July 21, 1996

Market's Big Scare, Wall Street's Big Fear

THE crash of T.W.A. Flight 800 last week set off a replay of a familiar but flawed script. Soon after the 747 jet, bound from New York to Paris with 230 people on board, went down in flames off Long Island Wednesday night, breathless theories emerged about the possible cause. But real answers don't necessarily come quickly, even when the cause turns out to be terrorism. In 1988, seven days passed before investigators determined that Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, because of a bomb. In accidents, sometimes the causes emerge much more slowly. And sometimes, not at all.

The Chinese women returned unevenly to international swimming today after a two-year absence, winning an Olympic gold medal in the 100-meter freestyle, but losing three of their top four swimmers in the preliminary rounds on a day of fire alarms and false alarms. Late Friday night, the Chinese team was awakened by fire alarms and was forced to evacuate its dormitory rooms at the Olympic village, Chinese officials said today. Earlier, the Chinese delegation had complained about the quality of food in the village dining hall.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani slammed a sledgehammer into the limestone facade of 45 Wall Street last week to begin construction work on one of the first office towers to be converted to residences under New York City's Lower Manhattan Revitalization Plan. The 28-story building, spanning the blockfront on William Street from Wall Street to Exchange Place, has been vacant for several years. It will be converted to 437 rental apartments with retail space on the ground floor and a rooftop fitness center by Rockrose Development Corporation in affiliation with Goldman Sachs & Company. Apartments will be available in about 12 months.

You survived the plunge in stocks, and you didn't panic. Maybe you took a long lunch on Tuesday and didn't even see the worst of the slide until it was over. And now stocks have made up a significant part of what was lost. Congratulations. But you're still a little nervous, and you wonder if there isn't a way to take out a little insurance, to be sure your portfolio won't melt the next time worry sets in.

It is at night when the mountain spills its secrets. The Macuxi shaman prepares for the moment with devotion, darkening the room, washing his mouth with tobacco juice and crooning. He beats leaves against the ground and through the air, so the mountain spirits come rushing to him, as if through a forest. They have names and personalities, taken from people he has known: Antonio, Pedro, Paraiba -- this last is the spirit of the shaman's slain son. The spirits report that they are withholding their gold and diamonds, so that the miners who invaded the area, devouring river banks with their machines and killing off Indians with malaria, will move on. "Ainda tem," diamonds are still left, the spirits whisper.

RENOVATING a Frank Lloyd Wright house? Writing a screenplay called "Casablanca, the Next Generation"? If you tinker with icons you'd better proceed with caution. In the mid-1980's, for instance, American Motors made several changes to Detroit's most recognizable veteran of foreign wars, the Jeep CJ-7, and capped the effort with a new front end. Before long, purists were wearing T-shirts that proclaimed, "Real Jeeps don't have square headlamps." Now A.M.C.'s successor, the Chrysler Corporation, has updated the Wrangler, as the basic Jeep is now known. The design made its wartime debut in 1941, and the Willys-Overland Jeep became a civilian in late '45, the first instance of beating swords into sport utility vehicles -- long before the Humvee of Desert Storm became the Hummer of Palm Desert.

A SWEET summer breeze sends shallow waves rippling through the blue canvas awning on the terrace at the Bonnie Briar Country Club in Mamaroneck. Diners gaze over 150 acres of rolling landscape, a verdant palette of a dozen hues, from the deep emerald of the fir trees to the pale jade of the willows. On the course, accompanied by bird songs and hovering squadrons of dragonflies, golfing parties (who are these people who get to play on weekdays, anyway?) make their way back and forth over the west branch of the Sheldrake River, which doubles as a water hazard for the 13th, 14th, 16th and 17th holes.

There was blood in the water, and it was Hungarian. That much Laszlo Ujvary could categorically confirm. He remembered that it was his friend, Ervin Zador, who was hit, and cut. "Right over here," Ujvary said, patting the spot above his eye. And while Ujvary was also certain that hostilities ran deep and punches were thrown, he was not about to exaggerate for the sake of a four-decade old yarn. "You know," he said, "a little blood in the water very soon makes a lot."

After last season ended in a second consecutive second-round exit from the Stanley Cup playoffs, Neil Smith said his next Rangers team would be remodeled. The 1996-97 Rangers would be younger, the president and general manager of the team said, and their league-leading payroll would be reduced. When asked about the possibility of signing Wayne Gretzky as a free agent, Smith said he would entertain the notion but he said he did not expect to be in the vanguard of a bidding war.

LAST fall, Kevin J. Mattakat was studying telecommunications and computer science at the University of Wisconsin. In his spare time, he tended bar and did computer work for the college. He earned about $5,700 in 1995. Today, at 30, he is making more than $45,000 a year at a subsidiary here of U S West, the regional telephone company, fixing the bugs that inevitably haunt complex computer networks.

BOB DOLE likes to tell audiences that when he was growing up, the worst crime anyone could think of was joy riding. Visiting a school earlier this year and seeing his campaign's home page materialize on a computer screen, he brightened with uneasy familiarity: "That's my whatchamacallit!" Last week he lamented: "I was amazed to learn recently that some schools don't even allow spelling bees anymore." George Bush was branded as out of touch when he expressed apparent fascination with a grocery-store scanner. Similarly, Mr. Dole has seemed, at times, to be emerging into the sunlight after his 35 years in a two-mile corridor between his home at the Watergate and Capitol Hill. When he told New Hampshire voters, "I didn't realize that jobs and trade and what makes America work would become a big issue in the last few days of this campaign," it was clear he still had a long way to go.