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Fish Story Is One That Got Away

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--President Bush apparently liked a book on fishing by former President Herbert Hoover so much that he took it back to Washington with him after his January stay at a condominium in Florida. That left the Winter Park Public Library talking about the one that got away. The book was the library’s only copy of “Fishing for Fun and to Wash Your Soul,” and it’s out of print. But the President, an avid fisherman, was not to blame. Richie Moretti, 45, of Marathon, admitted in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel: “I pulled all the library markings out of the book. The President did not know.” Moretti, who had seen the book before, had asked his daughter to check it out and send it to him when he heard Bush would visit the Keys. He gave the book to a friend, George Hommell, a charter operator who arranges Bush’s fishing trips in the Keys. Hommell put the book in the condo and said it was taken back to Washington. Moretti made amends to the library, which, its director said, was glad to provide reading for the President but “wouldn’t mind getting our book back.” Moretti said he paid a used-book dealer $22 for another copy to send to the library, and paid $35 in reparations. The work includes data on several former presidents who also were fishermen: William Howard Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Calvin Coolidge, Theodore Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. “Fishing reduces the ego in presidents and in former presidents, for in fishing most men are not equal to boys,” Hoover wrote.

--Costumes worn by Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi in the movie “The Blues Brothers” were auctioned to raise money for the Ray Graham Assn. for the Handicapped, based in Elmhurst, Ill. Belushi’s widow, Judy Jacklin Belushi, donated the outfits. Belushi’s shirt, tie, shoes, socks, hat and a copy of his sunglasses fetched $5,211, and Aykroyd’s suit, including a pair of his prescription sunglasses, drew $3,211, a spokeswoman for the charity said. The suits worn by the duo were purchased for the movie in a thrift shop in New York.

--The National Inventors Hall of Fame got four new members at the U.S. Patent Office in Washington. John Deere, born in 1804, was honored for developing the moldboard plow, which improved the standard plow’s ability to turn over soil. George Westinghouse, born in 1846, was named for inventing the steam-powered brake for railroads. Irving Langmuir, born in 1881, was chosen for developing the gas-filled incandescent electric lamp. And Raymond Damadian was honored for a device used in medical diagnosis, the magnetic resonance imaging scanner, which was patented in 1974.

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