On-the-Go Granny Turns Heads

The funniest part, says a motorcycle-riding grandmother of 61, is when motorists pass by and “they always look back and say: ‘Yes, it is a woman.’ I can tell from their lips.” Hazel Kolb, a retired school bus driver from Hannibal, Mo., took her own advice of “get off your duff and go” to make her first long solo motorcycle trip a year after her husband died. That trip, tracing the perimeter of the 48 contiguous states, launched the road-riding days of the “Motorcyclin’ Granma,” as a sign on the back of her $10,000 FLT Harley Davidson proclaims. Kolb recently finished her second marathon solo tour, to all 50 states, rolling into Juneau, Alaska, her final stop. “This is it, my last capital,” Kolb said, minutes after shaking the hand of Gov. Steve Cowper--”My 10th governor.”

--The fur flew when opponents of the animal skin industry learned that Prince Andrew and his wife, the former Sarah Ferguson, had accepted two fur coats from the government of Alberta province in Canada. That furor apparently was enough to cause the prince to have second thoughts about the mink coat he recently purchased as a first anniversary gift for his wife, fashion designers said, reporting that the prince will return the coat. No money had changed hands in the purchase of the ranch mink with a hand-painted lining by Clifford Yong, valued in the tens of thousands of dollars, they said.

--Here comes the judge, and the jury, under a new law in Illinois that makes previously exempt officials such as judges and police officers eligible for jury duty. Among the first of the newly eligible officials to enter the jury box was Lake County Associate Judge Barbara Gilleran-Johnson, who is serving on a jury deliberating in a drunken-driving case. “I’ve tried cases, I’ve defended cases and I judge cases, but I’ve never seen how a jury deliberates, and how a jury elects a foreman,” she said.

--Ignorance of the laws of nature led to the unnecessary massacre of hundreds of baby swallows, say Colorado wildlife officials, who are filing charges against Mountainside Condominiums in the slaughter. The management company at the Frisco complex knocked down about 100 swallows nests with the baby birds still in them after residents complained of potential health hazards from the mud nests clinging to the walls of the complex. But district wildlife manager Alex Chappell said the slaughter could have been avoided had the company waited a week, when the birds would have been large enough to fly. Migratory birds are protected under Colorado and federal law, he said.