February 18, 1991

Ward 50 at the state-run Gowanda Psychiatric Center in southwestern New York seems a throwback to the age of asylums. Like geriatric wards at mental hospitals across the state, the day room is well scrubbed and cheerfully decorated, but most of the 18 elderly patients are lost in schizophrenic hazes, captives of their wheelchairs. Ravaged by decades of mental illness and confinement, they mumble incoherently as accordion music seeps from a stereo. Their limbs jerk involuntarily; their faces contort into images from Edvard Munch. One of the few lucid patients, an 82-year-old woman who has lived here for seven years, shows off a Valentine from her daughter, then begins to weep.

A California company is proposing what may be the ultimate wilderness experience for those who think that "roughing it" means looking at mountains and canyons through the windshield of a car. Tourists will come to remote towns like this on the edge of the great American national parks, view a magnificent film about the park on a giant wrap-around movie screen, stay overnight in an adjoining motel and then leave without having to set foot in the park itself.

The war against Iraq may not be over soon, but many American soldiers and airmen stationed in Saudi Arabia for several months appear to be winning a victory over alcohol and drug abuse. Because this strictly Muslim nation bars the consumption of liquor and because illicit drugs are all but impossible to find, soldiers who had a problem with drinking or drugs have been forced to do without. And many have learned that they can.

American planes are scoring more hits on Iraqi tanks with a new night- fighting technique, officials report. Some say the tactic may help remove a potent battlefield threat. Page 6.

Jean Driscoll, the manager of the Bank of New England branch in Chestnut Hill, Mass., went to work on the morning of Jan. 4 expecting it to be just another Friday in the affluent Boston suburb. But there was nothing routine about it. By 8:30 A.M., there were long lines of anxious depositors at the tellers' windows and cash machines, withdrawing their money. The phones rang steadily with calls from worried customers. Bank officers tried to calm account holders, assuring them that their savings were federally insured up to $100,000. But to little effect. There were similar scenes at many of the Bank of New England's 300 branches. Frantic depositors pulled nearly $1 billion out of the bank in two days; small savers trooped through the lobbies with their money in wallets, bulging envelopes and briefcases, and money managers yanked out multimillion-dollar deposits by remote control with computer and telex orders.