Normal IQ Plus 42 Years Is Ruled Equal to $235,000

--An elderly woman of normal IQ who charged that she had been held against her will for 42 years in a Connecticut institution for the mentally retarded accepted a $235,000 settlement with the state. Gladys Tyler Burr, 78, smiled and clutched her attorney’s hand as she was wheeled from a U.S. District Court in Hartford. “I won my freedom,” the woman whispered to reporters crowded around her. Burr was released in 1978 after she sued former Mental Retardation Commissioner Gareth D. Thorne for false imprisonment and a number of other charges, including being forced to work without pay and denial of rehabilitative training. Burr had been committed by her family in 1936, when she was 29, for “a variety of psychiatric problems,” Assistant Atty. Gen. Francis J. McGregor said. Department of Mental Retardation spokesman Bill Mill said that such commitments are now impossible. “A mother can’t just say: ‘My daughter’s crazy, take her off my hands.’ ” “There’s a lot I want to do,” Burr said after the award. The first thing is to buy some ice cream, then she will take her lawyer to lunch and give $60 to her church.

--Three vintage cars, traveling at a top speed of 13 m.p.h., rumbled through Ogden, Utah, on their way to New York in a re-enactment of a 1903 cross-country automobile trip. “I think like I’m in 1903,” said Joseph Merli, 34, of Schenectady, N.Y. “This is the way it was.” Merli and three friends are following the path of two drivers who crossed the country in 1903 in their “Curved Dash Oldsmobiles.” The sentimental journey takes Merli, Gary Hoomsbeen, 47, of Minneapolis, and Roy Bernick, 55, of St. Cloud, Minn., from San Francisco, which they left June 30, to New York, where they should arrive on Aug 5. Their Oldsmobiles, dated 1902, 1903 and 1904, have one-cylinder engines and originally sold for $650.

--A 13-year-old Falls Church, Va., girl is the new queen of Girl Scout cookie sales. Elizabeth Brinton peddled 11,200 boxes of cookies this year to win a personal computer and claim the title from arch-rival Markita Andrews of New York, who had been dubbed the greatest cookie seller of all time but was far behind this year with sales of only 4,044 boxes. Brinton asserted that she has been selling more cookies than Andrews all along but wasn’t listed as champion because in past years her local Girl Scout Council didn’t keep individual records. Brinton said she routinely worked 40 hours a week selling cookies this spring, often at Washington Metro stations, bringing her eight-year total to 36,000 boxes. “I push a lot, I’m not quiet,” she said in outlining her technique. “Sometimes, they would try to sneak past you, and you look them in the eye and make them feel guilty.”