In Pen, ‘Bugs’ Found His Sting

The writings of William H. Rehnquist, President Reagan’s nominee for chief justice of the United States, are increasingly in demand these days. Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are seeking his writings on such issues as electronic surveillance of radical political movements while he was a Justice Department official during the Richard M. Nixon Administration. So far, the executive branch has refused to turn over the papers. But 45 years ago, the associate justice of the Supreme Court penned a few lines worthy of attention today. Writing under the name “Bugs Rehnquist,” the 17-year-old senior at Shorewood High School in suburban Milwaukee satirized the news media and lawyers, according to the Milwaukee Journal. On the media, Rehnquist wrote: “Somebody told me I didn’t look like a radio columnist because I haven’t a wave in my hair.” Rehnquist and another student, Richard Nachtsheim, who later became a lawyer, wrote a monthly column, “Boreign Correspondence,” for the Shorewood Ripples. In one column, they cooked up an imaginary murder trial in which the defense attorneys were named Loophole Looie, Crafty Carl and Ominous Ole. When one of them offered the defendant a ride home after the verdict, the client replied: “First you want my money, now you want to take my life.”

--To say that Edna Brewer of Chattanooga, Tenn., would probably celebrate her 103rd birthday sitting in a rocking chair is just plain hot air. What she did was to take her first hot-air balloon ride. “This is one for the book. Live to be 103, and then go up in a balloon. Well, I think that’s something,” she said. “I’ve decided I don’t have a heart because it didn’t even flutter. I don’t feel old, and I don’t think old. My friends help me do things that seem impossible. It’s wonderful to be alive, you know it?” She said that she’s had a similar adventure every Aug. 1 since her 100th birthday, thanks to her friend, Robert L. Wilson, a University of Tennessee-Chattanooga professor. “Next year it’ll be hang-gliding, or maybe scuba diving,” she said. “When you get old . . . you’d think you’d forget about the world. But I don’t. I vote every year. . . . Everything costs but breathing and voting. I do both.”

--Princess Caroline of Monaco gave birth to a 6-pound, 8-ounce girl, who was named Charlotte, the palace in Monte Carlo said. A palace spokeswoman at Princess Grace Hospital said that “mother and child are doing well.” Charlotte, named after Prince Rainier’s mother, is the second child of Caroline, 29, and Italian businessman Stefano Casiraghi. A boy, Andrea, was born in 1984. Rainier was present for the birth and then left to attend a boxing match.