TEEN GIRLS HELP TEACHER SNUFF OUT A SIGN.

Byline: DENNIS McCARTHY 

If you're a smoker, you're probably going to hate this column. Even if you're not, you still might not like it if you're in the crowd who thinks we're being way too politically correct these days.

Either way, what happened a few weeks ago when a couple of 12-year-old girls came out of the restroom at TGI Friday's in Woodland Hills is the kind of story that will either have you cheering or jeering.

The girls - Danielle Anderson and Nicole Gillan - were at the restaurant one Friday night with Danielle's mom, Vicki, to pay a surprise visit to the girls' favorite teacher, Craig Moss.

By day, Moss, 29, is a popular seventh-grade health teacher at Mount Gleason Middle School in Sunland. Three nights a week, he moonlights as a waiter at TGI Friday's.

``We had just begun studying tobacco in class that day and its effects on the body,'' Moss said. ``That night, the girls and Danielle's mom came to visit and eat in my serving section.''

The girls excused themselves to go to the restroom, and when they returned they told their health teacher there was a big sign just outside the door promoting the pleasures of tobacco.

It was one of those nostalgic signs that TGI Friday's has hanging from its walls. ``Chew Male Tobacco - treat yourself to the best,'' it said.

``We had just learned in class that day how wrong using any tobacco is, so it didn't seem right to see it advertised in a family restaurant,'' Nicole said.

Moss agreed. ``That's a high-volume area, and young kids don't know it's an old sign,'' he said. ``They just get the message on it: Tobacco's good.

``They see older kids smoking and promoting it, and now they were seeing my restaurant promoting it. It wasn't right.''

It didn't matter that it was promoting chewing tobacco and not cigarettes. Any tobacco - period - is bad, the health teacher said.

But he was only a waiter here, not the boss, he told the girl. So if they didn't like that sign hanging outside the women's restroom, they'd have to take it up with TGI Friday's corporate offices in Phoenix.

So, that's what the girls did.

They wrote Main Street and Main Inc., the parent company, saying the sign should be removed because of the many young, easily influenced girls who see it the fact that smoking is illegal in California restaurants anyway, so why should there be a sign promoting tobacco use in a restaurant?

``I really didn't expect much and quickly forgot about it,'' Moss said.

The girls didn't expect much, either. But a couple of weeks later, Craig Onstad, the general manager at the Woodland Hills TGI Friday's, handed Moss a drill and told him to remove the sign.

``He said he wasn't doing it because the request was from my students. He was doing it because it was the right thing,'' Moss said.

Judy Schumacher, spokesman for the corporation, said Wednesday, ``We understand the girls perspective, and respect it, so we took the sign down.

``The essence of Friday's is about nostalgia and history,'' she said. ``We make every effort to make the signs really old and didn't consider it in regard to current-day advertising (of tobacco).''

The girls say they're surprised a couple of 12-year-olds could get a big restaurant like Friday's to see the error of its way, and both of them truly feel they're helping other kids stay away from tobacco.

As for Moss, he says there's a blank spot on the wall where the tobacco sign used to hang.

``But, to me, it's the best sight in the restaurant now because I know what used to hang there and why the sign was removed,'' the health teacher/waiter said.

PC or just a good teacher doing his job? What do you think?

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Photo:

Craig Moss, a health teacher at Mount Gleason Middle School by day and a waiter at TGI Friday's in Woodland Hills, got unexpected help fighting the harmful effect of tobacco from two of his students: Nicole Gillan, 12, left, and Danielle Anderson, 13.

Gus Ruelas/Staff Photographer