Teacher Hopes to Use Her Pull to Win Flight in Space

--”High diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, Roxanne Hammer wants to milk a cow in orbit. “ The nursery rhyme may be ruined but Hammer, a 27-year-old fifth-grade teacher in Risingsun, Ohio, has a reason. The Lakota Central Elementary School teacher is proposing the cow-milking experiment in her quest to be the first American school teacher aboard a space shuttle. Should the milk idea turn sour, she is suggesting an alternative experiment to see whether bees can make honey in weightlessness. It remains to be seen whether the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will laugh to see such craft in a honey of an idea. Hammer’s pupils agree their teacher is far-out, in Earth orbit or jumping over the moon.

--Joe Kittinger is far less ambitious and perhaps more realistic in his plans for flight. Six months ago Kittinger became the first person to cross the Atlantic alone in a gas-filled balloon and is now planning a 20,000-mile balloon flight around the world in October or November. He said in Orlando, Fla., that the flight would take two weeks and would carry him over frozen mountain ranges, sweltering deserts and stormy winter oceans. “This is the ultimate adventure,” said Kittinger, who would ride jet stream winds in a sophisticated, pressurized capsule.

--Cardiac pacemakers emerge as a more down-to-earth activity in Seminole, Fla., where the Pinellas Animal Foundation, a nonprofit organization of county veterinarians, created a “pet care bank” to provide cardiac pacemakers for dogs with serious heart problems. The bank counts on donations of still-functioning pacemakers from deceased humans for transplant into the animals. “Once a pacemaker has been used (in a human), it is no longer certified for human use, but it is still perfectly good for pets,” said Dr. Mel Helphrey, who has implanted 20 pacemakers in dogs in the last seven years.

--Imported alfalfa and a stall about three times as large as that of most horses help set Dollor off from other equines. Dollor, a 17-year-old chestnut quarter horse, lives in semi-retirement on Howard and Debra Keffeler’s seven-acre ranch in Midlothian, Tex. The Keffelers report that five years after John Wayne’s death, the horse who starred with him in a string of movies still gets excited when he hears recordings of “The Duke.” “We don’t intend to get rich off Dollor,” Debra Keffeler says. “We just have a lot of respect for the patriotism John Wayne stands for. We think we can remind other people of those strong traits through the horse he loved so dearly.”