Example of Courage Puts Ryan in the Driver’s Seat

There’s only one thing keeping Ryan White from driving his first car “anywhere and everywhere”--he doesn’t have a driver’s license. But in anticipation of the big moment when he gets one, the Indiana Independent Automobile Dealers Assn. presented the 16-year-old AIDS victim with a black 1987 Chevrolet Cavalier. “Ryan has shown that the ordinary things in life can be ennobling. He has the kind of courage that I think most of us would like to have,” Fritz Kreutzinger, association president, said before handing Ryan the keys at an auto auction house in Indianapolis. Ryan’s mother, Jeanne White, said the car met all her son’s requirements: black with tinted windows and bucket seats. “I just want to tell everybody thanks, and I really appreciate it,” Ryan said. He has completed driver’s education and plans to get his license on June 9. Ryan, a hemophiliac, was diagnosed in 1984 as having contracted acquired immune deficiency syndrome through the use of contaminated blood products. In the summer of 1985, officials banned him from classes at a school near Kokomo. He won a legal battle to stay in school, but the Whites moved to Cicero, Ind., where Ryan was welcomed at Hamilton Heights High School.

--Maybe the judge wasn’t a rock ‘n’ roll fan. Or maybe, he just couldn’t find a precedent to allow a St. Clairsville, Ohio, man out of jail on Memorial Day to attend a Pink Floyd concert. In his motion for temporary release from the Belmont County Jail in St. Clairsville, Gregory Kimble, 23, said that before he was incarcerated he had stood in line for 3 1/2 hours to buy a ticket for the rock band’s Pittsburgh concert. But Belmont County Common Pleas Judge John Solovan II said he could find no basis to allow Kimble’s release. Kimble is serving a four-month sentence for violating probation.

--The heir to the Dutch throne, Crown Prince Willem Alexander, was fined $157 for speeding after his car plunged into a canal last weekend, a royal family spokeswoman said in Amsterdam. The 21-year-old prince, a history student at Leyden University, admitted he ignored local speed limits and lost control of his car when the accident happened last Saturday. The prince, the eldest son of Queen Beatrix and Prince Claus, escaped unharmed from the wrecked vehicle. The car was examined for brake failure after the accident but no faults were found.