Boston Mayor Adds Dogcatcher to His List of Duties

In the story with the happy ending in Boston, an action-loving mayor confronted an armed man holding police at bay and outsmarted him. Mayor Raymond L. Flynn, who has long prided himself on being an activist politician, responded to a police call that a part-time junk dealer was holed up at his fenced-in home, firing shots at police. Complicating the scenario, the irate citizen, enraged over city orders that he must clear his junk-laden property, was being protected by a snarling pit bull terrier. The mayor, arriving at the site, went in with a police superintendent to try to talk the man into surrendering. When that failed, the mayor, who had been carefully assessing the canine’s position, swung the gate back against the fence as he was leaving, trapping the pit bull behind it. With the dog out of the way, police rushed the home and subdued James Chaney, 59. “The mayor’s not looking for any kind of label or declaration as a hero. He just was happy that the incident ended without any bloodshed,” said Flynn’s spokesman, Arthur Jones.

--Dorothy Stacker took her gas station business personally. Pull into Stacker’s station in Granville, Mass., honk your car horn, and Dorothy would come hustling over from her house across the street to fill up the tank. So it was sheer numbers--not any lack of dedication--that led to a decision by Exxon Corp. to pull the plug on the station. “I knew it was coming. I figured the end of the year. I didn’t expect it so soon,” Stacker said of the oil company’s decision that Stacker’s low sales volume no longer justified gasoline deliveries to the station. Stacker sold about 20,000 gallons of gas a year, an Exxon spokesman said, with some urban gas stations selling 20,000 gallons of gas in a day. Neighbors said they would miss doing business with Stacker. “It was like the old-fashioned country store, where people crowd in there at night to visit,” said Leona Clifford of Southwick. “There always seemed to be a crowd there.”

--As a prosecutor in the Harris County district attorney’s office in Texas, Jeff Ross was responsible for bringing the many practitioners of check forgery to justice. At home, Ross has taken his campaign against check fraud a step further: He ordered checks with his picture printed in the left-hand corner and a complete physical description of himself listed beneath his address and telephone number. “Now, only a person with my looks and physical description can pass my checks,” Ross said. “If all check owners would get this done to their checks, we would see a dramatic decrease in the amount of forgeries.”