He Lost One for the Gipper, Sweater’s Donor Believes

--John N. Cackley of South Bend, Ind., is having second thoughts about having given the University of Notre Dame a school sweater worn by football legend George Gipp. The university, after displaying the sweater about five months, gave it to former President Ronald Reagan when the national champion Notre Dame football team visited the White House two days before Reagan left office. If Cackley had known that the university would not keep the 70-year-old sweater, “I would not have given it the way I did. I would have said it was on indefinite loan,” he told an Indiana newspaper. Reagan played the dying Gipp in “Knute Rockne, All-American,” and used the film’s line “win one for the Gipper” as a political slogan. Richard W. Conklin, a university spokesman, said the “deep, close friendship” between Reagan and the school demanded a unique gift. And Alumni Assn. director Charles Lennon said several alumni had called to praise the gift. But in Cackley’s opinion: “The sweater was not intended to be a giveaway, regardless of who might like to have it--whether that be Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, John Paul II or anyone else.”

--Sir Edmund Hillary, who conquered Mt. Everest in 1953 with Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay, says adventurers should declare a five-year moratorium on expeditions up the world’s tallest mountain, on the border of Nepal and Tibet. The explorer, 69, says: “There have been far too many expeditions jostling their way up Mt. Everest. . . . And a great deal of rubbish and junk has been left on the mountain.” He said he believes that, if the mountain was left alone for five years, much of the trash would be buried under snow, making the mountain “rather cleaner and more wholesome again.” Glenn Porzak, president of the American Alpine Club, said P.M. Shrestha, Nepal’s undersecretary of tourism, has indicated that closing the mountain is not planned.

--New York Hospital, where artist Andy Warhol died in 1987 after routine gallbladder surgery, must pay a $5,000 fine for not supervising the private nurse who was caring for him, state officials said. Warhol died the day after the operation, apparently of a heart attack, the cause of which medical examiners never officially determined. The nurse, Min Chou, was severely criticized by the state previously and was barred from the hospital.