June 24, 1996

You would think that everyone would want a better road. But in Vermont people fight to keep roads that freeze in winter, that turn into muddy sinkholes in spring, that kick up clouds of dust in summer, that gobble up shocks, mufflers and the occasional whole car. When the state proposed paving a scant half-mile stretch of road in bucolic Brookfield some years back, there was a citizens' uprising. Jackie Wilder, a retired teacher, threatened to lie down in front of the bulldozers with her grandchildren. "And I had two grandchildren then," Mrs. Wilder recalled, adding that she would take the same stand today with her five grandchildren.

When Michael Johnson crossed the finish line of the 200 meters, he looked left at the clock and saw that it read 19.66 seconds, a stunning new world record. What he never did was turn around to look at the wind gauge. In Saturday's semifinals at the Olympic trials, Johnson had apparently shattered track and field's oldest individual record, only to learn that the aiding wind was above the allowable limit for record purposes. Today he never glanced back, either at his competitors or the wind gauge.

When news spread last Thursday that Robert Jennings, a senior at Seymour High School, had been killed in a car accident, the response among his classmates and their parents ran from shock and grief to guilty relief. For the previous seven years, a Seymour student had died just before graduation, all but one a senior, all but one in a car. Now, the class of '96 finally knew who from its ranks would not be moving on. For the eighth year, commencement in this Naugatuck Valley town would be bordered in black, and what had come to be the graduates' annual memorial service would be for Robb Jennings.

Many people have written epitaphs for this storied old town. The version a few years ago went like this: Atlantic City was about to be surrounded with state-licensed casinos that would open in Pennsylvania and Connecticut and probably in New York. Losing its exclusivity as the center of East Coast gambling, the city would rapidly sink, dragged down by problems of urban decay and poverty that would never be solved. That was a very bad bet.

As city officials and top business leaders start on the long road to trying to lure the summer Olympics to New York in 2008, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said yesterday that new homes for the Yankees and the Mets should be considered as part of any plan to build stadiums and arenas to house the Games. Conceding that New York City's biggest weakness as a host for the Olympics is its lack of enough large sports venues, Mr. Giuliani said a committee that met formally for the first time at City Hall last week to consider a proposal for the Olympic Games in 2008 will look at the two issues -- the Games and new stadiums for the city's professional baseball teams -- as pieces of the same puzzle.