At the End of the Rainbow . . . D. B. Cooper’s Parachute

--It’s been more than 15 years since D. B. Cooper handed a note to a Northwest Airlines stewardess and said: “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.” The man who has since come to be a folk hero of sorts leaped out of the airplane somewhere north of the Oregon border on Nov. 21, 1971, with $200,000 strapped to his body. Cooper was never found, but in 1980 Brian Ingram, 8, found $5,800 on a Columbia River beach near Vancouver, Wash. Now, Richard T. Tosaw, a private investigator from Ceres, Calif., together with scuba divers, is mounting yet another of his searches for the rest of the money. Tosaw said that he believes Cooper’s parachute is still on the bottom of the Columbia River. “You’re not looking for a needle in the haystack,” Tosaw said. “It’s a goodly sized hunk of stuff you’re going to come across. If these scuba divers come fairly close to it, they’ll be able to see it.”

--Her court fight to keep Gussie the watchgoose is one thing, but now, Marguerite Croghan of Omaha, Neb., has an even bigger problem on her hands: She can’t find the goose. It could be just a practical joke, but Croghan, 79, isn’t even smiling. “I feel very sad about it, and I think it is a very cruel hoax,” she said. The 3-foot-tall Gussie was taken from her wooden doghouse over the weekend. She is at the center of a controversy involving Croghan, the Douglas County Health Department and a neighbor who complained that the goose honks too much. The citation charges Croghan with harboring poultry without a permit, and the goose has been ordered to leave town. But Croghan argues that Gussie is not your run-of-the-mill poultry. She’s a “watchgoose,” says Croghan, who still faces a Dec. 29 court date.

--It’s no secret that these are hard times, even for the movers and shakers in Texas. The reasons? A depressed oil industry and a new tax law that isn’t too generous with write-offs. Which is why former Gov. John B. Connally, chairman of Chapman Oil Co. of Dallas, has sold most of his quarter horse and thoroughbred breeding business. “It’s a difficult time for anybody who’s in the oil business, the real estate business or agriculture--and I’m in all three,” the three-time governor said. Connally, who was Treasury secretary in the Richard M. Nixon Administration, said he had hoped to collect $600,000 from the sale of 126 of his horses at an auction in Floresville, Tex., but his take was only $398,000. He said he will keep three stallions for stud service.