At Odd Jobs, He’s an Old Hand

William Duberry, son of a former slave, missed the Civil War by five years but not much that has happened since. Duberry, of Summerville, S.C., celebrated his 119th birthday this week. The Social Security Administration lists his birth date as Feb. 7, 1870, and the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Census Bureau concur. He was 6 years old when Gen. George Custer had his last stand at the Little Big Horn in 1876 and a teen-ager in 1887 when Thomas Edison invented motion pictures. Duberry, who still lives in his own home and looks like a man in his 60s or 70s, says he married rather late in life--when he was about 100 and his wife was 18 or 19. They had no children and were divorced after a few years. Duberry once worked as a field hand for 20 cents a day and has “done every little thing: working on state highways, digging foundations for buildings, working in the brickyard. No kind of work was strange to me. I kind of fell into it like I’d been doing it all the time.”

--”I wish I had never sat in that chair,” the blonde lamented, after she was found guilty of destruction of property. But the defendant, one Goldilocks, was acquitted of charges of breaking and entering and theft in a mock trial staged by a Baltimore law firm at Herring Run Middle School to illustrate how the criminal justice system works. A jury of her peers, 83 sixth- and seventh-graders, heard testimony on how Mama, Papa and Baby Bear took a walk in the woods on a cold night while their soup cooled. They returned to find Baby Bear’s chair in shambles. In her own defense, Goldilocks claimed she was searching for leaves for a science project and got lost. “I was cold and hungry. I pressed against the door and it opened. I just wanted to use the phone. I didn’t mean to do anything wrong,” she testified. One thing led to another, she said, “and the next thing I knew, there were these three screaming bears.” Teachers Robert Barnes and Macon Thornton played the bears and Goldilocks was portrayed by Muriel Ashley, a school system public relations employee who happens to have long, curly blond hair.

--In addition to pitching a new budget and a deficit reduction plan, President Bush plans to pitch a few horseshoes as well. The chief executive has wasted no time in ordering a 40-foot horseshoe pit installed near the tennis courts on the White House south grounds. He has even conducted an on-site inspection of the work-in-progress by a National Park Service crew. The game is apparently one of the President’s favorite forms of relaxation: A horseshoe pit is also being installed at Camp David.