Stark Ceremony: Nothing Fancy

--No special home-port ceremony greeted the return of the guided-missile frigate Stark after it spent 10 months in Pascagoula, Miss., to repair damage caused by two Iraqi missiles in the Persian Gulf. “We want the Stark to be just like every other ship,” said Capt. John Mitchell, commander of Mayport Naval Station in Florida. The Boone, also a guided-missile frigate, returned the same day after a yearlong overhaul in New Orleans, and “it’s no different, one from the other,” Mitchell said. Others may not agree. Among about 100 people on hand to greet the Stark was Jennifer Hayward, who waited with her three children for her husband to dock at Bravo pier, site of a memorial to the 37 sailors killed by the missiles. Sixteen officers and 174 enlisted men, including some who had helped with the repairs, were aboard. “It’s good to be a family again instead of a long-distance family,” Hayward said. A Navy spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Tim Taylor, said no ceremony was scheduled to hail the Stark’s return. Hundreds had greeted the ship in August, 1987, when it arrived after the attack in May of that year. The bill for the $90 million in damage will be sent to Iraq, which has promised compensation to the families of the dead sailors.

--A few New York state troopers traded their squad cars for unmarked beach chairs to tag unsuspecting speeders with radar as the Labor Day weekend began. “It’s not just that the cars are hot to sit in all day, but drivers are used to seeing us parked by the side of the road and they slow down,” state police spokesman Robert Armet said. Although they wore uniforms, the troopers, armed with radios to direct hidden squad cars, helped in netting more than 400 speeders in one day. “You’re coming down the highway and you see some guy sitting in a beach chair with a cooler at his side. It doesn’t occur to you that he’s going to pull you off the road,” Armet said. The beach bears were aided in their surveillance by troopers in aircraft, in unmarked cars and on lawn mowers.

--Paul Tavilla says setting his records is “very, very dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. You could put out an eye.” Tavilla also complained of neck strain after breaking his own record for catching a grape in his mouth. On about the 70th attempt, he finally snagged one, to the applause of about 150 onlookers, from among the many plummeting at him at 110 m.p.h. after being dropped from the roof of the John Hancock Tower in Boston. The 788-foot drop beat his previous record of 660 feet at the Sumimoto Insurance building in Tokyo in 1986.