Hero’s Trip Downhill All the Way

--Canadian truck driver Louis J. Gallant, 29, was inching down Nova Scotia’s Kelly Mountain on Jan. 14, 1984, well ahead of fellow Canadian trucker John W. Waite, 28, when Waite called on his citizens band radio. Waite had suddenly lost his brakes. “If I didn’t let him run into the back of me, he would have had to jump and he would have been killed. So, I just told him to run into the back of my trailer,” Gallant said. “I figured we both could jump if we had to.” Gallant increased his speed from about 20 m.p.h. to about 50 m.p.h. on the twisting downgrade before Waite’s rig slammed into his trailer. Gallant then hit the brakes hard. “We slid down the mountain with my brakes locked, about a half mile altogether,” Gallant said. “We finally came to a stop only about 1,000 feet in front of a horseshoe, 180-degree turn we normally take at about 15.” Both men were uninjured. And that’s how Gallant became one of 22 people honored for their heroic deeds in ceremonies in Pittsburgh by the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission. Gallant was one of 13 Americans and nine Canadians honored. Six of those honored died on the scene and one award was granted anonymously to an American who wanted no publicity.

--Movie director Steven Spielberg and actress Amy Irving were married Wednesday afternoon in Santa Fe., N.M., by Chief Judge Thomas A. Donnelly, it was just announced. “It was an intimate affair,” Judge Donnelly said, with Irving’s sister and Saul Cohen, an attorney and friend of Spielberg, attending.

--Veteran actress Helen Hayes, who says she “married Chicago” in 1928, has dedicated the site of a new theater there to be named after her late husband, Charles MacArthur.

--Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the television and radio sex adviser, said in an interview that Americans are too honest about sex. “People have the idea that they must tell each other everything,” she said in an interview with Playboy magazine. “This is not good sense . . . If you tell everybody everything you will be sorry. You must realize that every person has private territory,” she said. Extra-marital affairs should be taboo, Westheimer advised. “I do not believe you should have to tell your partner and ask her forgiveness,” she told the magazine. “People forgive, but not forget.” Westheimer, the tiny 57-year-old sex adviser who has been married three times and has two children, said she is opposed to adultery. “I do not believe in open marriage.” She also said she thinks the sexual revolution was not revolutionary enough.