Tree Climbing Leaves Him Cold

--Eight-year-old Nicki Chiapusio spent a couple of hours New Year’s Day just hanging around--upside down from a tree in subzero temperatures. “My feet were so cold when I moved them I couldn’t feel them,” the boy, who lives in appropriately named Cold Spring, Minn., said after he was rescued unharmed. “I was kind of thinking if I could just go up to heaven, the pain wouldn’t hurt so much.” Nicki got his right foot caught in his favorite elm tree while climbing that afternoon. When he tried to yank his foot free, he flipped over, ending up dangling upside down. Nicki tried hollering and the family dog, Trapper, discovered him. But the dog “didn’t know enough to come and scratch on the door,” Nicki’s mother, Patricia, said. The temperature was 5 degrees at 3 p.m. when Nicki got stuck. It had dipped to zero with a wind-chill factor of 26 below zero by 5 p.m., when neighbor Lance Honer drove down the driveway that runs close to the tree. When the car stopped, Nicki yelled. “He was so cold. There was no circulation in his feet,” his mother said. “It took time, but we got him all back together.”

--Dr. Milton Brothers, husband of well-known psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers, denounced as untrue a magazine interview in which he was quoted as saying that his wife gave “abysmal” advice to her own family. Brothers said in New York that the interview in Sunday’s Family Weekly amounted to a “hatchet job” and had upset his wife. But Thomas Plate, editor of the magazine, stood by the interview. “There’s not the slightest doubt in our minds that Dr. Milton Brothers said what he is quoted as saying,” he said.

--Actor Paul Newman and biographer A. E. Hotchner, partners in Newman’s Own Inc., which produces salad dressing, spaghetti sauce and popcorn, said they were “amazed” to learn that their $250,000 donation to an African drought relief effort to aid starving Ethiopians was the largest corporate contribution that the Catholic Relief Services had received. Newman and Hotchner, neighbors in Westport, Conn., donate all the profits from their food businesses to charities.

--New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, admitting that he’s not the “most committed fan” of “The King,” has proclaimed Tuesday to be Elvis Presley Memorial Day, marking the 50th anniversary of the singer’s birth. In fact, neither the governor nor any of his staff noticed that the proclamation incorrectly listed Presley’s age as 32 at the time of his death in 1977. He was 42. “We’ll have to put out another proclamation,” aide Madeline Lewis said.