Reagan Sees Woman President

President Reagan told a group of students that he’s all for a woman President, but he admitted that the idea would take “a little getting used to.” “But I think it’s inevitable that in this country there will be a woman President because they’ve come up in so many different fields,” Reagan said to the students from five Washington-area junior and senior high schools. However, Reagan urged women aspiring to the office to take a tip from Geraldine A. Ferraro and run for vice president first. “It’s just my feeling that probably, rather than one of them just entering the fray to run for President to begin with, that maybe it would probably start with one of them, as we did in the election in 1984 . . . running for vice president. She didn’t make it, but that might be the start of it, and I welcome it.”

George Bush and Dan Quayle share more than a ticket--they also share a family tree, says a Boston genealogist. Not only are the President-elect and his vice president 10th cousins once removed, they are also related to Abraham Lincoln and to the man believed to be Marilyn Monroe’s father, said Gary Boyd Roberts of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Bush and Quayle have a common ancestor in New England settler James Hamlin, who died in 1690, Roberts said. They also share blood ties to Charles Stanley Gifford, who died in California in 1965 and was named by Monroe’s mother as the father of her child, Roberts said. Bush is also distantly related to Presidents Franklin Pierce, fifth cousins four times removed; Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, the most distant presidential relation at 11th cousins once removed.

It was a birthday party fit for a king--well, a prince at least--as 1,500 youths toasted Britain’s Prince Charles with music and merriment on his 40th birthday. The young revelers, all helped by charities backed by the prince, decorated an old Birmingham tram depot for the party, at which the prince regaled them with stories of his eccentricity. The prince, who is known to favor alternative medicine and vegetarianism, believes in talking to plants and has sojourned among the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, opened his birthday speech with this account: “Only the other day I was inquiring of an entire bed of old-fashioned roses, who were forced to listen to my demented ramblings on the meaning of the universe . . . what they thought would happen on my birthday in a Birmingham tram shed. ‘A tram shed?’ they all replied, totally aghast at the thought.”