Teen-Ager a Victor in Battle Against AIDS Fear, Lies

Moved by his testimony, the members of the President’s commission on AIDS burst into applause after hearing Ryan White tell of enduring slurs and jokes but emerging, as he sees it, a victor in his fight against “discrimination, fear . . . and lies.” “I came face to face with death at 13 years old,” said the frail 16-year-old AIDS patient whose court fight to return to school would split a community. “Being the fighter that I am, I set high goals for myself. It was my decision to live a normal life. . . . It was not going to be easy.” Ryan, who is a hemophiliac, had to agree to use a separate restroom and drinking fountain on his return to his Kokomo, Ind., school, where he said he became the butt of “Ryan White jokes, lies about me biting people, spitting on vegetables and cookies in grocery stores . . .” His locker was vandalized and his belongings marked with the word fag and obscenities. “Even at church people would not shake my hand,” White testified.

--Mark Wood didn’t think he was much of a hero when he tripped and fell trying to save a man being attacked by two pit bull terriers. But the Detroit mechanic was able to save the life of John J. Gerhinger, 55, and for that he is being honored by the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission. “What a hero! Just like in the movies. . . . All of a sudden he falls and the bad guys come and get you,” Wood said with a chuckle of his less-than-surefooted rescue. Among the 18 people honored this year by the commission were Terry M. Coats, 24, of Riverside, who helped rescue a man from a burning apartment; Glenn M. Koppes, 23, of Bellflower, who helped save a 10-year-old boy from drowning; Theodore Hansen, 38, of Thousand Oaks, who died trying to save a 4-year-old boy from drowning in the Pacific, and Diane N. Vannett, 21, of Newbury Park, who took the boy from the unconscious Hansen.

--”She has true grit,” a doctor says of Darlwin Carlisle, the girl who lost her feet to frostbite-induced gangrene after her mother reportedly left her unattended in the frigid attic of their garbage-strewn home in Gary, Ind. The 9-year-old is already riding a bicycle six weeks after the amputation and should be ready to roller skate within the week, doctors report.