May 21, 1995

The grand staircase of the Merchants Club building, at Thomas Street and Trimble Place in Lower Manhattan, was designed to provide "remarkable ease of ascension for the nonathletic gentry." At least that's what Richard L. Bonsal, the club's final president, recalls. Mr. Bonsal said that the staircase was modeled on that of the St. Regis Hotel when the club was designed by a member, Leavelle McCampbell, in 1941. That year, the luncheon club for textile executives, which had been in rented quarters nearby, was already 70 years old. But the trade and the gentry dispersed -- many of them moving to the South -- and on March 31, the club ceased operation.

WHEN the Farmington Canal Trail opened a few years ago, Jane and Wesley Harper of Cheshire, who live near the trail, had some doubts. They liked the old path the way it was and wondered about the consequences of developing the trail, which runs from Cheshire to Hamden. Experience has turned them into fans. "It's the greatest thing going," said Mrs. Harper. "Older people like us have taken to walking. Many people do it daily. You meet people you haven't seen for years. You have couples and single people. At first you didn't see people walking alone. Now you do."

WHETHER THE SUBJECT IS THE Black Panther Party or quiz shows, Thomas Jefferson's sex life or Dorothy Parker's accent, there is one reaction moviegoers can expect when a historical film appears: the scolding, finger-wagging "tut-tut" response. As in, "Tut-tut-tut, Robert Redford changed the facts." Or, "Tut-tut-tut, Mario Van Peebles left facts out." Mr. Van Peebles's current film, "Panther," which presents a saintly version of the early days of the Black Panther Party, has become a predictable lightning rod for the tut-tut critics from the left (former Panthers territorial about their stories) and the right (conservatives who see the Panthers as outlaws with no redeeming qualities). The director and his father, Melvin Van Peebles, who wrote the screenplay, have created a sometimes powerful and often unfocused movie. They have been treated as if they were charlatans trying to pull a fast one on the American public.

INTEREST rates are falling. Interest rates are falling. It's a mantra being intoned by almost every real estate broker, mortgage banker and potential home buyer these days. And unlike other industry slogans -- like "now is a good time to buy" or "prices are rising" -- this one is unarguable, at least for now. The average interest rate on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages in the New York metropolitan area has plunged in the last few months, dropping more than a full percentage point to 8.06 as of last Wednesday from its recent high of 9.39 percent on Dec. 16, according to HSH Associates, a mortgage research company in Butler, N.J. That means that anyone who simply waited five months to buy a home with a fixed-rate mortgage may have saved, before taxes, $95 a month on a $100,000 mortgage; the payments would have dropped to $738 from $833. Rates on adjustable-rate mortgages also have dropped -- but not as much. The average interest rate on a one-year A.R.M. in the New York metropolitan area fell to 5.69 as of last Wednesday from its recent high of 6.54 percent on Jan. 13, according to HSH Associates. That means the average monthly payment for a new A.R.M. fell $55 on a $100,000 loan, to $580 from $635.

BETTY NORMAN was no match for the telephone con men who emptied her pockets of more than $40,000. A plain-talking widow who runs a small motel in Ionia, Mich., a town of state prisons and apple orchards, Mrs. Norman, born and raised here, was taught to believe that people are essentially honest. So she trusted salespeople who picked up details about her life in seemingly casual telephone chat while pitching her pens, costume jewelry and other trinkets. And after being swindled out of thousands of dollars, she lost even more to people promising to recover her original investments.

To Mike Brown, who runs a tiny county health care center about an hour's drive from here, the $250 billion or so in Medicare savings that Congressional Republicans want to achieve over the next seven years is more than an abstract figure in a Washington budget battle. Like many rural hospitals, his center, Saunders County Health Services, ministers to a population that is largely elderly and exceedingly dependent on Medicare. The health insurance program for the elderly accounts for about 40 percent of hospital revenue nationally but for more than 80 percent of the hospital revenue at the Saunders County center.

Searching for Answers As Oklahoma City struggles to cope after a month of anguish, an Army buddy of Timothy McVeigh may provide a breakthrough for investigators of the bombing. Page 16. The Favorite Comes Through Timber Country won the Preakness in Baltimore. The race ended too late for some copies of SportsSunday, Section 8. Furor Over a Legacy Since Doris Duke's death in 1993, her last will has been the center of a legal fight. Page 35.

AS America hurtles toward a trade war with Japan, most economists think the United States' trade deficit has little to do with protectionism in Japan. The real problem, they say, is that Joe Sixpack uses his paycheck to buy CD's from Wal-Mart while Joko Sixpackayama uses hers to buy CD's from a bank. How's that?

YOU are a multibillion-dollar corporation and Federal regulators are sniffing suspiciously at your factories, building a case that your industry has broadly violated the country's environmental laws. What to do?

The Indiana Pacers didn't want to be playing in New York today. The Knicks made that impossible.

"THE true fisherman approaches the first day of fishing with all the sense of wonder and awe of a child approaching Christmas," wrote John D. Voelker, a k a Robert Traver, the late Michigan writer, judge and fisherman. True anglers we are not. Still, we could relate to some degree to Judge Voelker's words as we eagerly awaited the opening of trout season in Michigan. Our anticipation was high, in part, because this seemed like the perfect opportunity to test-drive the 1995 Jeep Grand Cherokee Orvis Edition.

It is a tale all too familiar to co-op hunters and agents: What one co-op board demands from applicants may be totally different from what another requires. "There is wide variety and confusion," said JoAnne Kennedy, leader of a task force of residential brokers and management companies that this week is sending a new "streamlined" board application package to more than 200 of the city's management companies in the hope that New York City's co-op boards will adopt it.