical parity with Anglos in Los Angeles, with both groups at about 40% of population. But sheer numbers aren't enough to achieve proportional representation--something strikingly illustrated by the Orange County city of Santa Ana. The 1990 census showed that 65% of the residents of Santa Ana were Latino, a percentage that's growing every year.