7-Year-Battle Brings Pauper to a War Hero’s Grave

--For a century he lay in an unmarked pauper’s grave, a Civil War hero forgotten by most but remembered by a great-grandson, who fought his own battle to have his ancestor honored. As a result, Capt. James Smith will be honored during Memorial Day week with a ceremony and interment at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington. Smith won the Medal of Honor for heroism on Aug. 5, 1864, while serving aboard the Richmond under Adm. David Farragut during the battle of Mobile Bay. Seventeen years later, Smith died and was buried in the paupers’ section of New York City’s Calvary Cemetery. Smith’s great-grandson, Thomas Clarkson Brenker, a New York businessman, decided something should be done. Brenker was told that no marker could be put in the paupers’ section and that it was impossible for Smith’s remains to be moved to another grave site. After a seven-year battle, Brenker wrote to President Reagan. “Within two weeks, everything began to happen,” Brenker said. In October, the New York state Supreme Court ordered the disinterment of Capt. Smith, clearing the way for his burial in Arlington.

--The missing 4 1/2 months will probably remain a mystery, but the family of a Florida man is just glad that it will recover a videotape that vanished after being mailed to New Jersey. The tape was made at the 90th birthday party of John Simon of Dunnellon and was staged along the lines of the old “This Is Your Life” television and radio show. Relatives, many of whom the ailing Simon had not seen for decades, came from as far away as Holland for the bash. In January, Simon’s daughter, Vera Smallridge, mailed the tape from Florida to Ray Weinstein of Union Township, N.J., Simon’s brother-in-law, but it never arrived. It did show up on the seat of a New Jersey Transit bus, where Tom Harper of New York City found it. Recently, he played the tape and appreciated its value to the family. He submitted a picture from the tape to the Newark Star-Ledger, which published it last week. Weinstein’s wife, Evelyn, had attended the party and recognized the photograph. The Weinsteins contacted Smallridge in Florida. “I never dreamed they didn’t receive it, and they thought I never mailed it,” Smallridge said. “I think it’s nice that someone was so thoughtful to go through all this effort.”

--”Dondi,” the 31-year-old comic strip about a boy who escapes war-torn Europe and finds happiness and adventure in Midville, U.S.A., will be terminated, said Irwin Hasen, the New York-based cartoonist who has produced the strip since its start in 1955. In a “heart-wrenching decision,” Hasen said he will end the strip June 8. At its height in the early 1960s, more than 100 newspapers carried “Dondi,” but that number has dwindled to 35. Hasen attributes it to changes in tastes. “I don’t want to blame the tube--television--but the narrative strip lost favor,” Hasen said.