June 22, 1992

At the school here that trains elite "Top Gun" pilots, the Navy has begun experimenting with a timely addition to its standard curriculum. Along with aviation and technical subjects, trainees are now being taught the same message about sexual harassment that is being posted on bulletin boards at bases all over the country: "Not in Our Navy." The Navy's name for the course that has already been tested on 35 future pilots and flight officers at the Pensacola Naval Air Station is "core values" education. If the experimental program, which began May 18 and ends July 1, wins the approval of top Navy officials in Washington, as expected, it will become a permanent and obligatory part of training for all 576,000 active duty personnel in the Navy, perhaps as soon as the end of 1992.

When Israelis vote on Tuesday, they will determine the shape of a new government to shepherd them through what may be some of the biggest changes in their history. Yet paradoxically, the final weekend of the parliamentary election campaign ended today with the politicians having discussed few of the dominant issues in any depth.

Flush with profits that have surpassed the best years of the booming 1980's, Wall Street is offering glimmers of hope for the battered economies of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, but so far has failed to lift the region out of its recession. For those who work at investment banking firms, brokerage houses and elsewhere in the securities industry, 1992 has so far proven a romp. Despite the steep decline in stock values last week, trading volume, profits and paychecks in the industry, which the Government said reached an average of more than $83,000 last year, have all set records.

It is along toward 8 bells in the evening, and outside the Martin Beck Theater on West 45th Street a crowd is commencing to accumulate for a new showing of that old musical "Guys and Dolls," which is a very true rendering of stories by Mr. Damon Runyon, who mostly made them up. Now we are not putting the rap on revivals, and figuring weight for age, this particular show is real high class -- maybe eternal, even. But some things have changed since Sky Masterson, the highest roller of them all, first bet he could coax any doll to Havana, and ended up winning that soul-saving Mission Doll, Miss Sarah Brown. A Musical Fable So for those on this sidewalk as were not around when crooks were cute, when the show's top ticket price was not $65 but $6.60, when the Alda on Broadway was not Alan but his father, Robert, who played the original Sky, we offer a listener's guide to the shimmering slivers of lost New York in Frank Loesser's lyrics for this "musical fable of Broadway."

Enid J. Ford remembers taking her ailing daughter to the emergency room at Kings County Hospital Center several years ago as an exercise in angst. After six hours in the crowded waiting room, the only doctor on duty prescribed a medication for the girl's stomach pains without a full exam, she said. A hospital administrator called to hear her complaint was of little help. Frustrated, they went in search of a private doctor.

Among the bitter placards that greeted President F. W. de Klerk on his visit to the Boipatong massacre site on Saturday was one that bypassed the anger of the moment to tap a deeper rage. Daubed in white paint on a scrap of plastic that was waved aloft by a young township man were these words: "White man is Satan."

Twenty years ago, black hopes and white fears were on a collision course in picket-fenced neighborhoods around the nation as blacks pursued the dream of integration and whites ran from it. What resulted were places like Mount Greenwood and Roseland, two working-class neighborhoods in Chicago two miles apart, one now as black as the other is white. Sebron and Marian (Mother) Jones did not want it this way. For them, Roseland represented a ticket out of the ghetto, and a yard of their own. They were one of the first black families on their block and could not wait to plant the irises and invite company over to see the neighborhood.

Two years ago, Montel Williams, a former marine and naval officer, was making motivational speeches to high school students. Now he talks on national television to child prostitutes, white supremacists, big-breasted women, kids with guns and thin women who love fat men.

New York is a city where convenience can always be purchased. Too busy to shop for a new car? No problem, dealers make house calls. Need a cellular phone after midnight, a 10-gallon drum of tortilla chips, or a 17th-century medical book? This is the place. You can even buy a garbage disposer. Just don't get caught using it.

Someone recently asked Ray Hicks how he met his wife. He answered straightforwardly enough: The problem with his first girlfriend was that she was poor and raggedy, so Ray got her fixed up, but other boys then lured her away . . . so Ray courted her niece, but the niece's mother was a witch, who learned from reading tobacco stems that Ray wasn't really in love . . . so he went walking with a third girl, who took him to a fortune teller, who read some coffee grounds . . .

NEW YORK CITY WALL STREET REBOUND COULD PAY DIVIDENDS

For centuries, miners have toiled here in the lush foothills of the Andes, digging through layers of black rock to unearth a large percentage of the world's emeralds. The fiery green gemstones from the region's twin mines, Muzo and Quipama, often end up in museums, and gem experts say the local stones are the standard against which all other emeralds are measured.