Hit-and-Run Play Saves 7 Children in Burning Home

Louzon Davis of Kansas City, Mo., may be only 9 years old but, when his house caught on fire, he had the presence of mind to lead his six brothers and sisters outside to safety. “I knew we were all going to get out,” Louzon said matter-of-factly after the rescue. “That’s why I wasn’t scared.” The children, who range in age from 9 years to 6 months, were alone when the fire broke out, Fire Department spokesman Harold Knabe said. Louzon led the children down the stairs and through a first-floor window that he broke open with a baseball bat. The escape had to be made through a window because both the front and back doors of the house were bolted on the outside, Knabe said. He said the mother was at work and the father was not at home.

--Ron High has shed 500 of the 853 pounds he weighed two years ago but says he still has 161 pounds to go. So he’s taken up full-time residency at a health club in Chicago and says he won’t leave until he reaches his goal of 192 pounds. After years of trying fad diets and doing “everything wrong,” High, now 34, moved to the Bahamas for a year and a half and learned to swim, did aerobics and ate a vegetarian diet developed by comedian and social activist Dick Gregory, who paid for his Bahamian stay. In the process, High says, he has lost more than just weight. “I’m 5-foot-10 now, but I used to measure 6-foot-1,” he said.

--If you think you’ve heard every excuse in the book, you haven’t heard some of the doozies written by parents of absent schoolchildren in Vernon Parish in Leesville, La. “Some of them were obviously made up by students,” said Richard Carter, assistant principal of Leesville High School. But most, he said, were probably written by parents in the northwest Louisiana parish. A sampling: “My son is under the doctor’s care and should not take P.E. today. Please execute him.” A common complaint: “Mary could not come to school today because she was bother by very close veins.” And this: “Please ackuse Fred being absent on Jan. 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 and 33.”