Accident-Free Driver Is Ready for Another 100 Years

--A check of his driver’s license shows his birth date as 2/23/85, but the date is accurate. Tommy Wright was indeed born in ‘85--1885--and celebrated his 100th birthday last Saturday. He and his 96-year-old wife, Sadie, have been married for 78 years. Wright, who has never had an accident or a moving violation, just had his license renewed. “I’m the best damn driver in the whole state of Rhode Island,” he told the Providence Journal Bulletin. Wright, a resident of Hopkinton, still plays a fiddle and says the songs remind him of the first time he met his wife when he was about 20. “I thought she was pretty good-looking and I fell in love with her,” he said. “I thought I’d try to hang on to him,” said Sadie Wright. “I did.” Communication and realistic expectations are the secrets to their 78-year marriage, said Wright. “I don’t think we’ve ever had a real fight,” he said. “One other thing. You could pay me a million, but I’d never bother another man’s wife. Remember that.”

--Halley’s comet has no better friend in New Jersey than state Sen. James Hurley of Cumberland County. He has introduced legislation in the Senate urging every house and business in every city, town and hamlet in New Jersey to dim their lights when Halley’s comet streaks across the sky this year. “Not only will this enable people to see the comet better,” the Republican legislator said, “but think of the lower electric bills.”

--Samantha Smith, 12, the girl whose letter expressing fear of nuclear war gained her a trip to Moscow, is headed for Hollywood to star in a television series pilot. The seventh-grader of Manchester, Me., will begin filming next month with actor Robert Wagner and will play his daughter in the adventure series, said her father, Arthur Smith. Since her 1983 trip to the Soviet Union, Samantha has appeared on talk shows, addressed a children’s symposium in Japan and written a book.

--More than 500 persons were invited, and 32 showed up, to see a “new and exciting product” in Grand Rapids, Mich., and perhaps win a prize from New Dimensions. “It was a class operation,” Police Chief William Hegarty said of the sting--an effort to round up those named in outstanding warrants in the area alleging crimes ranging from minor traffic offenses to assault with intent to commit murder. “The ‘new and exciting product’ was the arrest warrant, and the prize was an escorted, all-expense-paid trip to the jail,” Chief Hegarty said.