Boy, 4, Has Handle on Heroism

--Brandon Bowen was the only person around when a two-ton truck slipped off a jack and pinned his father, Charles. Brandon, 4, calmly jacked it up and freed him, then ran for help. Bowen was working under the truck at his Williamstown, Ky., home when the accident occurred. “Daddy’s trapped, son,” he told the boy. “You’re going to have to help me. Get a jack handle.” Bowen slipped the jack under the rear springs with one arm and told his 30-pound son how to insert the handle. “I told him he had to jack the truck up. Before I could say anything else, he grabbed a long ratchet I have and put it in the jack handle. He jacked it up a little bit and said, ‘I can’t jack it any farther.’ I pumped the handle a couple of times, but I was about to pass out and I couldn’t go any longer. Then Brandon did it a couple more times and the truck was off me.” Bowen was lying on a creeper used by mechanics to slide under cars. Brandon grabbed his father’s feet and pulled him out. Then he ran next door to tell a neighbor, who called an ambulance. Bowen was hospitalized with a broken hip. Brandon feared that his father was dead until he visited him in the hospital. “He came in and stood there about ready to cry . . . and then he jumped up here and hugged me. I guess that said it all.”

--The wife of actor John Ritter, star of the ABC-TV series “Three’s Company” and its spinoff, “Three’s a Crowd,” gave birth to the couple’s third child, a spokesman said. Nancy Morgan delivered the 8-pound boy, Tyler David Thomas Ritter, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. “Nancy and John are both very happy that he is here and healthy,” spokesman Larry Frank said.

--Tom Selleck had some devoted but hysterical fans after Boston radio station WROR-FM broadcast a telephone number for listeners to call to wish him a happy 40th birthday. The number belonged to the Honolulu morgue, which was flooded with more than 1,000 calls. “The office was out of control,” morgue attendant Joyce Fujimoto said. “When people found out it was the medical examiner’s office, they thought Tom Selleck had expired. All these hysterical girls kept calling.” Joe Martelle and Andy Moes of WROR had called Honolulu information to get Selleck’s number, but an operator gave them the morgue instead. Telephone company officials said the operator had shown “serious lack of judgment” and would be disciplined. The station later apologized for the incident and said Martelle and Moes would reimburse listeners who made the calls. Selleck, star of television’s “Magnum, P.I.,” has an unlisted number.