Fast Track

For sheer audacity, it was a move worthy of J. R. Ewing, the fictional wheeler-dealer in Lorimar's hit series "Dallas." Earlier this month, Lorimar offered a cool billion dollars for Multimedia Inc., a Charleston, S.C., newspaper and broadcasting concern whose 1984 earnings were about triple those of Lorimar's in fiscal 1984. And, as if emulating the big-bluff tactics of J. R., Lorimar--whose cash reserves total just $87.

By Japanese or American standards, Hirotsugu Mizuno was on a fast track. A whiz kid graduate of one of Japan's finest universities, he seemed to have it made: a management job, with many promotions, at one of Japan's most respected banks. He was, some colleagues thought, destined to rise near the top. But amid this appearance of perfection, Mizuno had developed a minor character flaw: a propensity to gamble on horse racing, and not very successfully at that.

Cast aside as an election-year liability by the White House, President Clinton's 1997 proposal for "fast-track" authority to negotiate international trade deals was jolted back to life Tuesday by a Senate committee. The administration was less than enthusiastic. Senate Democrats accused Republican leaders of political gamesmanship, but many went along in the name of freer trade.

Before Robert Gomez started "Fast Track L.A.," an intensive eight-week technical skills training program in Huntington Park, he didn't believe he had a chance at getting a job that paid more than minimum wage. "I'm more confident now. I can compete," the 19-year-old said between final examinations last week at the Southeast branch of East Los Angeles College, where Fast Track is run.

Tired of a so-called post-riot recovery effort that sometimes appears to be proceeding with all the speed of a backlash of taffy? If so, the proposed Los Angeles Area Economic Recovery Act of 1992 may be just the medicine to ease those blues. That's because this piece of state legislation would jump-start new redevelopment projects in neighborhoods devastated by last spring's riots--projects for areas such as Koreatown or South Los Angeles--in about six months.

Pro stock champion Warren Johnson of Duluth, Ga., and former funny-car champion Cruz Pedregon of Moorpark found the weather and track conditions at the Pomona Raceway to their liking Thursday and set track and event records in qualifying for their events. Pedregon, who won the NHRA title last year only to lose it to Force this season, drove Larry Minor's Olds Cutlass to an elapsed-time record of 5.079 seconds. That broke the record of 5.108 Pedregon set last year. Johnson ran 194.30 m.p.h.

Q: Whatever happened to that old adage that said if your salary matched your age, you were doing pretty well on the job? Is there some new guideline to help us see where we stand in the job market? --F.H. A: Thanks to the rampant inflation of the early 1980s and a host of other significant changes in the American economy and work force, the old salary-equals-age yardstick that many of us grew up with has long since become outdated and has not been replaced with anything as simple.

Kathryn Kemp of Santa Paula was working as an FBI stenographer when she began thinking about becoming a sheriff's deputy. She applied "as a lark," survived the training academy and joined the Ventura County Sheriff's Department. That was 13 years ago. Since then, Kemp has patrolled the county's streets, confronted criminals, supervised jail inmates and done the things that make the life of a sheriff's deputy both exciting and exasperating. Obviously, she has done her job well.

High school freshman Scarlet Garcia says she wants to be a screenwriter. Monica Esparza wants to someday join the district attorney's office as a prosecutor. Nancy Martin Del Campo, Leilani Morales and Edward Brizo think computers look good. These youths are among a group of 62 students at Abraham Lincoln High School who are on a fast track toward college.

Some time ago I disturbed a few readers by quoting from a letter I had received from Al Hibbs, one-time voice of the Jet Propulsion Lab, in which he suggested that audio-visual technology would soon replace reading and writing in our schools. Naturally the letter came in the form of an audiocassette, and before I could study and quote it I had to transcribe it into the visible word--on my computer, of course. I have now heard from Hibbs again.