tangents

news & views

by dal mcintire

The original Peter Pan fell last month from a London subway platform and was killed by an oncoming train. Peter Llewellyn Davies, 68, had as a lad of 10 met the shy playwright, James M. Barrie, in Kensington Gardens. The boy Peter and his brothers there described to Sir James the 'Never-Never Land' of their daydreams, with Captain Hook, the Indians, and the crocodile that swallowed an alarm clock. Sir James Barrie turned their simple imaginings into the magic tale of Peter Pan, the boy who could fly and who never wanted to grow up. He also made the 5 orphan boys his wards and intimate lifelong friends, and seldom could tolerate any other company. He reluctantly attended the wedding of his favorite Peter to one of Lord Ruthven's daughters, but frightened by the crowd, he took off through the chapel's coal hole. Brother George, killed in World War I, inspired Barrie's "The Little White Bird," and brother Michael, drowned in an Oxford swimming accident, inspired the play, "Mary Rose." With Peter at his bedside, Sir James died in 1937, leaving the boys most of his manuscripts and private papers. One brother still survives, but the childhood classic of Never-Never Land lives on, and a statue of oncepixieish Peter now stands on the

Kensington Gardens spot where the boys first met and enchanted their shy benefactor . . .

ODDLINGS

This is the 50th time yours truly has banged out this column. We're slowly becoming inundated mounting piles of clippings, but with the help of those of you who keep sending us more, we hope to roll 'tangents' through the typewriter at least 50 more times...

Note the Biblolatrous diving expedition of Kansas City's Rev. Ralph Baney and party into the Dead Sea's murky waters seeking the legend-cursed ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah. And will they finally discover just HOW those wicked Sodomites wished to KNOW Lot's angelic visitors?... A Soviet physicist recently suggested (jestingly?) in Literaturnaya Gazeta that Sodom and Gomarrah may have been destroyed by technically advanced visitors from space, who blew up excess nuclear fuel upon leaving Earth are the Russ, who now admit that homosexuality and such things still exist in their utopia, getting ready to chuck the blame onto spacemen? . . .

Consulting psychologist Dr. John Huber interviewed 77 women executives, pronounced them all normal and femininethe country's