For Mother’s Plea, Space Is Free

--Linda Tracey wasn’t ready for the jolt when she first saw the billboard appealing for public assistance in the search for her daughter. “I tried to prepare myself, but when I pulled in front of it, I sat there and cried for 45 minutes,” said the 38-year-old Rockford, Ill., woman, whose daughter Tammy, 19, has been missing more than four months. “I wanted people to know how I felt about my daughter,” Tracey said of her message, which reads: “A face I can no longer touch . . . of a daughter I love so very much.” Robbinswood Outdoor Advertising donated the billboard after Tracey asked about buying ad space. “I have a couple of daughters, and I would hope someone would help me out if I were in the same situation,” said Robert Glaim of Robbinswood. Tammy was last seen May 27, cleaning her car in a park two blocks from her home in Rockford. Tracey said that neither the Rockford police nor the FBI has a clue to her daughter’s disappearance, but she is hoping that the $25,000 reward an anonymous donor recently offered to pay if Tammy is found “safe and sound” will help turn up some leads to her whereabouts.

--The world’s first surrogate grandmother has broken her silence. In an exclusive interview in The Mail of London, she said that she feels no strong maternal instincts for the triplets she bore for her daughter last week. “I did this because my daughter, not me, was desperate for children and unhappy because of it,” said Pat Anthony, 48, of Johannesburg, South Africa. “Although they will always be special to me, I was only the incubator for them to grow in.” To assure conception of at least one child, doctors had implanted in Anthony’s womb four eggs from her 25-year-old daughter, Karen, which had been fertilized in a laboratory with sperm from her 33-year-old son-in-law, Alcino Ferreira-Jorge. Karen, an aerobics instructor, took hormones for nine months and is able to breast-feed the two boys, David and Jose. Paula, who weighed just 3 pounds, 9 ounces at birth, is still being fed intravenously.

--The pressure of being in the public eye is one thing, but Nancy Reagan admits in an interview that she wasn’t prepared for the intensity of life in the White House. “I never thought it would be this magnified, this concentrated, although we’ve been in public life most of our lives,” she said in Sunday editions of the Chicago Tribune. “I don’t think anybody can possibly tell anyone else what it’s like. I know people tried to tell me.” She will visit Chicago, her childhood home, to receive a $100,000 award Wednesday from Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities for the Nancy Reagan Drug Abuse Fund.