He’s Thrown His Job for a Loop

--Harold Thomas has decided to try his luck again in Chicago. Three months after Thomas left his rotting, frigid riverside shack there for a new life with a New Mexico couple, he returned to the Windy City. “I just wasn’t progressing,” Thomas said as he was greeted by reporters at a Chicago bus station. “They were looking for a more experienced man. I thought I’d get some wages,” he added. “They treated me very nice but no wages.” Roy Gilman, 75, and his wife, Ethel, 68, paid Thomas room and board and deposited $300 in wages for him in a bank about a month ago. Thomas withdrew the money before leaving for Chicago. After talking to reporters, Thomas hopped in a cab and headed for a girlfriend’s apartment, where he said he would be staying. He said he hoped to find a job and planned to marry in Chicago. “I’m sad that it turned out like it did, because we really liked the man,” Ethel Gilman said in Portales, N. M. The Gilmans read about Thomas, 34, in an Associated Press story describing his life in a shack along the Chicago River during subzero temperatures. The couple offered him a job tearing apart old cars and rebuilding engines at their wrecking yard and an 8-foot-by-30-foot trailer at the yard to live in.

--If New York Mayor Edward I. Koch ever gets tired of politics, he may want to try a movie career. He has just completed filming his second movie role of the year--a spot as himself in Woody Allen’s latest project. Koch’s scene was shot at his official residence, Gracie Mansion, and he told the New York Daily News that he was sworn to secrecy about the movie, which is still untitled. But that did not stop him from revealing that his scene is a question-and-answer session with the media and that Allen plays a reporter. Earlier this year, Koch was in Miami to shoot a scene opposite a crocodile in “Tweeners,” which stars Raul Julia and is due for release around Christmas.

--Garrison Keillor has worked actively for several candidates. But the former Minnesotan said he regretted that he never got to work in a Humphrey campaign. Now he has his chance. The humorist and author took to the stage in New York to raise money for Minnesota Atty. Gen. Hubert Humphrey III, a Democrat who is challenging Sen. Dave Durenberger (R-Minn.) for his seat this year. Humphrey is the son of the late Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey Jr. At a private fund-raiser after his performance, Keillor said: “To me it feels right . . . just to be able to work for a Humphrey campaign after all these years.”