Auto Premium Almost Puts the Brakes on Marriage

--A Canadian insurance company has reconsidered the amount of an auto insurance premium that almost drove a woman to divorce. Lorna Fleming, 25, an office manager in Toronto, said she threatened to end her marriage after a broker for the Dominion Group of Canada Insurance Co. told her last month that her auto insurance would cost $2,300 a year because her new husband, transport driver Don Fleming, has three speeding tickets and a seat-belt violation on his record. She had gone as far as contacting a church minister about an annulment, but now the company says she will have to pay only the standard rate of $1,100 for coverage on her 1980 GMC pickup.

--The reports of Harold L. Gilroy’s death have been greatly exaggerated--for the third time in five years. By now, the 61-year-old Floral City, Fla., man knows what to do. “Show up in person, that’s what I did the last time,” the Navy veteran said of the Veterans Administration’s attempts to wipe him off its pension rolls. Officials at the VA regional office in St. Petersburg said it’s unusual for such an error to occur even once. “They push the wrong buttons when I send in documents they want. Any time I send in documents they want, they put me in for dead,” Gilroy said. His most recent death was the result of his sending the VA requested proof of the April 28 death of his wife, Florence, he said. Gilroy said the VA also declared him dead in 1984, after he sent documentation of his December, 1983, marriage to Florence, and proof of the death of her former husband. Gilroy was first declared dead in 1983. “Some other guy had a similar name,” and had died, Gilroy said.

--American millionaire industrialist Dr. Armand Hammer surprised reporters and dignitaries gathered in London for a lavish launching of his autobiography by announcing he had won a $41,000 libel suit against a British satirical magazine. Hammer said the magazine, Private Eye, had agreed to apologize in court for an article it published in November, 1985, alleging that he had smuggled gold from the Soviet Union to British communists. Hammer said he was giving the settlement money to Business in the Community, an inner-city charity also supported by Prince Charles.