Waif Repays Debt, With Honors

--A woman abandoned as a waif in Vietnam and adopted by an American soldier has won the U.S. teaching profession’s highest honor: the 1985 National Teacher of the Year award. Therese Knecht Dozier, 32, who teaches world history to 10th graders at Irmo High School in Columbia, S.C., will be honored in Washington April 17. Dozier was born in Saigon to a Vietnamese woman and a German man. After her mother died, she eventually was sent to a French orphanage, where she and her brothers were adopted by a U.S. Army military adviser and his wife. Dozier came to the United States when she was 2. The little girl grew up in Florida, where she was first in her high school class and had a perfect 4.0 average in college. “I have always been conscious of having been given a chance to make something out of myself,” she said. “Teaching is my way of repaying the debt.” But she does not blame today’s college graduates for avoiding teaching jobs. “I grew up in the ‘60s. We were out to save the world and help our fellow man,” she said. “Today, the kids are much more materialistic. They want to be rewarded for their abilities. I don’t blame them.”

--Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige and his wife, Midge, say they’ve put their $208,000 home in the fashionable Georgetown district on the selling block because they’ve had enough of the area’s “dirt and drunks.” The Baldriges have lived in the 120-year-old row house since he joined President Reagan’s Cabinet in 1981. They hope to move into an apartment elsewhere in the city. When the Citizens Assn. of Georgetown asked the Baldriges why they had not paid the association’s $25 annual membership dues, Midge Baldrige wrote: “Just so you don’t keep wondering, we are not going to renew our membership . . . . Alas, the dirt and the drunks, who wake us up every weekend at 2 a.m., are driving us out. Too bad, Midge Baldrige.” Residents frequently have complained to city officials about crowds, mostly youths, that congregate in Georgetown on weekends, generating an increase in street crime, vandalism, rowdiness and litter.

--”Did I feel like Cinderella? No. I felt like King Kong,” Ken Dutcher said with a smile. It wasn’t a question of his foot fitting into a glass slipper. It was a question of fitting his girth into extra-spacious pants on display at a new store for big men in Greece, N.Y.-- and thereby winning a $500 wardrobe. The pants were size 76, which means Dutcher, 42, a truck driver who is 5-feet-9 and weighs about 500 pounds, has a waistline of 6 feet, 4 inches. “There’s a lot of heavy people, and they won’t come out of the walls,” he said. “I mean, let’s face it, heavy people are embarrassed.”