HIT THE BEACH: Welcome to the merry...

HIT THE BEACH: Welcome to the merry month of May. . . . Need a reason to celebrate, besides May Day? Well, this is National Tourism Month and Older Americans Month. If you’re not a senior citizen on the move, this is also Clean Air Month and California State Parks Month. . . . Although many of the months feature activities that don’t affect Joe and Jane Public, everyone can take advantage of this: Just for today, the state is dropping the $5 day-use fee at all its parks and beaches, except Hearst Castle.

FRIGHT NIGHT: Why do teen-agers watch slasher movies? For a variety of motives, including--now here’s a shocker--because their parents tell them not to (E2). . . . Experts say that’s one of the less-worrisome reasons. Of more concern are those teen-agers who watch because they like violence or who view the blood-splattering as a way to escape isolation and to exorcise anger. Those youths tend to be troubled at home or in school.

OUT FROM UNDER: Before a Sheriff’s Department substation opened, Fillmore’s Lemon Way neighborhood was under siege by gang members, deputies and residents say. . . . But seven months after deputies took up their post in the abandoned laundry, the neighborhood has gone from wild to mild (B1). . . . “The Fillmore storefront has become a kind of haven,” says Ventura County Sheriff Larry Carpenter. “It’s a great example of what deputies and the community can do together.”

OLD SCHOOL: Today, more than 1,000 students attend Santa Paula High School. But when the private Santa Paula Academy opened on the same site on May 1, 1889, it housed less than a dozen students. . . . The academy, which became a public school two years later, was opened after a communitywide funding drive headed by N.W. Blanchard, one of the founders of Santa Paula. . . . The academy offered courses in the classics and the sciences, says Santa Paula historian Mary Alice Orcutt Henderson, whose grandparents were in the academy’s first graduating class.