East-West Carpenters Nail Down Summer Friendship

Raising high the roof beams in Washington’s Yakima Valley is an international affair this summer, with Soviet and American carpenters toiling together to build homes for poor migrant workers who stream into the area to pick crops. The perestroika- bred team first came together in July, when 10 Americans traveled to Armenia to perform reconstruction after a devastating earthquake. Now 10 Soviets are working on four homes and a day-care center in return, the buildings to be used by the itinerant workers. “I love to help poor people everywhere,” said Margarita Gopshtein, 45, whose work on the project is backed by the Moscow-based Soviet Peace Fund. Between toting boards and pounding nails, the Soviets have mingled with the locals, sampled Mexican food and sung at a local ethnic festival. “My major goal is to study American culture,” said Dimitri Kiselyov, 24, of Leningrad, a business student. “I want to visit Wall Street in New York.” The group will go to New York and Washington, D.C., at the end of their stay.

--Budding writer Tonya Robinson says she couldn’t have done it without her father, who read daily to his blind daughter and then spotted the talent in her story that went on to win the Georgia Young Author’s Writing Exposition. “When I was real little, my dad would teach me vocabulary, and I loved that,” Tonya said. “When I try to understand something in school, I’ll ask him about it and he’ll explain it. . . .” It was Thomas Robinson who told Tonya she had a winning story in “The Mannerless King,” about a village’s efforts to reform the rude King Herdman. The judges were unaware of Tonya’s handicap, a contest official said. “They simply considered her story most representative of good writing,” said contest coordinator Fred Johnson.

--Former Miss America Bess Myerson and her boyfriend, Carl Capasso, who recently finished a two-year prison term for tax evasion, are still a twosome, Capasso says. “We live separately but we’re together,” Capasso told the New York Post. Asked about marriage, Capasso said: “Listen, that’s the one thing that could break up any relationship.” The couple were acquitted Dec. 22 on charges they tried to have Capasso’s divorce payments to his former wife reduced by giving a job to the divorce judge’s daughter.