Jobless Father Spills the Beans, Cashes In on Honesty

--An unemployed teen-age father whose family often eats beans for dinner had $950 cash in his grasp, and he let it go. To Donald Yeager, picking up the bills he found in a discarded cash drawer by the side of the road would have been wrong. He left the money where he found it, climbed back on his bicycle and went to call the police. The Marshall, Tex., lumber store that got back the money it lost in a robbery gave Yeager, 19, a $100 reward and called him a hero. The police called him a good citizen. His friends called him crazy for not pocketing the cash. Yeager already has spent most of the $100 on his 1975 Chevrolet. (In the meantime, police said they have collected more than $100 in contributions from people who read about his good deed.) With the rest of his reward, Yeager took his wife, Kathy, 20, to dinner on their first wedding anniversary. “We went out for pizza,” Kathy Yeager said. “Pepperoni.” Yeager, a high-school dropout, has worked “on and off” since he was 12 and is still looking for a steady job. “I’ve been mowing some yards and picking up cans to sell,” he said. “In a good week, I might make $15 from cans.”

--Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was exiled from the Soviet Union for criticizing the government, has applied for U.S. citizenship along with his wife, Natalia, 45, in St. Albans, Vt. The couple, who moved to Cavendish, Vt., in 1976 soon after their arrival in the United States, filed the application last week. Solzhenitsyn, 66, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970. Four years later, Soviet officials arrested him for criticizing the government and put him on a plane to Zurich, Switzerland.

--A coast-to-coast musical extravaganza featuring the Beach Boys is planned for the July Fourth weekend to aid the Statue of Liberty restoration project and help fight world hunger. A series of four free concerts was announced in Philadelphia by the newly formed nonprofit Love Foundation for American Music Entertainment and Art, founded by Mike Love of the Beach Boys and American Airlines, its corporate sponsor. The concerts are scheduled for July 4, 5 and 6 in Philadelphia, Washington, Dallas and the San Francisco area and will feature the Beach Boys and other headliners. Artists playing on the tour will be announced over the next three weeks and will be drawn from the entire popular music spectrum. Organizers expect at least 1.5 million people to attend.