Young War Victims Find a Savior

--A rug dealer who did business in Afghanistan before Soviet intervention is helping Afghan children who lost limbs in attacks by Soviet or government forces to be fitted with artificial arms and legs in Boston. “I couldn’t live with myself and do nothing,” said Charles Brockunier, a Cambridge, Mass., importer. Five children have already arrived, including one who suffered disfiguring facial burns. “We have four more waiting to come as soon as we raise more funds,” Brockunier said. “Three of them are double amputees.” Dr. John M. Snowden, chief of prosthetics at Massachusetts General Hospital, is donating his time to fit the four with artificial limbs. “These are some of the toughest but most well-mannered kids I’ve ever seen,” Snowden said. Doctors at Shriners’ Burns Institute in Boston will reconstruct the face of the burned child. With $12,000 in donations from the Free Afghanistan Alliance, a nonprofit group, Brockunier began searching Pakistani refugee camps for injured children who could be helped in the United States. “I got a bit of a feel for the vast extent of the refugee camps,” he said. “Based on what I’ve seen, I’d estimate that 100,000 children have been killed or injured.”

--An unemployed Kansas City man was happy to take seconds when he won a $34,000 luxury sports car that was turned down by a 67-year-old widow who said that accepting the prize would complicate her life. Dennis A. Jackson, 36, received the keys to a 1986 Jaguar as the prize from a drawing of donors to the mayor’s Christmas Tree Fund. Jackson became eligible for the prize when the first winner, Pauline Darrah, 67, declined to accept it and persuaded officials to give it to someone else. “I don’t need a car. I don’t know anything about cars. I don’t want a car,” said Darrah, a great-grandmother who walks or rides the bus. “I never won anything in my life. I couldn’t believe it when I heard.”

--Sen. Bob Kasten (R-Wis.) married a New York advertising executive in a ceremony presided over by the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale. Kasten married Eva Jean Nimmons in a ceremony closed to the press at the Fort Washington Collegiate Church in New York City. The 43-year-old freshman senator had been considered one of Washington’s most eligible bachelors since arriving in the capital in 1980.

--Actor Gordon MacRae, star of the movie musicals “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel,” has been hospitalized in Lincoln, Neb., with an undisclosed ailment. No details on the hospitalization of MacRae, 64, were released in accordance with family wishes, said Ed Shafer, director of development and public relations for Bryan Memorial Hospital.