Frustrated Iowan Uses Art to Plow Into Reaganomics

--If art reflects life, then a farmer’s “Reaganomics Machine” reflects his frustration with the current state of agriculture. Tim Dinklage, who farms 750 rented acres near Avoca, Iowa, said the depressed farm economy and his inability to harvest corn through a wet fall pushed him to a personal protest of government bureaucracy. Dinklage, a Republican who voted for President Reagan, recently combined pieces of farm equipment into one symbolic sculpture dubbed the “Reaganonomics Machine.” It has an engine that “hasn’t done much lately, a social program cutter, rose-colored glasses to help the farmer view agriculture in the same manner government reports do, a bureaucratic wheel that “nobody knows what it does,” a workers tax-collecting auger that “scoops the money right up out of their pockets” and, among other things, a Pentagon program vessel in the form of a black barrel. “you can see there is no bottom to that,” Dinklage said.

--Soviet dissident Yelena Bonner, 62, still in pain a week after undergoing multiple heart-bypass surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, read and tried to walk a bit as she continued her recovery at her relatives’ home in Newton, Mass. “She is very uncomfortable, and I’m afraid it will be that way for a few more days,” said Efrem Yankelevich, her son-in-law.

--Russian-born pianist Vladimir Horowitz will return to his homeland for the first time in 61 years for a concert in April under a new U.S.-Soviet cultural agreement, USIA chief Charles Z. Wick said in Moscow. The trip will be Horowitz’s first since he left Russia in 1925, vowing never to return.

--For most people, a cordless telephone means freedom of motion, but not for inmates at the Sierra County Jail in Truth or Consequences, N.M. The jail is inside the county courthouse and has no telephone. Until recently, all it took was a phone call to offer prisoners an avenue of escape, said chief jailer Chuck Talley. “We let them out of their cells to answer the phone in the office, and they can run on us, either down the stairs or out the window,” Talley said. But a cordless telephone has put an end to all that. “Now when someone gets a call, we can hand the phone in through the bars, and when they’re finished, they can hand it back out to us,” Talley said.