Walesa Award Is a Family Affair

The celebration of America’s independence took on an international accent as Danuta Walesa, wife of Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, accepted the Philadelphia Liberty Medal on her husband’s behalf while throngs of Polish-Americans watched. Walesa, her eldest son Jaroslaw at her side, was presented with the medal by Mayor W. Wilson Goode during Fourth of July ceremonies at Independence Hall. Standing in front of a large copy of the medal--which bears an engraving of the Liberty Bell suspended between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres--and speaking through a translator, Walesa read a letter from her husband. “Americans and Poles both have this need for freedom and gave voice to this need when they drafted their constitutions over 200 years ago, but it would not have come into existence if people in our nations had succumbed to captivity,” he wrote. Lech Walesa, the first recipient of the award, will receive $100,000 cash from Bell Atlantic, the Liberty Medal sponsor. Also on hand was former Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie, a Polish-American. He praised Walesa’s fight to uphold the human rights contained in the Polish constitution.

--Some friends of activist Dick Gregory are saying yes to his anti-drug crusade in Shreveport, La. The former comedian set up camp in a Shreveport park known for its drug trade, declaring it a drug-free zone. Coretta Scott King stopped by to urge those in the park to use nonviolence to fight drugs as her husband had used nonviolence to fight for civil rights. “There is a power in nonviolence,” she said. “We don’t expect it to be solved overnight. When the people of America speak with one voice and say, ‘This is enough,’ we’ll do something about the problem.” Her son, Martin Luther King III, also is scheduled to stop in Shreveport to help Gregory’s crusade, and actor Ben Vereen joined Gregory over the weekend.

--It will be an expensive date but not a very private one. A Dallas woman who bid $13,600 to go on a charity date with Jean LeClerc, who plays Jeremy Hunter on the soap opera “All My Children,” is taking along a chaperon--Dallas Cystic Fibrosis poster child Mika Doyle. “I thought that was one of the nicest gestures I’ve ever seen,” said Regen Horchow Pillsbury, who was one of the organizers of the Cystic Fibrosis Bachelor Bid last week in Dallas. Jan Rogers’ donation won her a trip to New York for lunch with LeClerc at Tavern on the Green and a ringside seat at a taping session of his TV show.