May 14, 1996

In the last two years, Piotr and Danuta Jentes, Polish 30-somethings, have bought a second car and splurged on a $3,000 wind surfer. Owners of a small business, they go to a private doctor, send their youngest child to a private day-care center and spend a lot of money fixing up their home. And in rapidly Westernizing Poland, they are no longer a rarity. For the first time, after the false hopes and smashed expectations that followed the collapse of Communism in 1989, market researchers and economists say they are seeing the emergence of a Polish middle class. Sometimes dubbed "puppies," these Polish yuppies are buying consumer goods like cars and refrigerators that Americans take for granted but that not so long ago were the preserve of the Communist apparatchiks. And they are showing a sophistication about their new-found buying power that economists say bodes well for the country -- and for the Western companies that have made Poland a key base of investment in the former Communist bloc.

A motley collection of electric and hybrid vehicles will buzz, whirr and hum their way over 64 miles from Chesapeake to Annapolis in Maryland on Tuesday, about 50 in all, depending on how many have run out of juice, shorted out a component or otherwise broken down along the way in the eighth American Tour de Sol race, which began in New York City and will end here on Thursday. The cars in the race are better than they ever have been. For many of the vehicles, the minimum demand of the race, up to 71.4 miles a day over a mixed city, suburban and interstate route, is hardly a challenge. The leading entry hopes to go 300 miles on a single charge, farther than many conventional cars go on a tank of gas.

Taking Aim at Clothes Rack

A Federal judge ordered Sussex County authorities yesterday to meet with lawyers for jail inmates who say that guards routinely beat prisoners, The Associated Press reported. Describing the county jail as a "chamber of horrors," Vincent D. Paragano, a lawyer for several inmates, told Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise that at least 26 prisoners have been beaten over the last six years. But Sheriff Robert E. Untig denied that a problem existed, and said interaction between guards and inmates has been recorded on videotape since early last year.

Nowhere else in New York does God confront Mammon as directly as where Trinity Church meets Wall Street. A landmark Gothic Revival church staring down the canyon of capitalism: what better way for architecture to symbolize the very conflict of urban civilization? Trinity Church, which turns 150 years old this week, is one of those landmarks that New Yorkers take for granted, and which turns out to have a far more profound connection to the idea of city life than it appears to on the surface. This is no mere Gothic Revival leftover amid skyscrapers. It was New York's tallest building for most of the 19th century and one of its most potent symbols, as closely identified with the idea of the New York skyline then as the World Trade Center is now.

While some investors on Wall Street have worried that auto makers' brisk sales and recent production increases may signal an overheating economy, auto industry officials say they doubt that the recent burst of activity will last. The combination this spring of low interest rates, large tax refunds, rising employment and more consumer confidence had new cars and trucks driving out of dealerships at a brisk, seasonally adjusted annual rate of up to 15.7 million vehicles during the first four months of this year. But with interest rates rising and the tax refund season mostly over, almost everybody in Detroit expects sales to moderate slightly in the coming months.

Investigators got their first break this afternoon in the crash of a Valujet DC-9 in the Everglades on Saturday, as a police officer searching the scene for body parts stepped on a 30-pound metal box that turned out to be the flight data recorder, one of the plane's two "black boxes." The box, which is actually yellow, had been partly covered by mud under several feet of water. Investigators packed it in a cooler borrowed from a firefighter and rushed it by police car to Miami International Airport, where it was put on a plane and sent to engineers at the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington.

National Accounts is a Parsippany-based company that buys long-distance service at bulk rates and resells it to businesses. Today, the State Division of Consumer Affairs plans to sue the company in Superior Court for violating the Consumer Protection Act, officials said. Telemarketers would misidentify themselves as employees of AT&T or other long-distance companies and offer service at cheaper rates, but sometimes customers would see their rates go up, said Mark S. Herr, director of Consumer Affairs.

WITH little fanfare, the Federal Government has assumed a serious role in an activity seen until recently as the province of zealous astronomers and doomsday enthusiasts: scanning the skies for speeding rocks from outer space that could slam into the planet to cause widespread destruction and death. It is the first such governmental search in the world. As such, it gives the issue a significant new degree of credibility.

About 10,000 gallons of medium-weight crude oil spilled from a leaky ship early Friday, endangering wildlife and dirtying a two-mile stretch of beach along Delaware Bay. But state environmental officials said yesterday that Sunset Beach should be cleaned up within a few days. Some 50 horseshoe crabs were coated with oil, threatening the thousands of birds that eat their eggs, Governor Whitman said while visiting the site yesterday. The ship, owned by France Shipmanagement, sprang a leak while crude oil was being unloaded to make the vessel lighter, said Lieut. (j.g.) Scott Kelly of the Coast Guard.

NO way would the NYC column be written anymore, no sir, not after so many worthy colleagues had been ignored for the Pulitzer Prize. Granted, a better protest would have been to reject one's own nomination for the prize, a la Julie Andrews. (Can there be a more wholesome model than the woman who played Mary Poppins, even if she went on to bare her breasts on screen?) But, sob, no Pulitzer nomination had come this way to be turned down. That left a work stoppage as the only path left for the indignant. Yet there was lurking curiosity about how Broadway theatergoers viewed Ms. Andrews's ballyhooed snubbing of the snubbers, those awards committee members who'd decided last week that "Victor/ Victoria" merited only one Tony nomination: her own. Has there been a show-biz story this heart-rending since the Michael Jackson-Lisa Marie Presley marriage went pfft?

Anyone hoping to hear a grand rescue plan for Apple Computer Inc. probably came away disappointed. But 100 days after being given the job of leading Apple out of the financial desert, Gilbert F. Amelio, in his first public strategy speech, said today that the company's comeback path would consist of many small steps -- rather than the single bold move he said the news media might be expecting.