September 4, 1991

Twenty- five people were killed and 40 were injured early today as a fire believed to have started near huge grease-filled vats swept through a chicken-processing plant here. Many of the dead were found at exits from the plant, stuck in poses of escape. The town's fire chief also said some bodies were found in a freezer, where workers had apparently fled to avoid the fire.

A BUMPER crop of zucchini isn't something you'd expect in Bensonhurst. The Brooklyn asphalt that stretches from 17th Avenue to Avenue U, between the water and 60th Street, appears to be sown only with row upon row of brick and stone houses. But just as most houses in this Italian neighborhood have a stoop and a well-polished car out front, most also have a zucchini patch behind. In late summer, harvesters roam the blocks on a primordial neighborly mission: giving away the squash. They are unswayed by gushing fire-hydrants, the skateboarders that career by them, the hard rock that booms from the cars that cruise the blocks or by any other evidence of modern urban life. Through it all, they carry baskets of blossoms and zucchini on their arms and the fullness of tradition in their hearts.

At the age of 43, Wayne R. Bryant is a senior partner in a thriving law firm with a Fortune 500 client roster, and he owns a major piece of a glistening new office tower in the town of Lawnside, where his family settled in the 1780's. He is wealthy, patrician and influential: Just the sort of man who would have no use for the welfare system. And Mr. Bryant clearly does not. "It's cradle-to-grave protection from responsibility," he says as he noses a big Lincoln through the mean streets of Camden, the state's poorest city, where 70 percent of the 87,000 residents, mostly black and Hispanic, receive some form of public assistance.

Stew Leonard's is a giant dairy store here, with a petting zoo and dancing milk cartons, that each year sells 10 million quarts of milk, more than 1,000 tons of hamburger and 7.8 million ears of corn. (That's enough corn to stretch from Norwalk to Houston, give or take an ear.) It is beloved in a way that few stores are -- as a major employer in this city, as a tourist attraction in Fairfield County and as a national monument to family enterprise. The Reagan Administration even bestowed the Presidential Award for Entrepreneurial Achievement on the store's founder, 61-year-old Stew Leonard Sr.

With Soviet oil production falling precipitously, Saudi Arabia has significantly increased its stocks of oil in storage to around 60 million barrels and is signaling its determination to keep worldwide supplies plentiful and prices down. A senior official in the Persian Gulf oil industry, in a telephone interview today, confirmed a published report that the Saudis have been storing oil at the impressive rate of 400,000 to 500,000 barrels a day since July. The report appeared in Petrostrategies, an oil newsletter published in Paris. The publication, which is close to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, noted that Saudi Arabia would be going to the Geneva meeting of OPEC oil ministers this month "with some 50 to 60 million barrels of onshore and offshore oil stocks." On Land and at Sea Because Saudi Arabia has the oil stored both on land and in tankers at sea, the country is in an ideal position to replace immediately any supply shortfalls, particularly from the Soviet Union. Most other oil-producing nations are operating at capacity and do not have ample stored supplies.