The Heidi Jo State Prison Issue may be old Tom’s undoing. : Rolling the Baby Around

There is really no good place to build a prison, but smart politicians at least try to find a site with minimum potential for negative public reaction and the fewest number of problem-sensitive residents in an area that no one wants anyhow.

Which is why Tom Bradley is proposing to build a new state prison across from Saugus High School, near Six Flags Magic Mountain, nestled in suburban Bouquet Canyon in a region inhabited by people who are there in the first place to get away from crime.

The only things not within sight of the proposed slammer are a nunnery, a home for abandoned babies and an armory specializing in weapons for escaped prisoners.

There is trouble, I will tell you, down Heidi Jo Lane. Mayors have never been known for either wit or intellectual sufficiency, but Bradley’s recent propensity for antagonizing just about everyone achieves a perplexing high in lumpishness, even for a politician.

First he outraged the ocean people by not vetoing oil drilling along the coast, then he outraged the Jews by dragging his feet on the condemnation of Louis Farrakhan and now, not to leave any segment of the population in peace, he is outraging those who live in the Santa Clarita Valley by proposing a prison adjacent to their high school just down the street from Heidi Jo Lane.

And the man is raising all of this hell at a time when he is beginning a new bid for the governorship of California. Something’s wrong there somewhere.

I am not a political expert, but I know there is nothing wilder or meaner or more determined than a young suburban mother who feels her child is in danger.

Bradley got by with giving the L. A. coastline to Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum Corp. only because the Westside is composed of celebrities who dislike raising their voices.

He also managed to survive the Farrakhan storm because the Jews are a philosophical people who realize that if they scream Bradley out of office they might end up with someone worse.

But the Heidi Jo State Prison Issue may be old Tom’s undoing.

Young suburban mothers protecting their children simply do not give a damn about decorum or political trade-offs or the equation that determines which segment of the population is politically expendable.

All they know is you’d better not step on their baby’s face.

I spoke with one of them in the region of the proposed prison who feels that Tom Bradley, by his airy proposal, has not only stepped on her baby’s face but has stepped on the whole baby.

She was angrier than anyone I have ever seen, certainly angrier than anyone I have ever seen sitting on an imitation leather couch in a living room with a sprayed ceiling that sparkled with pinpoint Formica stars.

Women who live in tract houses are usually fairly placid people, confining their passions to whatever fantasies are evoked by watching “The Young and the Restless.” But not Megan and not now.

Megan was so angry at the idea of a Heidi Jo Prison that at one point, while charging back and forth across her family room, she almost stepped on her own infant son, who was playing on the floor with a spatula.

“Who wants it who needs it why in God’s name would he put it in the middle of a suburban area where children are out playing just over the fence from killers and rapists and God knows what else?” she demanded without punctuation.

Her words swept by like a blast of hot wind, rustling paper flowers behind me.

“They’re going to be electrocuting those people near the schools where the children will be able to smell the burning flesh!” she shouted with such vigor that her son stopped playing with the spatula and began to cry.

She reached down and turned him over on his stomach and he stopped crying.

“In the first place,” I said to Megan, wondering vaguely why turning a baby over made it stop crying, “we don’t electrocute people in California, we gas them. It has something to do with cost-effectiveness. In the second place, we already have San Quentin for that sort of thing. As for the smell of burning flesh, I am forced to admit ignorance.”

It was clear, however, that Megan was in no mood to pick nits. What mattered was that the mayor she had helped elect was going to put a prison near a school her baby would someday attend.

“What next?” she demanded. “A whorehouse across from the Bouquet Baptist Church?”

Clearly our discussion had transcended pure reason onto a plane where lightning flashes and vultures roost, so I thanked Megan and bade her good day.

But I know she is gathering together other young mothers whose infants have Bradley footprints on their faces, and they are going to be ready for him when he makes his new bid for the governorship.

Megan was on the telephone gathering her army even before I left her Tudor Model 27 tract home. I could hear her baby cry briefly as I walked down the front pathway, but then he became silent again.

I would guess she had turned the little feller over.