Law to Keep Girls on Their Toes

--The girls of Cabool can now kick up their heels and dance, legally. The Board of Aldermen repealed a 48-year-old ordinance that prohibited girls under age 18 from dancing in public places in the Missouri town of about 2,000 people. The city attorney had declared the ordinance unconstitutional because of age and sex discrimination. The ordinance was discovered last month when Carl Casey, 35, asked the board to lower the age limit to 16 so he could sponsor dances at his drive-in restaurant. Mayor Dale Cartwright said he had not been aware of the ordinance, which had not been enforced in the 30 years he has lived in Cabool. But after all that fuss, Casey said, he may not be able to sponsor dances after all. “We were originally going to have dances indoors, but the controversy has caused so much stink. The Ministers Alliance is against the whole idea,” he said. The Rev. Dale Blackwell of the First Free Will Baptist Church of Cabool said he was disappointed that the aldermen repealed the ordinance. “I was opposed to young girls being introduced to a dance-hall environment,” he said.

--A 19th-Century stagecoach set off from Lapwai, Ida., for Walla Walla, Wash., to re-create the trip settlers took on the Nez Perce Trail 150 years ago. Members of the Walla Walla 59ers Club drove the empty stagecoach. The driver and shotgun rider were commemorating the mail run that went to the Whitman Mission, site of the 1847 Cayuse Indian attack that resulted in the deaths of the mission’s founders. The 5,000 letters, including four to President Reagan, carried on top of the coach, bore a “59ers Stagecoach Station, Lapwai, Idaho” cancellation mark. Joe Kinzer, who organized the mail run, said the 59ers hold the last official permit to carry U.S. mail by stagecoach. The massacre on Nov. 29, 1847, left Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and 11 other people dead. Fifty people were taken hostage but were later released by the Cayuse for a ransom of tobacco, weapons, ammunition and clothing.

--In case someone tries to get his goat, President Reagan has six new goats to be got. The young goats, or kids, were given to Reagan by the American Dairy Goat Assn. and the Dairy Goat Journal. Agriculture Secretary Richard E. Lyng accepted the goats on behalf of the President. The association noted that it has Reagan’s support for observing Dairy Goat Awareness Week next week. The six kids will not grace the White House premises as automatic lawn mowers but will reside on a 200-acre farm operated by the U.S. Park Service in nearby Oxon Hill, Md. “They will be known as the President’s Herd,” Lyng said.