September 9, 1993

In this smokestack city halfway between Cleveland and Columbus, a group of business people and merchants give a weekly bagpipe concert in a downtown parking lot at dusk. Fritz's, the local hangout, lets diners pay for their meals on the honor system. And out-of-towners who park illegally find "parking tickets" on their windshields with a cartoon of a smiling meter and the message, "This one's on us!"

His hopes of winning a Senate seat dashed last year and his prospects for the governorship apparently stymied, Robert Abrams abruptly announced yesterday that he would resign after 15 years as the Attorney General of New York State to become a partner in a Manhattan law firm at the end of the year. Mr. Abrams, New York's senior statewide official, its chief law-enforcement officer and a popular figure in state and city Democratic politics for more than 25 years, is the second top state official to resign this year. Comptroller Edward V. Regan quit last spring to head an economics study center at Bard College.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Trenton declared today that although a spiritual awakening inspired thousands of pilgrims to visit the suburban New Jersey home of a man who claimed that the Virgin Mary came to visit, no true miracle occurred at the site. Bishop John C. Reiss urged the faithful to stop their Sunday evening vigils at the Marlboro Township home of Joseph Januszkiewicz, a draftsman who began reporting the visions in the spring of 1992. Mr. Januszkiewicz was also admonished to stop taking steps to promote the visits to the blue spruce trees on his yard, where he said his vision appeared, or to the shrine he has erected on his property.

Nearly half of the nation's 191 million adult citizens are not proficient enough in English to write a letter about a billing error or to calculate the length of a bus trip from a published schedule, according to a four-year Federal study of literacy in America. The study, released yesterday by the Education Department, presented a bleak statistical portrait of the nation's literacy.

The economy displayed "slow to moderate" overall growth in midsummer but was marked by striking differences among geographic areas and industries, a Federal Reserve survey said today. "Economic growth appears weaker on the East and West Coasts while central areas such as Cleveland, Dallas, Kansas City and Minneapolis report stronger than average growth," said the Fed's so-called beige book, an anecdotal survey of business conditions in late July and August.