Beanie Babies

The mail has been piling up lately, and though I'd love to be out there walking the Valley boulevards in this triple-digit heat, duty requires me to sit inside this air-conditioned office. Your correspondence just cries out to be shared. Most of the mail lately came as reaction to two columns, one about the Beanie Baby Bandit who struck a Sherman Oaks novelty shop, the other about the ex-boyfriend of a former Beverly Hills High student.

I was working the day watch out of Chatsworth, trolling for column fodder, combing the newspapers that had come out during my vacation. It had been an obscene two weeks in the San Fernando Valley. Darn, but I missed the Cal State Northridge pornography conference. Then I saw something truly obscene. It was a headline over a story about a crime that could make even the most calloused police reporter shake his head in dismay. Murder, alas, is something we understand.

The Pittsburgh Pirates tried giving away golf umbrellas and beach towels, but nothing helped in selling out Three Rivers Stadium. Then Mark McGwire and the St. Louis Cardinals came to town. The Saturday and Sunday games were the first consecutive regular-season sellouts at Three Rivers Stadium. "The Mark McGwire home run craze is quite phenomenal," said Vic Gregovits, the Pirates' vice president of marketing and broadcasting. Crowds of 38,149 showed up for beach towels and 41,568 for umbrellas.

Police are hoping that somebody spills the beans in this crime. A masked man walked into a Sherman Oaks gift shop, ordered customers and employees to the floor at gunpoint and stole more than 40 Beanie Babies worth $5,000--ignoring the cash register, police said. "He pointed the gun at the clerk and told her to get down," said Det. Keith Hunter of the Los Angeles Police Department.

A masked man walked into a gift shop, ordered customers and employees to the floor at gunpoint and stole more than 40 Beanie Babies worth $5,000--ignoring the cash register, police said. Aahs, a novelty shop in the 14500 block of Ventura Boulevard, had just opened at 9 a.m. when the gunman entered brandishing a chrome semiautomatic pistol, according to Los Angeles police. "He pointed the gun at the clerk and told her to 'Get down. Get down'," said Det.

Those sweet and fuzzy Beanie Babies seem to bring out the opposite traits in prospective buyers. People trying to buy the popular stuffed animals from one store Friday got downright dirty. "It was pathetic. Adults were pushing children down," said Treasure Baskets spokesman David Weiser. Some adults were miffed that children got priority in buying the 180 toys. Employees had T-shirts made that said: "I survived the Beanie Baby craze." Ty Inc. of Oak Brook, Mass.

They turned out by the thousands, some camping out most of the night for a chance to buy or win one of those incorrigibly cute but staggeringly pricey soft toys that send adult collectors and child fans wild: Beanie Babies. Roughly 2,000 people flocked to Los Cerritos Center Thursday morning, where gift stores raffled off the chance to buy new and limited editions of the toys, said Terri Jonisch, a spokeswoman for the mall.

For a few tense moments, it appeared Sunday that another near-riot might be added to the growing pattern of mania and mayhem attributed to that plushest of toy treasures, the Beanie Baby. When more than 5,000 people showed up at the Disneyland Pacific Hotel in Anaheim for a Beanie Baby convention, harried hotel officials and event organizers cited fire codes and began to turn the toy collectors away.

There are levels of madness when it comes to Beanie Babies. There are die-hard collectors, folks who wait hours to pay big bucks for a bean-filled animal they will plunk into a clear plastic container and never, ever touch. And there are the profit seekers, who know every detail about all 146 Beanie Baby models and who have stepped into the toy industry's hottest phenomenon to make enough, they hope, to help pay their children's college tuition.

There are levels of madness when it comes to Beanie Babies. There are die-hard collectors--folks who wait hours to pay big bucks for a bean-filled animal they will plunk into a clear plastic container and never, ever touch. And there are the profit-seekers, who know every detail about all 146 Beanie Baby models and have stepped into the toy industry's hottest phenomenon to make enough, they hope, to help pay their children's college tuition.