Honesty’s Not Always the Policy

--If Diogenes were afoot in Columbus, Ohio, he would probably have been amused. The Greek cynic, reputed to have gone with a lamp at high noon in search of an honest man, would have found “Take an Honest Look,” a project aimed at improving the city’s sense of ethics. Headed by Jeb Stuart Magruder, a convicted Watergate conspirator who is now a Presbyterian minister, the program, begun last January, has had mixed results. Statistically, the city’s crime rate is up 8.2%, with murder and manslaughter up 20.5%, said Harold Wilson, police crime prevention coordinator. On the other hand, said Magruder, he is pleased by individual acts of honesty: “We had a woman return five bags of lottery tickets she found, and someone returned $100 that wasn’t his from an automatic teller machine at the airport. And a woman from Ft. Wayne, Ind., who stayed in a local hotel left an envelope behind with cash in it. She forgot about it until she got home, then was delighted to find that somebody turned it in.”

--George Miller, 66, a retired statistics professor from Bellevue, Wash., has been irking Miss America Pageant officials for a decade, ever since he began feeding numbers into his computer and predicting--sometimes days ahead of time--the winner. He got it right five of 10 times. Miller first began having trouble when the pageant, bowing to feminist demands, stopped releasing contestant bust, hip and waist measurements. Then, calling Miller a “pain in the neck,” pageant director Leonard Horn ordered other statistics such as weight and height withheld. The perfect candidate, according to Miller, is 21, stands 5-8, weighs 116 pounds, is blond with green eyes and hails from Mississippi or a large state.

--Cath Tschirn of King George, Va., will say her wedding vows with Richard Thomas on Saturday, and it will be the first time in five years that she will have stood up in public. Tschirn was injured in a car accident in 1984 and has been confined to a wheelchair. But members of the Virginia Chapter of Volunteers for Medical Engineering have built the woman, 20, a special stand to hold herself up and a turntable device to enable her to turn and greet the congregation. The volunteer engineers, with 400 members in 12 chapters, have donated a number of inventions to immobilized people around the country. The group was founded by John Staehlin, a Baltimore defense engineer who “heard a sermon on using your talents.”