March 11, 1996

Two hundred years ago this week, the Legislature authorized the purchase of 35 books that formed the original collection of the New Jersey State Library, which will celebrate its bicentennial today with ceremonies in the Assembly chambers. The library has 500,000 books, but it did not buy any books in the last fiscal year. Instead, the library spent its $180,000 book-acquisition budget on computers, said Robert L. Bland, director of the State Government Information Services Bureau. Although the library resumed buying new books this year, next year's budget for acquiring books has been cut by $130,000.

When the Oklahoma City bombing trial starts here this fall, anyone who shows an Oklahoma driver's license at La Petite Cleaners will get 50 percent off on pressing and cleaning. "My heart goes out to those people," Maryann Chumley, the owner, said of bombing survivors and victims' relatives who plan to attend the trial. "I felt those families are already so devastated, and they aren't real well-to-do. They're working class."

The concept seemed simple enough when Education Alternatives Inc. came here in 1994 to help manage Hartford's 32 public schools: use private-business expertise to wring more money for education out of the district's $200 million budget. Only 16 months later, the nation's first experiment in private management of an entire school system is ending with the concept largely untested. After spending $12 million of its own, Education Alternatives is being dismissed without ever taking control of the district's finances.

In 1993, a task force advising Vice President Al Gore on "reinventing government" recommended the elimination of subsidies for the fading maritime industry, which it described as "a cancer eating away" at the Federal Treasury. Soon after the Republicans took over Congress last year, the House Budget Committee put the maritime payments high on its hit list of dubious "corporate welfare" programs.

Being in the publishing business is the last thing the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey needs, George J. Marlin, its executive director, said last week. Consequently, Via Port of New York and New Jersey, a free bimonthly trade magazine on port and air cargo matters with 25,000 subscribers, will cease publication after 47 years, the authority announced. The move will save $475,000 a year, said Gwen Williams, a spokeswoman for the authority.

With large-scale layoffs and falling wages creating many of the same anxieties felt in the 1930's, Lazar Treschan, like hundreds of other idealistic college students, is planning to do what many of the best and the brightest did after college in the Depression: become union organizers. Disillusioned by an economy in which corporate profits are soaring while millions of workers are being squeezed or discarded, Mr. Treschan, a history major at Wesleyan University here whose parents belong to a teachers' union, says the labor movement is the place to be for young people who want to set things right.

A Hacksensack company that lost its bid for a $78 million New Jersey lottery contract has accused the winning company of concealing information about its former national sales director, who was indicted in 1994 on bribery charges. In contesting the decision to award the contract to the Rhode Island-based Gtech Holdings Corporation, the losing bidder, Automated Wagering International Inc., told the State Director of Purchase and Property Friday that Gtech had failed to disclose that J. David Smith, the former Gtech official, remained a consultant with the company. But Robert Rendine, a spokesman for Gtech, said Mr. Smith severed all connections with the company before his indictment.

Each time Wall Street has panicked in the last few years, investors on Main Street have stepped in and stemmed the tide of selling. Whether that continues today will depend on the hundreds of thousands of people who have invested in mutual funds in recent years. At mutual fund and brokerage firms around the country yesterday, the volume of calls from customers rose, but there was no sign of panic selling in the wake of Friday's nosedive in the stock and bond markets. So if recent history is a guide, the stock market should stabilize.

A bill to ban the sale of nonalcoholic beverages in containers made to look like those in which alcoholic beverages are sold will be considered today by the Assembly Consumer Affairs and Regulated Professions Committee. The measure was introduced after juice and iced tea in liquor-like containers began appearing on store shelves in South Jersey, said the bill's sponsor, Assemblywoman Shirley K. Turner, Democrat of Ewing Township. Her bill would also bar candy cigarette sales.

A lawsuit contending that the makers of the movie "Philadelphia" misappropriated a story about a New York lawyer, who was dismissed after his employer discovered he had AIDS, is scheduled to go to trial tomorrow in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

What does Pat want? That is what Republican leaders are asking as Patrick J. Buchanan scoffs at lining up behind the party's presumptive nominee and declares that he will harry Senator Bob Dole through the Middle West to California, right up to the doors of the Republican National Convention in August.

Somerset County is the fastest-growing county in New Jersey, with a 10.5 percent increase in population from 1990 to 1995, according to the latest figures from the United States Census Bureau. Somerset's population increased to 265,440 from 240,245, the bureau said in a report released last week. Essex County's population, by contrast, decreased by 2.5 percent over the same period, falling to 758,626 from 777,964. Bergen County remained the most-populous county, with 845,189. Salem County, with a population of 64,921, stayed the smallest.