Soviet Visitors See How It All Began for Little Ronald

--In the name of superpower friendship, Dixon, Ill., welcomed a delegation from Dickson, Siberia, on the first visit by Soviets to President Reagan’s boyhood home. A private tour of the two-story house where Reagan lived in 1920 as a 9-year-old boy with his parents and older brother topped the agenda for Dickson Mayor Nikolai T. Kartamyshev, journalist Boris S. Ivanov and interpreter Nikolai S. Vishnevsky of Moscow. Dickson, a village of about 5,000 in extreme northern Siberia, is named for Oskar Dickson, a 19th-Century Swedish merchant who provided supplies to Arctic explorers. The Soviet visitors were greeted by a crowd of about 100 in the host city of 15,700 about 100 miles west of Chicago. As the Soviets made their way from their car to the house, they were stopped several times by onlookers who shook their hands, slapped their backs and welcomed them. “We associate Reagan with the positive changes in relations between our countries,” Kartamyshev said. “It’s interesting to see where he spent his childhood.”

--In another example of contacts between nations, the story of Dennis Banks, leader of the American Indian Movement, has won a top award in a Japanese magazine contest, the magazine’s publisher said. Banks and Yuri Morita, co-authors of “Sacred Soul,” received this year’s $7,500 Asahi Journal Non-Fiction Award. Morita, 37, spent five years translating into Japanese the story of Banks’ struggle for Indian rights. Banks, 52, of the Ojibwa tribe in Minnesota, was a U.S. Air Force serviceman in Japan in the 1950s and says he is inspired by the nonviolent philosophy of Japanese Buddhists.

--Friends of Leonard Bernstein opened a four-day celebration of the maestro’s 70th birthday with--what else--music. Among those donating their services for the Lenox, Mass., concert to benefit the Tanglewood Music Center were Beverly Sills, the former diva who is now director of the New York City Opera; actresses Lauren Bacall, Phyllis Newman and Kitty Carlisle Hart; songwriter Stephen Sondheim, composer-producer Quincy Jones; humorist Victor Borge, and cellists Mstislav Rostropovich and Yo-Yo Ma. Organizers said that the four-day bash at the summertime home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra is expected to produce $1 million for the school.