After a Cold Start, Boy Warms Up to Life by Degrees

--Five weeks after nearly freezing to death outside his home, 2 1/2-year-old Michael Troche lived up to the message on his T-shirt, “Feeling Like a Winner,” as he met reporters for the first time. Wheeled into a news conference at Milwaukee Children’s Hospital on a child’s wagon, with a stuffed toy close at hand, Michael smiled, toyed with a microphone and occasionally asked to go for a walk as his parents told of his progress. “We feel really just ecstatic--I guess that is the word--that he’s done so well,” said Michael’s mother, Judy. Doctors said they have failed to find any other case of an accidental victim of hypothermia surviving a body core temperature as cold as Michael’s--60 degrees. James Troche found his son collapsed in the snow Jan. 19, after wandering from his home with the temperature at 20 degrees below zero and a wind-chill index of about 65 below. Michael had no heartbeat and had stopped breathing, but the boy lost only the tips of three fingers on his left hand, and his neurological functions were described as 100% normal.

--The manager of a thrift shop said she was “dumbfounded” when she discovered a dozen pairs of monogrammed boxer shorts intended for President Reagan outside her store. The white shorts, monogrammed “RWR 84” in red and blue, and other gifts sent to the White House appeared last week at the Threshold Thrift Shop in suburban Kensington, Md. “I had no idea how it got there. I know they give a lot of stuff away to charity, but I didn’t think they would give it to us,” said manager Loverne Dessoff. Customers at the shop snatched up the shorts--sold for $2 apiece--grabbed a coffee mug with “Nancy” painted on it for $10, and a linen tea towel embroidered with the words “To Ronald and Nancy Reagan” for $1, Dessoff said. Accompanying the presidential booty was a note reading, “The White House Gift Unit.” The donation of monogrammed shorts and other embroidered memorabilia apparently was a mistake, said a staff member at the gift unit. White House spokeswoman Terry Abdoo said gifts to the Reagans are donated to charity, but the First Family normally keeps monogrammed gifts “to avoid publicity.” Dessoff said the boxer shorts were folded and wrapped in plastic. “I don’t think they’ve been worn,” she said.