Wife Gets Into Business Picture

--Donna Small said she was not afraid of heights but she had to admit that when she was hoisted atop a 48-foot billboard to help advertise her husband’s business she was “a little squeamish.” Small, wearing a red dress to stand out from the sign’s background, spent the day smiling and waving down to amazed motorists on a busy street in Evansville, Ind. “After awhile,” she said, “there was nothing to it.” She said she would spend five days on three new billboards around town, and then would be replaced by a metal silhouette. She sits on a platform behind a piece of plywood cut in the shape of an office desk, promoting her husband’s office supply company, Corporate Design Inc. “I’ve never seen anything like it before, and it was all her idea,” said Leon Howell, manager of Naegele Outdoor Advertising Co., which put up the billboard. “The attention it’s gotten has been phenomenal,” he said. Donna Small, a former advertising businesswoman, said her husband, J. Michael Small, also needed some persuading. “He wanted someone else to be up there, but I wanted to do it myself,” she said. “I didn’t want to miss the excitement.”

--Singer Marie Osmond filed for divorce from her husband of nearly three years after several unsuccessful attempts to reconcile their differences, a spokesman for the singer said in Provo, Utah. Ron Clark, spokesman for the Osmond family, said she filed for divorce from Steve Craig, a former Brigham Young University basketball star who has been working in the business operations of the Osmond Studios. Marie Osmond, sister and one-time singing partner of Donny Osmond, is the only member of the famous musical family to file for divorce. Clark said Osmond declined to disclose the problems that led to her separation from her husband and her decision to end her marriage. “Osmond and her husband have been in a reconciliation period for the past six months,” Clark said. “It’s actually been at least their second reconciliation.” The couple were married in June of 1982. They have a son, Stephen James, 2, who is with his mother in California.

--The Episcopal bishop of Central Florida is suing the U.S. government for $200,000, claiming that a knee injury he suffered on the Navy’s tennis courts prevents him from genuflecting before the altar. But the Naval Training Center in Orlando, Fla., has filed a counterclaim, contending that the bishop was a trespasser and owes $5,200 for the use of the courts over five years. Bishop William H. Folwell, 60, of Winter Park says his left knee was severely and permanently damaged in 1982 when he slipped on algae on the training center courts. The decision to sue the government “took a lot of thought, prayers and consultation,” the bishop said.