Island Offers Would-Be Castaways Comforts of Home

--Fans who loved the television comedy series about a group of shipwrecked vacationers living in grass shacks on a deserted isle can enjoy the real island, if they’ve got $8.75 million. But its former inhabitants--Gilligan; skipper Jonas Grumby; Thurston Howell III and his wife, Lovey; sexy movie star Ginger Grant; Prof. Roy Hinckley, and that sweet country girl Mary Ann Summers, won’t be ashore to entertain you. The 25-acre Hawaiian island in windward Oahu’s Kaneohe Bay, is anything but an isolated and uncharted desert isle. For less than $9 million, the island’s new owner will get an estate home, eight other residential units, a guest house, beach cabana and a four-masted schooner, says Mike McCormack, the agent handling the sale. “It’s not often a privately owned island goes on the market,” said McCormack. “I’ve had calls from fat farms to think tanks, restaurants to yacht clubs.” The island was originally owned by the Hawaiian Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, who planted so many palm trees the island came to be known as Coconut Island.

--An American-led expedition retracing Marco Polo’s footsteps across China’s ancient Silk Road has reached Peking to complete the last leg of a 13,000-mile journey begun 10 years ago in Italy, organizers said. A statement from the Marco Polo Foundation of Seattle, Wash., said expedition leader Harry Rutstein, 55, became the first person in 700 years to follow Polo’s route across Asia. It said the group crossed 14 Chinese mountain ranges and six deserts, including the Taklamakan.

--City fathers have beaten graduating seniors to the punch--they hired professional painters to emblazon “Class of 1986” on the city water tower in Cary, N.C. Worried about derring-do students scaling the 158-foot tower to express their class pride, officials paid for the three-foot and six-foot green letters on the white tank. Green and white are the Cary Senior High School colors. “Personally, I like the way it looks,” senior class president David Kurtz said. “But I’d like it to be bigger.” School principal Ramey Beavers said students had foolishly risked their lives to scrawl the class year on the 19-year-old tower across from Cary High. Just last spring two students were arrested when neighbors called police because the boys were making so much noise trying to shinny up the tower.