Youth Commissioner Is Just the Right Age for the Job

The newest member of Berkeley’s Youth Commission has a formidable background: He has studied physics and paleontology, is fluent in Chinese and was unofficial campaign manager for Councilman Don Jelinek. He is also 7 years old. Teddy Andrews, a whiz kid who worked 10- and 12-hour days going door to door for Jelinek, reaped the spoils of the successful reelection campaign when he became the youngest of about 400 people who serve on Berkeley’s 43 boards and commissions. The nine-member Youth Commission, appointed by the City Council, meets monthly and advises the council on youth issues. “I decided it would make a great appointment,” Jelinek said. “Here’s a rare opportunity to have the wisdom of someone who is physically 7 years old but has a mental and intellectual age of someone 10 years older.” Teddy said he wants to work to fix the bathrooms at a park several blocks from the residential hotel in which he lives with his mother, and he wants to make it easier for homeless children to go to school. Teddy still has a lot to learn about the world of politics, however. At his swearing-in, he was asked how he liked the press conference. “What’s a press conference?” he responded.

--The yuletide season is no holiday for Merry Christmas. The 24-year-old Houston insurance clerk said she is besieged by phone calls from children who giggle and hang up. And people are constantly calling out her name. “I turn my head a lot this time of year,” she said. Her father, Carl, thought it would be a hoot to name a daughter Merry. When she was young, Christmas said, he would purposely become separated from her in department stores so he could hear her name called over the loudspeaker. “My father traced our family tree back to the 1800s, and there was another Merry. But we think she used to murder people.” Christmas plans to marry a man named Cox this spring but said she will keep her maiden name and remain Merry Christmas to all.

--It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s . . . supermayor! Boston’s Raymond L. Flynn was once more to the rescue as he used a fire extinguisher to help douse flames shooting from the hood of a car while a crowd of Christmas shoppers and a sidewalk Santa Claus cheered from a safe distance. Flynn and his wife, Cathy, were leaving a charity event at a bookstore when they spotted the fire at an intersection. Firefighters quickly arrived to finish the job Flynn started. Hizzoner’s other heroics include rescuing a handicapped person from a burning apartment in July, 1987, and intervening with a gunman holding a woman hostage.