IN AUGUST, PRESS TAKES A HOLIDAY.

Byline: KIMIT MUSTON Local View

I didn't think we'd make it - with Scott Peterson, Michael Jackson and the Boston Tea Party, it seemed we were about to be buried under an avalanche of 24-hour mega-news hyperbole and conjecture. But today we safely arrived in that journalistic void that is August. It's not that nothing happens in August. It's just that the press rarely reports it.

For example, did you know that on Aug. 1, 1656, the first Quakers landed in Boston seeking religious freedom and were immediately arrested by the Puritan fathers who didn't believe in it?

It was on Aug.1, 1898, that Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders charged up San Juan Hill. But did you know they did it on foot because their horses were still back in Florida?

On Aug. 1, 1900, the Coca-Cola company introduced its first New Coke. The press entirely missed that it was the same old coke, just sans the cocaine.

And on Aug. 1, 1923, the press reported that President Warren G. Harding had died in a San Francisco hotel room. Actually, Harding probably died aboard a yacht a day or two earlier - right after his wife found yet another stash of love letters from yet another mistress. The public was uninformed about all these stories because the press corps went on vacation every August.

On the other hand, on Aug. 1, 1942, Jose Diaz attended a party in the Williams Ranch section of East Los Angeles, near the Sleepy Hollow Lagoon. We know that the lagoon was a city reservoir and that Hispanics, denied access to community pools, often went swimming there. But nobody today is certain where the reservoir actually was. Jose may have been a pachuco in the Downey Boys Gang, or he may not have been. He may have worn a zoot suit, but he may not have. Late that night he either passed out on Slausen Avenue and was later run over by a car, or he was beaten to death by members of the 38th Street Gang. The next morning his corpse was either found by the police, or he was rushed to a hospital where he died. The confusion exists because that particular August, the press stayed on the job.

There was a war on, and we weren't winning it just yet. Los Angeles was filled with people looking for new jobs and new homes - and with a lot of testosterone in uniform. The U.S. government had just agreed to allow braceros, laborers temporarily brought into the United States from Mexico, to cross the border for war work. And into all that uncertainty, on Aug. 3, the Los Angeles Evening Herald & Express put the ``Sleepy Hollow Lagoon Murder'' on its front page with banner headlines warning about the growing threat of Mexican street gangs in their zoot suits. Immediately every English-language newspaper in Los Angeles followed that lead and thus buried the truth about Sleepy Hollow for all time.

The cops, infected with panic by the frantic press, dragged 300 people in for questioning. Eventually 22 were indicted, and 17 were put on trial. Los Angeles Police Department Lt. Edward Ayres testified as an ``expert'' witness that people of Mexican descent were biologically prone to violence because of their ``Oriental'' Aztec ancestry. The jury convicted 12 young Hispanic men of Jose Diaz's murder and five others of assaulting him.

Almost a year later, the press was still hysterical, filling that summer with stories about avenging gangs of soldiers and sailors marching into East Los Angeles, stripping zoot suiters of their clothing and beating them up. One version of the legend even has a gang of off-duty police starting ``Zoot-Suit Riots.'' A very fine play and movie, ``Zoot Suit,'' was based on these ``true'' events.

But an examination of emergency room records reveals no influx of riot victims. Insurance companies reported no wave of property-loss claims. And police records don't report an increase in arrests over previous summers. All the ugly confrontations between non-Latino white soldiers and Hispanic youths in Los Angeles that summer were being duplicated around military camps across the country - between young soldiers and young locals. And in 1944, an appeals court threw out all the convictions because the prosecution had failed to prove that Jose Diaz had in fact been murdered by anybody. In other words, the whole bloody mess may have been press hyperbole feeding off bigotry.

So enjoy your August time-out. And should you feel uninformed, think how much less informed we'd be if the press didn't take a holiday.