Class Officers Are a Pair of High Fliers on Prom Night

--It wasn’t only prom night but an effort as well to put the Harford Vocational-Technical High School on the map. “This should pretty much do it,” said Matthew J. Odachowski, who with Charles R. Mace rented a helicopter to bring their dates--Terrie Schulze and Sandra Hunt--to the dance. When the chopper landed in the parking lot in Edgewood, Md., the boys sauntered out in white top hats, tails and walking sticks. The $425 one-hour rental for the helicopter was split by Odachowski, the class president, and Mace, the vice president, who said they had no problem getting the money. Odachowski, 18, has his own carpet-cleaning service and works part time at a carpet store in the suburb of Bel Air, where the school is situated. “I checked into renting a limousine,” Mace, 18, said, “and my dad said it might be cheaper if we rented a helicopter, and it was.” Renting a Rolls-Royce would have been $295 an hour, but one hour would not have been enough because of the distance from the four teen-agers’ homes to the dance, Mace said.

--Stevie Wonder lashed out at South African apartheid and performed a new song to tumultuous applause at the United Nations in New York on his 35th birthday. The singer and song-writer, honored at a special meeting of the U.N. Committee Against Apartheid, performed “The Bell for Freedom” and later disclosed that he had just written another new song, titled “Apartheid Is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong.” Wonder’s music has been banned in South Africa because, in accepting an Academy Award in Hollywood last month, he said he did so in the name of Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid campaigner and African National Congress leader jailed for more than 20 years.

--Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah) presented to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington a paper airplane he had flown aboard the space shuttle last month. “It was rather downplayed by some,” Garn said of the plane and other toys he and his fellow astronauts tested in zero gravity. “They said, ‘This is frivolous.’ ” The National Aeronautics and Space Administration worried about its image enough, Garn said, to tell the shuttle crew: “Don’t look like you’re having a good time.” But Garn said that they did have a good time with the plane, a yo-yo, jacks and other common toys, and they helped bring the lofty goals of the space program down to earth so people could relate to them. The paper craft will be displayed this summer in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.