Herschel

When he made a surprise training ride with the alternate U.S. two-man bobsled team at the Calgary Olympics in 1988, Willie Gault said he was satisfied with his performance. "I think my push times proved I deserve to be here," said Gault, then of the Chicago Bears and now a wide receiver with the Raiders. Gault didn't end up pushing a U.S. sled in competition at Calgary, but Tuesday he again proved he deserves future consideration for a spot on the Olympic team.

Guernica, as everyone now knows, is a small town in the Basque provinces. It was heavily bombed, unexpectedly, in the course of the Spanish civil war by German aircraft in the service of Gen. Francisco Franco's nationalist forces advancing on Bilbao. About half the town was flattened and about 1,000 people were killed. The Basques had no aircraft for defense. The outrage does not seem large by the standards of later years, but, at the time, there was a real outcry. Friends of the Spanish Republic seized on the event as an indication of how far the Nazi air force would go in pursuit of power.

In a political showdown the likes of which the San Fernando Valley hasn't seen in many years, a bitter and costly Democratic primary battle is taking shape between two liberal lawmakers--Assemblyman Tom Hayden and state Sen. Herschel Rosenthal.

A political turf fight over Marina del Rey is brewing between longtime Los Angeles Democratic state Senate allies Diane Watson and Herschel Rosenthal. The squabble surfaced last week after Senate leaders unveiled their plan for the once-a-decade redrawing of Senate boundaries. Under the proposal, Watson would be forced to cede Marina del Rey to Rosenthal.

State Senate candidates Tom Hayden and Catherine O'Neill have accused Sen. Herschel Rosenthal of hiding from voters by canceling all joint appearances in the district last week, including a cable television debate that had been arranged to fit his schedule. A spokeswoman for Rosenthal insisted that the cancellations stemmed from the press of legislative business in Sacramento during the period that the annual state budget is prepared.

A San Fernando Valley lawmaker on Monday unexpectedly dropped a bill designed to slow down development in parts of the Santa Monica Mountains. The measure would have temporarily blocked the practice of upzoning--easing zoning restrictions to allow more houses on a tract of land--pending completion of a study on how to preserve wildlife habitat in Los Angeles County. The measure, by state Sen.

NFL players Herschel Walker and Willie Gault and three champion hurdlers will try to make the U.S. bobsled team for the 1992 Winter Olympics, according to a published report. In today's editions of The National, Gault said he, Walker, Edwin Moses, Roger Kingdom and Renaldo Nehemiah will begin serious bobsled training after the 1990 NFL season. Gault, a former hurdler who plays for the Los Angeles Raiders, made the U.S.

The photography collection of the world's richest museum just became significantly richer. Pop musician Graham Nash and his wife, Susan, have given the J. Paul Getty Museum 280 camera lucida drawings by Sir John F. W. Herschel. The 19th-Century drawings of European landscapes and buildings, executed with the help of an optical device, are direct precursors to photography.

Bowing to political pressure, state Sen. Herschel Rosenthal (D-Los Angeles) has asked that his name be removed from a measure specially crafted to protect Fox Studio's planned $200-million expansion from future lawsuits. But an aide to the senator said this week that Rosenthal may yet vote to support the much-criticized special legislation, despite having disavowed co-authorship. "He's weighing what to do on that," said Lynette Stevens, Rosenthal's chief of staff.

After 10 years on the inside, Assemblyman Tom Hayden is running another insurgent campaign, this time for the state Senate. At stake in a bitter Democratic primary firefight is nothing less than the former anti-war activist's political future. Stripped of a safe Assembly seat by redistricting, the Santa Monica Democrat opted to run for the upper house. Now, nine days before the June 2 election, Hayden is locked in a very expensive three-way battle against two liberal Democrats--veteran Sen.