Price of Wheat in Oklahoma Headed for Outer Space

--The wide-open spaces of Oklahoma apparently aren’t wide enough for one farmer. Elmer Graham, 73, of Walters, says he has offered to give $1-million worth of wheat to the Soviet Union if it will take him along on a spaceflight. “I’d a heap lot rather go up with the United States, but they quit that after that accident,” Graham said, speaking of the Challenger shuttle explosion that killed the seven crew members. NASA announced last week that it will not resume taking non-essential personnel into space. Graham said he wrote to Soviet Ambassador Yuri V. Dubinin in November but has not had a reply. “I figure they’re checking me out, making sure I’m not with the CIA or something like that,” Graham said. The farmer, who also is board chairman of two banks, said friends have offered to lend him what he needs to total the $1 million in wheat. Singer John Denver made a similar effort to get aboard a Soviet flight after he was rejected by NASA, but has not succeeded.

--Now that Libya has returned the body of a U.S. pilot killed in a 1986 attack on that country, a descendant of another U.S. serviceman is renewing his efforts to get his ancestor brought home. Richard Somers, 56, of Margate, N.J., is the namesake of a U.S. Navy captain lost 185 years ago when the young United States was defending itself against the Barbary pirates in Tripoli. In 1804, President Thomas Jefferson sent the Navy to protect America’s ships. Capt. Somers and a number of volunteers guided the Intrepid, a pirate ship captured by Lt. Stephen Decatur, toward Tripoli Harbor, planning to light a fuse on explosives aboard the ship and then escape in the lifeboats. But the explosives ignited before they could get away. The current Somers says he has been told the cemetery where the captain and some of his men lie “is overgrown with weeds and grave markers defaced. So let’s bring them home.”

--Six former U.S. Marines arrived in Vietnam as unofficial good-will ambassadors who hope to improve relations between the two countries and verify Vietnamese statements that all the mines planted to protect U.S. outposts along the demilitarized zone have been removed. “As long as we can . . . let the world know that these are fantastic, wonderful people, and they need help--if we can get that across to the American people I’d be happy,” said Mike Wallace, 41, now a Langdon, Kan., farmer.