“Like jumping off a brownstone, huh? Meshugah. Nuts, “Shel says, shaking his head.”But beautiful, I got to say.” Shel and his wife, retirement-condo shoppers, have wandered out to the pool grandstand from the real-estate office also located in the Mission Bay center.

In matching shorts sets, with floor plans in hand, they stand watching some of the nation’s best diver’s arc and plunge. It was the condo developer’s idea to put an Olympic-quality diving and swimming facility in his Boca Raton Utopia, hire one of the best diving coaches in America and make a Family Attraction that would elevate his tracts of stucco duplexes above the others gouged into the sandy scrubland north of Miami.

He’s planted young gods amid the pensioners, and its working. Mission Bay hosts world class diving and swimming meets, collects fat media fees for photographing and videotaping and runs clinics and camps that draw hopefuls from all over the United States and Canada.

This is the business end of Olympic dreams, with a sweet real-estate tie-in. And bunking in the heart of it, in a rent-free model unit, is the most beautiful dreamer of all.

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The two paragraphs be- High up on the tower, preparing to jump from ginning “high up” are brown-stone height, is Greg Louganis, who summary paragraph- swept the platform and springboard gold medals has proving his internal- in the’84 Olympics and hopes to repeat in Seoul ional expertise.

He has been called the best ever; he’s the only man in history to earn over 700 points in a single Olympic diving event, the only human ever to score seven perfect 10s for one dive in national and world com-petition. He is the gold standard for the sport. Single-hand-idly, Greg Louganis raised the degree of difficulty in world competition.

The diving competition was not diluted by the Eastern-bloc boycott in ’84; this year, as it was then, the chief rivalry will be between the Americans and the Chinese. Most of his competitors, but especially the Eastern-bloc teams, are known to study tapes of Greg Louganis, who has dominated the sport for the last ten years. He was just sixteen when he won a silver medal in Montreal in 1976and became the One to Watch.

Since then, he has been the One to beat, and to that end, they fret over the tapes, freeze-frame his dives and analyze the parts. But they cannot come up with the impossible sums that judges award Greg Louganis.

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“The Soviets and the Chinese seem to have developed programs that teach Louganis techniques to every one of their divers,” says Louganis’s coach, Ron O’Brien. “[The communist countries] have developed an acrobatic, a me-chemical copy of Greg. They haven’t been successful attaching a rhythmic, dance like quality.”

They’ve called him a Noreen, a Baryshnikov. No one is better at aquatic, serial, kamikaze ballet. He walks like a dancer, back straight, shoulders square and high, legs turned out slightly. Louganis has been pacing along the platform, unrolling a chamois that he squeaks over diver’s hard torso and a dancer’s outsize thighs.

He has been dancing since he was eighteen months old, diving since he was eight, and the resulting sculpture draws stare seven while he’s performing this high-rise toilette. Poolside, and in the grandstand, they gawk as water sluices down a pair of Rodin- quality calves. In sacks of letters, in poetics and porn, men and women inflict their reactions, say they cannot help themselves; he is so befouled.

Even Shel, who doesn’t know an inverted triple from a club sandwich, is spellbound as Louganis readies himself for liftoff. One, two, three. He always eyes the water, then, counts it down in his head.

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Arms out, head straight, Louganis pushes off the concrete, rises straight up, high, higher, with a vertical leap that has been measured at thirty-three inches, blocking the noon-day sun in a gleaming brown flash.

Now he is tucked, spinning, falling at 40 mph, counting the revolutions, looking for his spots, the visual reference points essential to spinning ballet divas. And trapeze artists. And fancy divers.

Top of platform, kick. Bottom of platform, kick. Bottom, water, open and stretch. The astonishing silhouette is torn from the blue sky, slipped beneath the water with a mere surface dimple and sound they call the rip.

Good feature article- It sounds like taut silk tearing. Blazered, stag should offer the reader- fed guys like Jim McKay wax lyrical about the material they cannot get rip on TV, but you cannot hear it on any from television.

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There should be a “gee-whiz-I didn’t know that” quality to good nonfiction. In this case, the explanation of “the rip.” network satellite feed. The rip is the diver’s sonic boom, the aquatic Mach III. It’s the screech of water molecules giving it up to a force greater than their puissant specific gravity.

Louganis’s rip is followed by an instant of reverent silence and a cacophony of claps, whistles and the crack of wet chamois slapped against the concrete deck. “Way to rip it, Lugo!”

“Nine point five,” rasps O’Brien, who is scoring practice dives over the poolside P.A. “Real soft, Grego.”

In a hard, competitive sport, a soft entry is highly prized. Despite the intricate acrobatics of the three-second per-romance, the entry, or bottom, is the last thing the judges see. And if Louganis has any chronic weakness, it is the bottom of his dives. He says he wishes he could rip con-distantly, like the Chinese; he wishes he could concentration the end better. “The problem I have,” Louganis says, “is getting in the water.”

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The problem he had, says O’Brien, was getting out of him. Ask Obrien about the greatest reward of coaching the world’s best for over a decade, and there is no talk about pikes, triples and perfect scores.

“To see him grow as a person,” O’Brien replies. “He used to be very introverted. He was in a lot of turmoil. I’ve seen him grow to being a very relaxed, confident, comfortable person who can deal with media, speak in front of crowds and just be happy.

When I first started coaching him, he wasn’t a real happy kid.” He was always a brave, strong diver, O’Brien says. “But he was a scared kid. Scared of so darn many things.” LOUGANIS IS SMALLER AT EYE LEVEL, JUST FIVE FEET NINE, a god turned garbage man. He has put himself on trash detail, his tough feet scudding on the griddle-hot concrete.

Here is the underlying theme of the article: overcoming fears. Notice the author’s nice phrase “Lougani-sthinks there are more-kinds of fear than Baskin-Robbins flavors.”

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The author uses the space break technique to separate sections of the article picking up empty Gatorade cups discarded during the last session of Mission Bay’s summer diving camp. In a second, the children are on him, shy but insistent, a knot of brown, peel- nosed kids in wet Speedos and BODY ANDSEOUL T-shirts.

Some just stare; some are nudged by parents aiming Canon Sure Shots. Louganis poses with tiny springboard fliers, signs T-shirts. The bolder ones ask the questions he hears over and over: “What if you get scared?” What if you wipe out?” What if you get all the way up there and you just can’t dirt?”

He talks to them gently, patiently, about fear. Some-times Greg Louganis thinks there are more kinds of fear than Baskin-Robbins flavors. He’s tasted quite a few, has rolled them around in his mouth, taken their measure, given them their quarter of respect. He admits he’s been scared of a lot of things.

Dangerous dives. Failure Success. “And snakes,” he is saying as he stuffs towels and a wet Speedo info his battered Gap tote bag. “I really had a thing about snakes as a kid. But the thing about fear is that sooner or later you have to face it down or you’ll be, like, nuts.” So he faced down some snakes? “I saved up and bought one,” he says. “A boa constrictor. Not too big. But a serious snake.”

He made himself feed it live mice and sacks of squirming worms, and he came to see it as a thing of beauty and strength. “It was kind of gross at first,” he says. But he got past it. “The other thing about fear?” he says, posing his own question. “Is that there’s always another one to take its place. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing if you deal with it.” Eat the boa before it eats you? “Nah,” he says. “Just remember to buy the mice.”

HERE’S THE BIG BOA NOW: LETTING ONE OBSESSION GO AND committing to another. He wants very much to act; he has studied the craft for nine years, since he majored in drama at college.

He signed with William Morris right after the’84 Olympics, has kept studying, auditioning, and chatting up casting directors. He is looking forward to what he calls an emotional rather than a physical obsession, but he wants to go out of diving just right.

Can he rip it; leave the sport with a clean, golden finish? And when should he leave it? In October? Or in ’92? Divers are said to peak in thermo-twenties, and he is twenty-eight.

“I am totally consumed by the limitations of age,” he says. “The young kids on the team say, ‘Show us how to-do it, Grandpa.’ I keep reminding myself that Dr.SammyLee was thirty-two when he won his last Olympic gold medal. And I’ll be thirty-two at the ’92 Olympics.”

Once before, after the ’84 games, he announced his retirement, and then ignored it. Leaving is scary in itself. It means the end of an obsession that’s fueled half his life. Diving cleaves the years, neatly, into a progression he can understand.

“I went through so many stages,” he says, and proceeds to tick them off: Grammar school through junior high: “When I first started out, this [diving] was the one area of success. Soit was almost like my survival.” High school and college: “It became something I was good at but I wasn’t really enjoying. And then it was something that I wanted to do well at.”

From eight to twenty-four, he lived his life hungry, troubled, pressured by great expectations and deferred pay-offs. Like so many American athletes, he endured an eight- year .wait for his gold because of the ’80 U.S. boycott of the Moscow games, and it nearly unnerved him.

Before’84, says Ron O’Brien, “he was not a happy camper.” And then, after the Los Angeles Olympics? “I was doing it because I enjoyed it,” says the camper, happy as a clam. “I was having fun; so really, these last four years have been for the enjoyment.”

He stops and smiles, then he shake his head. “I never thought I could get to this point.” He has described the common pathology of obsession. It was keenest when he was hungry. But he has been losing some over the last year, which is to say placing fourth or fifth in Olympic tune up meets that he used to win by 50or 100 points.

Right now he has to control his appetite for other things-quit reading the scripts, auditioning, forget about the appearances and endorsements. Since Decembers, he has been training hard at Mission Bay, two work-outs a day, six days a week. Right now he has to summon up the hunger that used to come unbidden.

Louganis orders up some Spartan gazpa- chuan green salad but cannot resist a small side order of fried calamari. He is an enthusiastic goodie, conversant with Korean bar-become, Szechwan lobster, Greek dolmades, but he fears his fat-burning capacities are sliding toward the levels of the silver-haired seniors tearing into early-bird specials at surrounding tables.

“Stop me,” he says. “Don’t let me eat that garlic bread. I mean, when the time comes, feel free to say, ‘Meal’s over, Greg.'” HE’S ALWAYS HAD TROUBLE WITH ENDINGS, BE IT A SINGLE dive, a diving career, and a late lunch. The first time Greg Louganis had trouble finishing his act was in his first dance recital, in El Cajon, Southern California. He’d been at it since eighteen months, when he begged to join his older sister’s class.

At three and a half, he was good enough to have a solo song-and-dance number in tiny top hat and tux. Owing to the lights, he couldn’t see to find his exit. She sat down on the edge of the stage, where he could watch the show and see his mom in the audience.

Frantically, the teacher waved him off, but he sat there grinning.” I was having a great time,” he says. Twenty-one years later, when the stage was global, he stood on the ten-meter platform at the Los Angels Olympics-at the very end of his performance; perhaps, he thought then, the end of his Olympic career-and it was no fun, no way. His mom was there, along with 13,497people holding their collective breath at the USC pool and about 35 million people nationwide on TV.

You couldn’t have staged a better, a more dramatic Olympic Moment. It was down to one dive. Oh, he had won before he was finished; the nearest competitor was over fifteen points away; even if he missed the dive entirely, the gold was his. The only competition was with him.

Louganis’ score stood within reach of the 700 mark, which no manor woman had ever achieved. He stood above the silent crowd and prepared for the last dive on his list, number 307C, a reverse three-and-a-half somersault. Degree of difficulty, 3.4, and then the highest that had been done. A year earlier, in another meet, His early history appears well into the mid-die of the article, well after the lead.

Louganis had been about to climb the platform when 307C fatally injured Soviet diver SergeiShilbashvili. And as the ambulance bore him away, Louganis’ performed 307C flawlessly. He was not afraid of the dive; his trajectory is always too high and far and fast to send his skull crashing into the platform like the doomed Russian.

Nonetheless, as he prepared to do 307C at the end of his program in the ’84 Olympics, he says, “I was scared. The fear was a number of things. The fear was a fear of failure. Coming so close and not achieving that [breaking700], especially at the Olympic Games. Another fear was fear of success.

If I achieved breaking 700, then what else can I do? So it was fear-of many different fears that were just kind of hitting me.” He knew they were there, but he would not let them in: “I just didn’t acknowledge.” Louganis stood on the edge of the platform and said this to himself. “No matter what happens, my mother still loves me.” Final score: 710.91

ALWAYS, THROUGH SOME VERY BAD TIMES, FRANCES LOU-gains have loved her adopted son. His birth parentswereboth fifteen when he was born: his father wanted to raise him as a brother but was persuaded to give him up.

Peter Louganis, a hard-drinking tuna fisherman, brought the nine-month-old boy home to his tall, fair Texan wife and vowed to raise him strong and strict. No nonsense, no coddling. He would study and work on the tough docks near San Diego and obey, and if it was a matter of honor, he would fight. He would be a man-in the old way.

There were plenty of chances to get in a fight, but the boy never did. Instead, he got beat up, day after day. He would fib about the bruises and fret about the reason. “Nigger!” they called him at school. His birth father was Samoan, and as a child, Gregory Efthimios Louganisturned very, very brown in the California sun.

“Stupid!” they taunted before dyslexia was a commonly diagnosed reading problem. He inverted sentences, flip-flopped letters. Mistakenly, teachers had him tested for mental impairment.

“Reheard!” He was too shy to answer back, too scared. And he stuttered-badly enough to require speech therapy. When he sought haven from it all, it was in Frances Louganis kitchen. “My mother is Scotch-Irish, and my father is Greek, so my mother had to learn how to cook Greek,” he says.” We learned-I always helped my mom in the kitchen, because this is where I felt most comfortable.”

It was a safe place for a dark-skinned, stammering, dyslexic loner. They made spinach– filled spanikopita. He drizzled honey over the transparent pastry dough for world-beating baklava. “To me, it’s relaxing,” says Lou-ganis. “I had companionship, you know, from my mother.

It gave me a good sense of self-esteem.” He hated when his father dragged him to a club for boys and made him wrestle, loathed the combative contact. But he loved to dance. “Sissy! They called him then, and that bothered him more than the other stuff, but not enough to make him stop.

No one understood him better than his dance partner, Eleanor Smith. They were a team from age thereto twelve. Almost every day, they went to the dance studio; when one changed teachers, and the other followed. They moved alike, thought alike, and were best of friends.

Eventually, Eleanor headed off toward gymnastics, and Greg followed, but there was no men’s gymnastics team in SanDiego.Knee injuries were aggravated by gymnastics and .dance.

“So,” he says, “I learned to dive.” Early on, he was exceptional. Ron O’Brien has watched thousands of grade-school hopefuls with Olympic dreamland chlorine-pink eyes. But he can still remember his first look at Greg

Louganis at a Florida meet: “I saw him whence was ten and I was coach at Ohio State University. Head a different quality to his diving than I had seen with anyone else. He was stronger. His body lines were sharper. For a ten-year- old, he was extremely strong. And he had a presence about him.”

On the springboard, still his strongest event, there was no hesitancy. No fear. “As long as I had water under me,” Louganis says, “I wasn’t afraid.”

When he calls diving his “survival” during that early period, he means that it raised him above other, darker things-the torments of school and the increasing difficulties at home. Peter Louganis proved a hard man who could not understand his more vulnerable son: the sweet, strong boy could not bear the drinking, the yelling, the strain on his mother.

Once, when he was thirteen, they came to blows, and Greg was hauled to juvenile hall. De-spite the turmoil, his diving got stronger, and as it did, each year took him farther outside of El Cajon. “I went to Europe when I was thirteen for a world competition,” he says. “When I was fourteen, I lived in Arizona for the summer with a diving family so Icouldget coaching. When I was fifteen, I spent the summer indicator, Alabama, in Ron O’Brien’s camp.” He also worked. Diving, coaching and travel were ex-pensive.

Peter Louganis helped his son get coaching, and he also made sure Greg had worked at the tuna dock in which Peter owned an interest. Greg started at fifteen, mending the heavy tuna nets, putting his well- developed shoulders to the work of cutting the nets away from the buoys and loading the gun like needle with the marine-grade twine that repaired the nets.

Later, in high school and college, he worked three part-time jobs at once, into clothing stores and a recreation center. He paid his expenses, and he put some money away. Since he was fifteen, he’s had a special savings account.

“For a house,” he says. “I always wanted a house. It was like something that was out there that was never going to get.” Other fifteen-year-olds were saving for surfboards and Pink Floyd tapes. But a house? “See, I needed a place to go. I wanted out of the house, but I needed a sense of security, a sense of roots. I think that’s what I was most obsessed with. It is something that’s mine… my roots.”

But there were more immediate goals. In January of’76 when he was sixteen and about to begin training for that year’s Olympics, he left home entirely and moved in with the family of his coach, Dr. Sammy Lee, himself al948 and 1952 gold medalist. A busy ear, nose and throat specialist, Lee took as much time off as he could to coach the boy he felt could be the very best diver in history.

Once again, Louganis felt himself adopted and found him-self headed for the warmest room in the house. “Darleen is Korean; Mrs. Lee is Chinese,” Louganis says. “I always helped her out in the kitchen, too, so learned how to cook Chinese and Korean stuff.”

His new high school was more of a culture shock. “I went from an upper-middle class high school to a school that was seventy to eighty percent Chicano. They had seven security guards. The week before I got there, one of the security guards was put in the hospital by some students. So I was a little nervous. But I kind of fit in because I was dark haired and dark completed.”

He says he kept his mouth shut and focused on diving. When he came home from Montreal with a silver medal in springboard and some headlines, he went back home to El Cajon and Valhalla High, which, despite its name, was not necessarily a hall of hero worship.

The nigger-dummy-sissy was a hero, but a lonely one-even though more people said hello in the halls.

He kept saving for his house, training, going on college-recruiting trips. He chose the University of Miami, largely because “it was far away” from California. He says he really” grew up” in south Florida, majoring in theater and hanging with drama students who knew virtually nothing about his diving.

He stayed there from 1978 to 1980, when he transferred to the University of California at Irvine. By thence was swimming under Ron O’Brien at the Mission Viejo Club, a world-class tank near San Diego. And he was not happy camper.

He was withdrawn; uncommunicative. He began a quiet assault on the body and the image that had so far ensured his survival. Aware that it could have gotten him booted from the team, he smoked.

“My smoking was out of rebellion,” he says. “Didn’t want to fit the mold of this ‘goody- goody-two-shoes jock.” So he swaggered around with the burning cylinders hanging off his lip. He thought they said, “I’m bad.”

He drank, too, mostly beer and fruity swill wine. André worried, convinced that owing to his home environment, he was destined for alcoholism. He says he was desperately unhappy, he was spinning. He was in danger of losing the water-the thing a diver fears most of all.

Like “the rip,” the author LOSING THE WATER-GETTING DISO- explains an insider’s RIENTED AND LANDING badly-happens to knowledge of diving- everyone at least once, even the best. But fear the fear of’ losing the of it can cripple a diver’s nerve the way a water.” bad entry can bend his body.

Ron O’Brien can only recall one time when his student seized up with serious angst on the platform, when he was trying to teach him the inward three-and-a-half tuck. It involves three and a half tight, dizzying revolutions in the direction of the platform, and when O’Brien came at Louganis with it, the dive had just been entered into the official book. It was so new, so difficult that no one else was doing it.

They worked on it in stages and Louganis had done it on dry land, in a spotting belt. Finally, says O’Brien, “it was time for him to do the dive. He went up to do it, and he wouldn’t go. He’d stand on the end of the platform and stand and stand and step back.”

They got to the end of the practice, and he still hadn’t done it. He was trying to sneak off when O’Brien caught him.

“I told him he just had to learn that dive. That if he wanted to bring his lunch and dinner the next day, to dose, because he was going to stay up there till he did do it. Do it or else.” Ask Louganis about it, and he grins. “Yeah, that was probably the most difficult dive I had to learn. Because Is pin pretty fast. And I was afraid that I wasn’t going to know where I was in the air.”

It is easy to lose the water in a right spin, and there is nothing worse, tumbling upside down, falling at 40 phi’s a thirty-three-foot drop to the surface, another seven-teen feet to the pool bottom. Hit on your side, and you can puncture an eardrum; land on your back, and you candor worse.

The day after he had balked on the inward triple, Louganis thought about losing the water, and he thought about losing his nerve and his place on the team, and he climbed up to the platform and nailed the dive on the first try.

Good anecdotes help the was in 1982. He was diving well then. But reader understand the on dry land, he still didn’t know where he was subject at. He was sneaking the smokes, chugging beers he had no taste for.

He thought about cleaning up, but he had no motivation until one day, at a meet, he ran into a subtend diver, a kid puffing absurdly at a cigarette. “Why are you doing that?” Louganis asked him. “I want to be just like Greg Louganis.” Stupid, too stupid. He decided to cut the crap.

His cubit all out in ’83, the year before the Olympics. He did it himself, no counseling, but with the help of friends. “I don’t think anybody can do it all by themselves,” he says. “I had a support group… Ron O’Brien and his wife, Mary Kay. And Jim [Babbitt, a UC-Irvine friend who is now his manager]. And Megan Never, another diver. “I found I even had to stay away from my dad,” he says. He realized this one evening when Peter Louganis took him out to dinner.

“Every time he’d order a drink for himself, he’d order one for me. By the end of the meal, I had five untouched beers lined up in front of me, and I said, ‘Dad, I won’t be coming around for a while.'”

He says that people have told him that he overreacted, that he probably wasn’t a real alcoholic, and he says yes, maybe it wasn’t so bad, but he wasn’t going to keep drinking and find out for sure. Besides, the worst part was why he did it.

“I was scared,” he says. “And I guess I wasn’t real happy with who I am.” He was just twenty-three, a year from the Big Test inflows Angeles, but he felt he was being tested all the time, especially the day he lost the Water for real. Earlier the author ex- LOUGANIS HAS HAD INJURIES, A pained the idea of “loss- DISLOCATED SHOULDER, chronic wresting the water.”

Here problems aggravated by a ganglion cyst, is what it means when one horrible crackup where he knocked the really happens to a base of his skull on the platform and was diver. Unconscious for fifteen minutes. But he says the worst was a wipeout at a meet in New Zealand in early ’84, because it bruised him body and soul.

He can remember it all too well: He is standing on the platform during practice, looking down at this strange pool with stripes across the walls and ceiling, long narrow stripes that ripple if you look at them too long. He is preparing himself for an inward three and half.

He counts, springs up, out, spinning, seeing the stripes fly by, and then he loses the water. Is it up, down, where? No time to decide. He sees the windows at the far end, stretches for them and lands, hard, flat on his back with a sickening slap.

Around the pool, there was silence. “Because everybody on the team was just like ‘Oh my God, Greg Louganis just wiped out.'” He’s not sure how, but he got out of the water laughing. The next day, he couldn’t get out of bed.

“I just ached so much, I felt like I had the flu,” he says.” I had trouble walking, because I had hit my calves on impact, too. I broke a lot of blood vessels in my back and the back of my legs. It had welted up.”

He was in serious pain for four days and decided onto compete in the meet. He didn’t want to screw himself up in a lousy striped tank of water. “I was afraid,” he says. “I was afraid if I had wiped-out again, then I would have to go back to easier dives.

I didn’t feel that I could afford to do that during the Olympic year.” His coach agreed, but, Louganis says, “I got a lot of flak from other divers. Had it been anybody else, they probably would have been consoling, saying, ‘It’s okay/But I caught so much flak.”

The flap was such that a team meeting was called, and while he was still sore and welted from losing the water, Greg Louganis finally stood up for himself. He talked back. He did it in front of a group of people. And it felt okay. Now Louganis talks to many groups: “organizations for the dyslexic, youth clubs, drug- and alcohol-rehab places, diving clinics.

He talks easily, about what it was like tube dyslexic, dependent on alcohol, and dozens, scores of times he has had to reassure young divers about chickening out or losing the water. He’s comfortable with people who admit to their fears.

He thinks he helps a little. There are a lot of stories about healing and forgiveness in Louganis narrative. His parents divorced four years ago, “and they’re dating again,” he says with a smile and shake of his head.

On his left hand, he wears a diamonding that once belonged to his grandfather Louganis and was given to him by his father. “He was supposed to leave it to me.

But he said that he wanted to see me enjoy it.” His parents come to see him compete; recently, he sent his mother and an aunt to Europe on his frequent-flier miles. He often has his parents to a barbecue at his home in Malibu-the one he finally got to buy, the only thing he owns.

It has a panoramic view of the Pacific from bluff above the beach, a redwood deck, a custom- built swimming pool with a one-meter platform. He looked forth right house for two years, searched from Santa Barbara to San Diego, and he works hard at appearances and en-horsemints to make the mortgage.

When he is home, he spends a lot of time in the kitchen. For Christmas, for Thanksgiving, friends, neighbors and relatives come to him, and he loves feeding them.