Johnny, in Life, This Is the Way We Really Knew You

The three-foot plaster statue shows him striding, eyes forward, his left hand tucked in one pocket, in what colleagues say was a classic John F. Kennedy pose. By next year it will be an 8-foot bronze memorial outside the Massachusetts Statehouse. “There are many memorials to my father in this country and around the world,” said Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, at the unveiling of the model by artist Isabel McIlvain of Concord, which won a yearlong competition for a design for the official state memorial. “But of all of them, this one in the state he loved means the most.” The bronze memorial is to be unveiled May 29, 1989, which would have been Kennedy’s 72nd birthday. Longtime Kennedy aide Dave Powers said the sculpture reminded him of what E.B. White once wrote of Kennedy: “He never feared the weather. . . . Instead he challenged the wind, to change its direction and to cause it to blow more kindly and more softly over the world and its people.”

--Out of the mouths of babes has come what appears to be an answer to West Virginia’s highly publicized financial woes. The project by 11-year-old native son Keeling Fife Jr., which captured first prize at the Wood County Social Studies Fair, would reverse the state’s failing finances by changing the “gross state product”--increasing the percentage of workers employed in industry. “West Virginia is in a desperate time, and it will take patience and tough decisions to bring the state back to prosperous times,” he said. The budding troubleshooter also suggests building hydroelectric dams and lowering the costs of natural resources for in-state users.

--Like the old lady who lived in the shoe, they had so many children. But unlike the haggard woman of nursery rhyme, they knew what to do--Bob and Linda Cornyn, the parents of 28, have received the keys to a 15-bedroom home courtesy of the Pierce Country Housing Development Assn. in Washington state. The association spent $60,000 remodeling the home that the Cornyns will lease for their “rainbow coalition,” their 25 adopted children who include South Koreans, Colombians, American Indians, Amerasians and blacks. “You are a great example of what are the very best traditions of our country,” said Rep. Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.) in turning over the keys of the house.