Foiled by Her Ladyship, Snatcher Is All Tuckered Out

--New York police said Lady Vera Tucker of England was walking near her apartment on an exclusive block off 5th Avenue when a bicyclist grabbed her purse and tried to pedal away. Lady Tucker, 87, shouted for the thief to stop. When he did not, she screamed for help while whacking the thief with her umbrella until he fell off the bike. Police said Jose Ramos got up and staggered across the street, trying to remount his bicycle, the purse swinging by its strap over the handlebars. “I heard these very loud shrieks,” said Gregory Culley, 33. “I saw this elderly woman whopping a man on the head,” he said. “I wouldn’t like to have been him. The umbrella had a good bend in it.” Culley, who is 6-foot-5 and weighs 175 pounds, approached Ramos, who is 5-foot-7 nd weighs 132 pounds. “He tried to push the purse at me. He said, ‘Here it is. It’s over. It’s over,’ ” Culley recalled. Then the police arrived. Lady Tucker, who said, “I was furious. I wanted to go and whack him some more when he was down, but they wouldn’t let me,” declined treatment for a minor arm injury.

--Martha Graham, still choreographing at 92, celebrated the 60th birthday of her dance company in New York with a joyous new work based on her favorite themes of love, jealousy and reconciliation. The Martha Graham Dance Company marked the anniversary of its founding in 1926 with a gala benefit performance at the City Center.

--To one child, the city of El Paso is a “piece of dry land and 400 miles all around.” To another, the state capital of Austin seems more than 3,000 miles away. Yet another says Texas is the “largest cattle ranch in the world.” The observations of El Paso’s Hughey Elementary School pupils are contained in a booklet called “So You Think You Know All About Texas.” It is an afterthought for an art project involving a mural to celebrate the Texas Sesquicentennial. Art teacher Jeannine Collins asked her fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade pupils to write short paragraphs telling something they know about Texas. The information served as a guide for deciding what would be depicted in the mural. Did you know, for example, that El Paso is “so far west the rest don’t know were hear”? One pupil counted El Paso’s population and came up with: “El Paso has about 180 people or maybe more.” Another child concluded: “Texas has a lot of heratige in fact too much to explain.”