Prayer Was His Shark Repellent

--He spent much of the night praying, sometimes asking God to take his life so that the ordeal would be over. Walter Wyatt spent the rest of those dark hours desperately kicking at the sharks in the water around him and plugging the holes in his life jacket with his fingers. “The first time a shark hit me, I jumped. My fingers came out of the holes, and the jacket filled up with water,” said Wyatt, 37, of Homestead, Fla., a United Airlines pilot who was forced to ditch his private plane off the Bahamas as he was returning to Florida. “I prayed to God to kill me many times. I didn’t think I’d make it until midnight. I spent all my time filling my life jacket up and kicking the sharks--and talking to God.” Wyatt said his flares did not work and he spent 16 hours in the water--dressed in a T-shirt, shorts and tennis shoes--before he was spotted by the Coast Guard. Except for minor cuts from the crash-landing, he was uninjured.

--There’s no telling what a throwaway society will discard. A Somers Point, N.J., bartender who has made it his business to nose through the trash of the city’s affluent neighborhoods found an 1877 letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson that contains an excerpt from one of his poems. Gary Duffy, manager of the Anchorage Tavern, said he almost threw the letter away “because the ‘S’ in (Emerson’s) name looked like an ‘F,’ ” Duffy said. “After I went back to it, I saw what it was, I was very excited.” The letter’s authenticity has been confirmed by two experts. Emerson apparently sent it as a message of sympathy to a family who had lost a relative, Duffy said. Duffy also has found a first-edition set of Charles Dickens’ novels and an antique edition of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” among the garbage.

--A work by folk artist Marie Fox, 41, of Duxbury, Mass., will be displayed next to the national Christmas tree behind the White House. Her 24-by-30-inch acrylic painting, “The Lighting of the National Christmas Tree,” depicts a starry, snowy night under a quarter-moon with President and Nancy Reagan waving, Tony Bennett leading carolers and Mickey and Minnie Mouse joining in the merry-making.

--Julio Iglesias’ neighbors may be wishing that he fancied cats or canaries as pets. Iglesias’ four Belgian pointers have been digging holes on the golf course and leaving unmentionable things in other people’s yards, according to the council of Indian Creek Village, an exclusive community near Miami. Iglesias’ manager says the dogs are harmless and that the singer will do his best to restrain them, but the village council has voted to send Iglesias a third letter on the matter--a warning that Dade County Animal Control officers will be notified the next time the dogs are seen at large.