Hug for Mother Closes Book on Mystery of Deaf Boy

--He was called Sabat because he was found on a Saturday last November wandering alone near a city park in Ciudad Juarez across the border from El Paso. But Saturday’s child, a 9-year-old deaf-mute named Jose de Jesus Garcia Aguilera, was finally reunited with his mother, ending a widely publicized search on both sides of the border for his identity. Micaela Aguilera de Garcia said her son, who is nicknamed Chuy, ran away in October from their home in Tampico on the Gulf of Mexico and apparently hitchhiked to Ciudad Juarez 1,100 miles away. Officials there initially thought Chuy might be American since he seemed to prefer American food to Mexican and would point to an American flag and Oklahoma on a map and then to himself. Chuy, who communicates with drawings and gestures, also drew pictures that showed a wrecked plane and the bodies of his parents and two sisters, and himself walking away from the crash. Garcia saw a television report on her son this weekend and took a bus to Ciudad Juarez for the reunion.

--John F. Kennedy is the most overrated public figure in American history followed by President Reagan, according to a survey of 75 prominent historians and journalists by American Heritage magazine published in its July-August issue. Four presidents tied for first place in the most underrated category: Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Quincy Adams, Ulysses S. Grant and James K. Polk, according to the survey. Of Kennedy, historian and novelist Thomas Fleming wrote: “I write this with a lump in my throat. But the record shows that his public relations approach to the presidency was an almost total disaster for the nation. . . .” While presidents dominated both ends of the survey, many non-presidents, including several women, got votes. Among the women named as the most underrated were Eleanor Roosevelt, Abigail Adams, the radical theorist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, transcendentalist Margaret Fuller and journalist Sarah Josepha Buell Hale. Among the most overrated: Betsy Ross.

--Five Spanish adventurers are hoping to re-enact Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 voyage from Peru to Easter Island--but on a larger scale. They plan to set sail today on a 9,300-mile odyssey from Peru to New Zealand aboard a primitive reed boat to prove that ancient peoples could have traded across the Pacific.