Tell Tale Upsets Swiss Apple Cart

A Swiss folk hero who has been suffering what his defenders say are the slings and arrows of historical misfortune has a new champion who’s determined to keep the legendary archer the apple of his country’s eye. The flurry began earlier this month, when Swiss historian Fritz Karl Mathys charged that 13th-Century hero William Tell, if he ever lived, could not have used a crossbow to shoot the apple from his son’s head and to slay the tyrannical Hapsburg governor. Claiming the weapon was unknown until a century after Tell’s exploits, Mathys said the crossbow was not mentioned in any chronicles before 1300 and was not depicted in contemporary drawings of famous Swiss battles all the way to 1388. But Jost Buergi, chief archeologist of canton Thurgau, accused Mathys of making only a superficial study of the subject. Buergi, writing in a Thurgau daily newspaper, said that a crossbow unearthed in 1969 in canton Schwyz, about 25 miles from Tell’s reputed home in the canton of Uri, had been dated to about 1200, well in time for Tell’s supposed feats and the original Swiss oath of confederation in 1291. Mathys’ claim had caused a fury among the fiercely patriotic Swiss. One reader wrote in to the daily tabloid Blick to wonder sarcastically whether Tell had carried an atom bomb.

--A granddaughter of beer empire founder Adolph Coors has bequeathed $5 million each to an animal protection society and a college that went bankrupt in 1977. Margaret Collbran of Denver died Feb. 17 at the age of 75. Her will divided her $20-million fortune equally among St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Denver, the Metropolitan Opera Guild in New York, Bennett College in New York and the Denver Dumb Friends League, similar to a humane society. Collbran suffered from a debilitating illness for the last 10 years of her life and did not know that Bennett, which she attended in the 1930s, had gone bankrupt in 1977. If no school can show in an Oct. 20 probate hearing that it is carrying on in Bennett’s stead, the money will be divided among the three other beneficiaries, said Charles Ennis, Collbran’s attorney.

--Pop singer Boy George, battling a heroin habit, flew to the Caribbean to begin work on some new songs. “I feel miserable,” said the singer, who appeared pale and unshaven and without his usual makeup. Boy George, 25, said he would be working at the Air Recording Studios on the island of Montserrat with American songwriter Lamont Dozier, the man behind many of the classic Motown songs of the 1960s. “I’ll be out there as long as I can. I just want to get away and start working again,” he said.