Expressway Sign Leads Father Into Fast Lane to a Job

It was a sign of the times, and it brought an unemployed construction worker a chance to feed his family and keep up with his mortgage. Art Fosle, a 25-year-old Sauk Village, Ill., resident who was laid off 2 1/2 months ago, was getting bored and desperate. So he made a sign that said, “Family Man Needs a Job,” and stood for three hours in the cold along the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago. “People were very supportive,” Fosle said. “They waved at me.” They also called with about half a dozen job offers to the phone number listed on the sign, and Fosle will take one of those offers this week from a Chicago construction firm. Now, said Fosle, father of a 17-month-old daughter, he’s in a position to help others. “People are calling asking me for jobs, and I’m going to help people out if I can.”

--Paul Entrekin wants to make sure he is in plane sight wherever he flies, so that anyone spotting him in his MIG-15 doesn’t make any mistakes about his identity. Entrekin recently purchased the jet, complete with the red star markings of the Soviet Union, from the Combat Jet Museum in Chino, Calif., for $150,000. The plane was obtained by the museum in a sale of surplus equipment by China. “I’ll make sure every place I go I have air traffic control clearance and I will fly a flight plan,” Entrekin pledged. The 32-year-old former Marine Corps pilot, who gave up his captain’s commission for a career in aerobatics, sees the MIG as a way to get air show bookings. He will keep the jet, which was manufactured in the same year he was born, in his hometown of Pensacola, Fla.

--The one that got away in tiny Grenadier Pond in Toronto has ended up--50 years later and many miles away--near Scotland. Back in the 1930s, the Toronto Star newspaper launched a promotional campaign in which it tagged half a dozen fish and offered $5 for each one brought in. Scottish fisherman Peter MacSween, 46, now wants the newspaper to make good on that campaign after he caught a fish with the tag near the Isle of Skye. Ralph Cowan, 84, circulation manager for the newspaper, remembers the campaign and speculated on how a fish so far away came to have the tag. “The pond is linked to Lake Ontario by a pipe,” Cowan said, “so fish can get back and forth. What could have happened is that one of the fish got out into the lake and was eaten by a bigger fish. This process could have continued until a tag-swallowing fish could have been eaten by a saltwater fish where fresh and salt water come together in the St. Lawrence River.”