Setting Broncos to Music Is More Than They Can Bear

--The Denver Broncos apparently didn’t strike the right chord with symphony fans. The Boulder, Colo., Philharmonic Orchestra concert that was to have featured members of the Broncos football team wielding the baton had to be canceled after only 40 advance tickets were sold. Orchestra general manager Jim Hanifin got the idea for the concert when he heard that 20,000 tickets were sold to watch Chicago Bears football legend Walter Payton conduct an orchestra in Chicago. So Hanifin set up the Boulder concert in which members of the NFL’s American Football Conference champions would conduct the 100-member orchestra. Among the Broncos who had agreed to participate were Vance Johnson, Ricky Nattiel and Mark Jackson--known as the Three Amigos--and Keith Bishop and Steve Watson. “If Steve Watson can’t draw 15,000 women, there’s something wrong,” Hanifin said. Proceeds were to benefit the Broncos Youth Foundation’s efforts to combat substance abuse.

--CBS reporter Harry Reasoner went home to Humboldt, Iowa, to wed a New York health insurance executive. Reasoner, 65, who appears on “60 Minutes,” married Lois Harriet Weber, 44, before about 30 people, mostly family, at the United Church of Christ. Reasoner said he and his wife would honeymoon in Colorado before returning to his home in Westport, Conn. “Growing up in Humboldt gave me a built-in defense against critics who accuse major media organizations of having an East Coast liberal bias,” he said.

--NATO Secretary-General Lord Carrington took a slight detour over the weekend. Instead of touching down on Madeira for a meeting of the North Atlantic Assembly, an advisory body to NATO, as planned, his NATO plane landed on Porto Santo, a tiny barren island nearby where NATO has an airfield. “I’d never been to Madeira before and all I’d heard was that it was full of beautiful flowers and bananas and green trees and forests and it did occur to me when we landed that it didn’t look quite like that,” Carrington told reporters. He was quickly flown on to Madeira.