November 25, 1981

Preaching peace among nations, Raisa Smirnova and Ludmila Kondrakhina met the eighth graders of Glenfield School today. By the end of the afternoon, the two middle-aged women from the Soviet Union had the abashed teen-agers clasping hands, swaying and singing American antiwar songs from the 1960's. Both women are fairly high-ranking members of the Communist Party and are visiting the United States for the first time under the auspices of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. They had wanted to see a public school -Mrs. Kondrakhina was once a school principal - and so they found themselves in Philip Stern's classroom facing a social studies class in participatory democracy.

The first full-production air-launchable cruise missile on display yesterday at ceremony at the Boeing plant in Kent, Wash. It is the first of 705 missiles scheduled to be delivered to the Air Force.

More chocolate truffles and caviar. More croissants and duck pate. More copper pots and coffee makers. As the appetite for specialty foods and quality cookware continues to grow, retailers are redesigning and adding space to keep up with the demand. This fall, several important food shops in Manhattan have undergone major expansions. At Bloomingdale's the work is still in progress. Over the next six months, various sections of the delicacy shop will shift around as the master plan is completed in stages to avoid closing the shop or disrupting the Christmas trade. When the renovation is finely completed next spring and the collection of shops within a shop has opened, the total selling area devoted to food will have increased by 75 percent. The first segment of the expansion, the bakery, opened on 59th Street last month. It maintains the warm, old-world look of the adjacent candy shop, which was designed several years ago by Barbara D'Arcy and is the only part of the complex which will remain essentially unchanged.

The BankAmerica Corporation announced yesterday that it intended to acquire Charles Schwab & Company Inc., America's largest discount brokerage firm, for about $53 million in common stock. The transaction could develop into a historic test case for Federal banking laws. The proposed merger would appear to conflict with the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which drew a line between investment banking and commercial banking. The act forbids commercial banks to own, underwrite or deal in corporate stocks and bonds.

Budget cuts have caused the Census Bureau to delay or to cancel reports of important findings from the 1980 population count and to say it cannot afford to conduct a 1985 middecade census that Congress has mandated. And further reductions projected by the Reagan Administration over the next two fiscal years have cast doubt on the bureau's plans to modernize its equipment and techniques, a step that officials say would save money and increase efficiency. Repeated delays in issuing 1980 Census data have brought a rumbling of complaints from census users who rely on detailed characteristics of the population by county, city and communities to market products or carry out public planning on such matters as the closing or construction of schools. Hope on Containing Problem However, Bruce K. Chapman, who was confirmed two months ago by the Senate as director of the census and who is trying to rebuild the beleaguered agency, said in an interview that the cuts had not been as deep as had been feared and that he did not foresee further cancellation of any major service in this fiscal year.