Girl Tests Her Wings With a Run at the Record Book

Sitting on four pillows so she could see out the window of her Cessna 182, 11-year-old Jennifer Hudgens took off from Homestead, Fla., on a 4,100-mile trip to the northernmost tip of Alaska, a flying feat her father says is the first for a girl. “I really like the idea of flying,” said the sixth-grader who last year talked her Army pilot father, Maj. Richard Hudgens, into giving her lessons. Hudgens will go with his daughter on the trip to Point Barrow, Alaska, which will feature overnight stops in Huntsville, Ala.; Sioux City, Iowa, and the Canadian cities of Regina and Ft. St. Johns. They believe Jennifer will be the youngest girl to make such a cross-country flight. The youngest boy, according to National Aeronautics Assn. records, is 9-year-old Tony Aliengena of San Juan Capistrano, Calif., who completed a 6,000-mile flight across the country and back in April. Hudgens contacted that agency to see about his daughter setting an official record, but was told its officials are no longer keeping records for young pilots because it had become a nuisance. “It won’t be official, but I’ll still know it’s a record,” he said.

--The Fayette, Miss., ceremony had an international flavor as an African rebel leader accepted an award named for a slain American civil rights leader. Jonas Savimbi, head of the Western-backed National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), was in the Deep South city to receive the Medgar Evers humanitarian award presented by Charles Evers, mayor of Fayette. He is the brother of the late field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP who was killed in an ambush in 1963. Savimbi is on a U.S. tour to attract support for UNITA.

--Former vice presidential candidate Geraldine A. Ferraro will be at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta next month in a new role--as an analyst for Boston television station WCVB-TV. Ferraro said she does not “feel the same obligation the station does to be objective” but is confident she will be able to discuss the issues without promoting her personal political agenda. “I’m not walking away from being a Democrat. I’m proud of it,” she said at a news conference. “Perhaps because of it I can give an inside view.” She said she was raising funds for Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, the probable Democratic nominee. A former New York congresswoman, Ferraro was Walter F. Mondale’s running mate in 1984.