November 10, 1991

One of the first things Walt Frazier noticed upon his return to professional basketball three years ago as a broadcaster for the New York Knicks was the proliferation of young women attending the games. A great star of the 1960's and the 1970's, and an admitted champion partyer of his era, Frazier said he quickly realized how times had changed. "In my day, you at least had to go to parties and you had to have a rap to pick up women," said Frazier, who retired from the National Basketball Association in 1979. "Now you see them lining up against the wall after the game. The stars just take their pick and the other guys get the leftovers.

"Ruinous competition," said John D. Rockefeller, was the enemy of all his plans. When the founder of the Standard Oil Trust spoke, however quietly and secretly, about the need to avoid "wasteful conditions," he was usually heeded. Last week, on trading desks at many of the Treasury's 40 primary dealers, the same sort of warnings about the costs of competition could be heard above the din surrounding the most open auctions in memory. Used to be, said one trader, "You would have frank discussions with other dealers" to learn their plans. Now that the Salomon scandal has awakened the regulators, "It's hands off," he said. Discussions are limited to saying "I have interest," or "I don't have interest."

Basic Insurance in Trouble An effort by health insurers to provide affordable coverage for uninsured workers has run into trouble: employers are not buying. Page 22. Paying to Resettle Refugees The U.N. official charged with caring for the world's refugees hopes to persuade wealthy Persian Gulf states to help pay resettlement costs. Page 14. 6 Die in Bronx Crash Six young people died after their car slammed into a tree in what the police called the worst car accident in New York City this year. Page 50. In S. Africa, 'Mayor Who?" More confusion than curiosity awaits Mayor Dinkins in South Africa, where he heads tonight. Page 42. Yves Montand Dead at 70 Yves Montand, the French actor and singer renowned for political and other passions, died at age 70. Page 52.

A handful of medical centers have begun offering infertile couples a new but very expensive option in their quest for a baby of their own. They are providing lists of healthy young women who, for a fee, will provide eggs that can be fertilized in the laboratory and implanted in the infertile woman's womb. Although the first programs that offered eggs provided by strangers began in 1987, they were until recently limited endeavors. But as word has spread among doctors and infertile women that egg donors are an option, the programs have suddenly blossomed.

Russian culture is, traditionally, exuberantly child-oriented and unabashedly kitschy. This combination makes for rich offerings on the children's book front, since kitsch at its best is only the glorious overrichness and brightness of childhood taste. The sentimental morality that led the Russians to Communism in the first place -- many of the Revolution's progenitors saw Marxism as a fair system imposed on an unfair world -- has a certain eloquence in books for children, a context in which idealism for its own sake is laudable rather than foolish. While poets, philosophers and conceptual artists have been doing work, since the demise of the Iron Curtain, that breaks radically with the ideological restraints imposed by Stalin and Brezhnev, many illustrators of children's books, like ballet dancers and other performing artists, are doing just what they did so admirably in the days of the dictators. Though our eyes were ever on the grands jetes of the Bolshoi stars, we have only recently, in our enthusiasm for Russia, noticed the tradition of sumptuous illustration that has long existed there. It is our openness, more than theirs, that has brought such work here.