He’s on Road to ‘New Frontiers’

--”I have come to understand my body and my mind. Emotionally, I’ve learned to push through barriers of pain and reach new frontiers of endurance.” Rick Hansen of Vancouver, British Columbia, is no expert in the martial arts, but his mental toughness is helping him in his round-the-world odyssey--in a wheelchair. The paraplegic has used up 108 tires, 42 pairs of gloves and “lots of sweat” traveling halfway around the globe to raise public awareness for the handicapped. Hansen, 28, who began his 25,000-mile trip March 21, 1985, has won 19 medals in wheelchair marathons. So far, Hansen, who is now in Peking, has covered 14,000 miles in 31 countries, in addition to raising more than $10 million for research in spinal cord rehabilitation and sports for the handicapped. His next objective is Shanghai, only 1,060 miles away.

--When Teresa Bailey of New York first saw the police drawing of a suspect in Manhattan’s “silver gun bandit” case, according to the New York Post, she turned to her husband, Michael Dirton, and said: “It looks like you. He just laughed and said: ‘No, that’s not me. You know me--I wouldn’t do that.’ ” But Dirton was later arrested and charged with burglary, robbery, sexual abuse and sodomy. Bailey said Dirton’s friends had also remarked on the resemblance. The burglar is known as the “silver gun bandit” because of the pearl-handled, chrome-plated revolver he carried when he crept through apartment windows late at night over the last seven months. When he was arrested, Dirton, who has a criminal record and was identified by 14 victims, was carrying a silver starter’s pistol that had been painted black, its pearl handle covered with tape, police said.

--The daughters of President Lyndon B. Johnson said he agonized over Vietnam War protests and that on his deathbed asked for forgiveness for “missing out on the small moments of our lives in the White House.” Luci Johnson Turpin, wife of a Toronto banker, said: “He was always there for the big events. But for the four years he lived after he left Washington, it was then that we had the small moments, and I treasure them.” Luci and her sister, Lynda Johnson Robb, wife of the former Virginia governor, spoke at a symposium at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., on the Johnson Administration. Both said the presence of Secret Service agents was one of the major drawbacks of being a President’s daughter. Lynda said agents took her to the hospital to have her first child and that “the doctors panicked when the Secret Service man said he had to go up to the delivery room with me. I told the doctors that the Secret Service man might as well come along because he had been there for everything else.”