Mondale: Loneliness of a Long-Distance Runner-up

--Walter F. Mondale says he wasn’t depressed after losing the 1984 presidential race to Ronald Reagan, just exhausted from a grueling campaign and in need of “a long time to adjust.” The former Democratic presidential candidate, now a Washington lawyer, noted, “One day you’ve got 200 reporters and cameras and everybody is hanging on you. And three days later, you’re alone. And it’s quite a transition.” In an interview in the Minneapolis Star & Tribune, Mondale denied that his public reticence after the election reflected emotional distress. “I wouldn’t call it depression,” he said. “There was a period of fatigue. I mean I was bone tired.” And a further thought on the campaign: “I think the Reagan people are superb marketers. Their whole approach to polling, to television, to the symbolism and the rest approaches genius. And I would not say mine did.”

--President Reagan bid a personal farewell to Jerry Parr, the retiring Secret Service agent who helped save his life. Parr, 54, pushed the wounded President into his limousine outside the Washington Hilton Hotel as would-be assassin John W. Hinckley Jr. opened fire on March 30, 1981.

--Science fiction writer Ben Bova announced in West Hartford, Conn., that he has become the first human being to open a bank account on the moon so that he will have “walking around money” when he gets there. His $1,000 deposit is with the lunar branch of the Lamar Savings & Loan in Austin, Tex., which recently applied to the Texas Banking Commission for permission to put a bank on the moon--when feasible.

--Newton N. Minow was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in the 1960s when he warned that television was becoming “a vast wasteland,” but now he has changed his mind. “In the past 23 years I feel we’ve started to illuminate the wasteland and to use this medium as its creators dreamed it would be used,” said Minow, now a partner in a Chicago law firm, in Consumers Digest. As an institute of learning, television is more important than Harvard and Yale, Minow said, and “more people learn--more ideas, more values--through television than any other source.”