Illustrated Woman Started With a Butterfly and Love

--From the neck up, she’s your charming white-haired grandmother. But from the neck down, she’s a work of art, ablaze with colorful flowers, birds and bracelets. That’s Elizabeth Weinzirl, 83, the tattooed sensation of her quiet retirement community in Gresham, Ore., who’s taking part in the National Tattoo Assn. convention in New Orleans. Weinzirl, who said she’s never counted her tattoos, traced it all back to a butterfly on her left thigh about 40 years ago. “My husband wanted a tattooed wife, and I loved him very much and I was eager to do things to please him,” Weinzirl, known as the “grandmother of tattooing,” said. “And so I got a tattoo, and then I thought ‘that’s it.’ Then later he said: ‘Don’t you think it’s time for another one?’ By the time I got the third one, I started getting interested myself. It’s something we did together, and he’s gone, and that’s that.” Her husband, a medical school professor, had only two tattoos--his Social Security number and a “drinking dot.” She said that the tattooist who put the dot on her husband had told him: “That’s a drinking dot. If you see two of them, you’ve had too much.”

--It’s turning into a recipe for a modern-day, Texas-style duel. Lufkin Mayor Pitser H. Garrison, implying that he was fed up with it, wrote to El Paso Mayor Jonathan Rogers, asking that they “settle, once and for all, the issue of which town is truly the oldest of all in Texas: Nacogdoches, San Augustine or the El Paso settlement of Ysleta.” Garrison suggested a duel-to-the-end: a hushpuppy cooking contest among the three cities May 17 at the 16th annual Southern Hushpuppy Olympics in Lufkin. But Rogers wanted to choose the weapons. “We would insist upon using tamales rather than hushpuppies,” he said. “Hushpuppies are imported from another culture into Texas, whereas tamales are truly a part of the heritage of Texas as we know it today.” San Augustine Mayor Walter Richey was in a Houston hospital and could not be reached for comment. Nacogdoches Mayor A.L. Mengham opted for hushpuppies. “Any tamale I made would be interesting,” he said. “I haven’t made tamales before. In fact, I haven’t made many hushpuppies either.”

--Harvard University will settle for an address by Britain’s Prince Charles, who has agreed to replace President Reagan at the school’s 350th anniversary next September. The White House said the President declined the invitation because of scheduling problems. Last spring the university chose not to award Reagan an honorary degree. But Harvard spokeswoman Margery Hefferon said that the honorary degree factor probably did not influence Reagan’s decision.