Cautious Utah Rescuers Serve Meatballs Fit for a Dog

It took a helicopter and mountain climbers to rescue Pepper and Sam from 500-foot-high sandstone ledges near Moab, Utah, but the key ingredient of the story was a drugged meatball. Pepper, 2, and Sam, 1, are heeler-labrador mixes who wandered away from their home in Moab about three weeks ago and were not seen until hikers spotted them 5 miles from town. By the time climbers Kirk DeFond and G. Bego Gerhart and Charles Taylor, a relative of Chuck and Sandy Washburn, the dogs’ owners, were flown to the top of the sandstone dome, Pepper and Sam were emaciated. They also had become separated from each other, as Sam was stuck on a ledge about 70 feet below Pepper. Katherine Brant of the Humane Society of Utah said it was decided to feed the dogs meatballs with tranquilizers, since the sight of strangers and the noise of the helicopter had frightened them. After eating the meatballs, the dogs were rescued by the climbers. Brant said the dogs would recover from their ordeal.

--The sound of music rang through the halls of Eastside High School in Paterson, N.J., in tribute to the school’s no-nonsense principal Joe Clark. Run-DMC, a rap group from New York, performed two shows for the North Jersey students, said Lori Somes, a publicist for the musicians, because of their admiration for the man who roams the halls with a baseball bat and a bullhorn. “Our principal wasn’t as strict as Joe Clark, and we needed somebody like that,” Joseph Simmons, the group’s lead rapper, said at a news conference. The Joe Clark controversy erupted last December after he kicked out 66 students without notifying the school board.

--Residents of DeSoto County in Florida asked for--and received--an apology from President Reagan. The President’s remarks focused on the plight of hemophiliac brothers Ricky, Robert and Randy Ray, who were barred from school because they tested positive for AIDS antibodies. They were later admitted under a court order, but Louise, the boys’ mother, said the family was then told to leave Arcadia’s Central Missionary Baptist Church. In a speech last May, Reagan said: “The pastor asked the entire family not to come back to their church. . . . This is old-fashioned fear, and it has no place in the home of the brave.” Reagan expressed his apology in a letter.