Children Show They Have Heart for Valentine’s Day

--Pupils at Lancaster Elementary School in Orlando, Fla., aren’t exchanging Valentine’s Day cards this year. The money they would have spent is going to help a 7-year-old classmate who needs a heart and lung transplant. The children have already raised $750, but the transplant Joey Holden needs could cost $200,000 and his mother, Catherine, said she doesn’t have insurance and had to quit her job as a waitress to care for her son. Joey suffers from high blood pressure of the lungs, which leads to enlargement of the right side of his heart, and sufferers generally die within a year of diagnosis. Joey’s problem was diagnosed in May by Dr. Arthur Raptoulis, head of pediatric cardiology at Orlando Regional Medical Center. His deteriorating condition has left him short of breath and forced his mother to take him out of school. Joey said he misses school and passes the time building castles with his block set and playing with his home computer. But he said he looks forward to learning to ride a bicycle after surgery. “I miss all the fun,” he said. “He knows that he has to wait for a donor,” his mother said. “He does know that he could die on the operating table.”

--Actress Helen Hayes says most of today’s film stars won’t stand the test of time. “Do you realize how few of the film stars we have now . . . are going to be enduring?” she asked in an interview with Good Housekeeping magazine. Hayes, 85, said Burt Reynolds, for example, is “a wonderful sort of happy slob. But think about the movie actors of my generation: Clark Gable, Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper. . . . These men weren’t just happy slobs or amusing slobs. They were brilliant people.” Gable, she said, “was no mental giant, but, oh, what excitement, what electricity surrounded that man.” As for movie actresses, “Today there are really only Meryl Streep and Vanessa Redgrave. But I remember the Garbos and Lillian Gishes and Katharine Hepburns and Bette Davises--amazing magnetism in their personalities.”

--Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is visiting Mexico to participate in the annual Juarez-Lincoln lecture series. Her speech, scheduled for delivery Wednesday at the Foreign Ministry’s auditorium in Mexico City, is called “The Constitution and the Courts of the United States of America: Bastions of Liberty.” The annual lecture series is named after Abraham Lincoln and Benito Juarez, one of Mexico’s must famous founding fathers.