Traveler Feels at Home in China

At night, the family would fall asleep to the sound of gunfire from bandits on forays or Communist guerrillas battling soldiers, and baths were strictly a one-time-a-week affair. But Ruth Graham, wife of evangelist Billy Graham, also remembered the attic alcove in her childhood home in Huaiyin, China, as the “nicest room in the world,” and pointed out where the Christmas tree used to stand each year during a visit to her China birthplace. The Grahams, in the middle of a 16-day tour of China, made a point of visiting the Renci Hospital in the northern Jiangsu province town where Graham lived for 17 years while her father served as a missionary surgeon at the hospital. “As soon as I got to the countryside, I thought, ‘My, I’m coming home,’ ” said Graham, who is 67. It was not the first time back for Graham, who visited China in 1980 with her two sisters and brother, and made a one-day visit to the Renci Hospital then.

--All work and no play makes Yuri a dull boy, believe Soviet officials, who visited the ski resort at Park City, Utah, as part of an inspection tour of recreational facilities that will be available to Soviet inspectors stationed in Utah as part of an arms limitation agreement. The Soviets, who also took in a little window shopping after a Mexican lunch, were particularly amused by a window display of a stuffed rattlesnake next to a pair of rattlesnake cowboy boots, a day after they were warned of the danger of snakes at the Hercules Inc. plant near Salt Lake City where the Soviet inspection team will be staying. Asked if U.S. inspectors would face similar dangers where they will be stationed at Votkinsk, near the Ural Mountains, Igor Khripunov, first secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, replied: “We can’t offer anything as exciting as rattlesnakes. Just cold and snow, I guess.”

--”My credibility is on the line,” an angry Mick Jagger declared outside a federal courthouse in White Plains, N.Y., where a jury was hearing a copyright infringement suit filed against the Stones’ lead singer by Bronx reggae artist Patrick Alley. Alley, 37, claims Jagger’s “Just Another Night,” from his 1985 “She’s the Boss” album, was copied from a composition he wrote and recorded in 1979. He is suing Jagger and CBS Records for the estimated $6 million in profits from the album. In Jagger’s defense, musician Lowell (Sly) Dunbar was put behind a pair of drums in the courtroom to play the drum sections of both recordings, saying later that the beats were not the same for the two songs. Jagger is scheduled to testify today in the case.