Crime Watch Bears Fruit as Fawn Hall Eats Banana

--Peeling a banana proved a slip in etiquette for Fawn Hall, with the Iran- contra figure facing a $10 fine for eating a piece of the fruit while waiting on a subway platform. Hall, cited after she was caught munching in the Washington subway system, which bans eating and drinking, ignored a transit officer who told her to stop consuming the forbidden fruit. “You have to stop eating that banana,” the unidentified officer warned Hall, said Mary Bucklew, a spokeswoman for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. “Whereupon, she popped the rest of it in her mouth and threw the peel in the trash can.” Lt. Col. Oliver L. North’s former secretary is thinking of fighting the citation, which her attorney said was a case of the striking blonde’s being singled out. “She’s very visible,” Plato Cacheris said of the 27-year-old part-time model. “I think he (the citing officer) knew who she was.” Hall, now a secretary at the Pentagon, was granted limited immunity from prosecution in testifying at congressional hearings in June.

--A Texas woman was incensed when, after her key opened a safe with a $10,000 prize in a car-dealership giveaway, the dealership refused to give her the money. It turns out the contest had a pre-selected winner, and Beatrice Taylor simply wasn’t the one. Indeed, dealership managers said, the lock had opened only because it was broken. But, in a change of heart, George Grubbs Jr., whose Lincoln Mercury dealership in Dallas had sponsored the contest, called Taylor back and said she could have the prize. Grubbs said that after Taylor’s saga was reported Wednesday, the dealership received calls throughout the day from people who had read about the dispute. “I’ve never won anything like that before,” the 72-year-old DeSoto woman said. “Once I won a $25 gift certificate from (a grocery store).” Taylor originally had been offered a $500 coupon on the purchase of a car as a consolation prize but had turned it down in a huff.

--Even among the baskets of flowers sent by the brightest of Washington’s political luminaries, it stood out. The wicker basket of irises, carnations and assorted flowers sent to recovering First Lady Nancy Reagan was from Raisa Gorbachev, wife of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Mrs. Reagan, whose left breast was removed in a procedure known as a modified radical mastectomy, spent the day with “her feet up, keeping busy reading all her cards,” her press secretary, Elaine Crispen, said. Mrs. Reagan will leave the hospital today, President Reagan announced.