For the Homeless, Her Policy Is Strictly Open Door

Marie-Therese Demers is living the old adage that charity begins at home. In the last four years, the 57-year-old widow has taken more than 150 people with no place to live into her Enfield, Conn., home. Some stay a few months, others stay longer. Demers, who has an accounting job with a South Windsor distributor of construction materials, estimates that her charity has cost her about $10,000. Her first guest, a 17-year-old boy who wandered into a soup kitchen where Demers had volunteered and asked for a place to stay so he could enroll in high school, is still living with her. The mother of 15 children, Demers has a few simple rules: no drinking, no drugs, a 10 p.m. curfew and everyone who can work must. Those who are employed pay her $50 a week. Only five people have had to leave for breaking the rules. Demers “is really concerned for the poor,” said Father Raymond Gallagher, her parish priest and a member of the board of the Enfield Shelter for the Homeless, which Demers founded.

--Officials at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., are finding it hard to be philosophical about a hoax. It seems that the national “Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education in Philosophy” given to the small liberal arts college doesn’t exist. The college received a letter from Newark, Del., last November announcing the honor. The letter was on letterhead stationery of the American Philosophical Assn., based at the University of Delaware. But when a newspaper contacted David Hoekman, executive secretary of the APA, he said he did not write the letter that carried his signature. John Stuhr, chairman of Whitman’s philosophy department, said: “I have no idea what the motivation would be.”

--India’s Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi is a man in a hurry, and two Indian newspapers blamed his fast driving for the wreck of an escort car. The Sunday Observer and Sunday Mail said in front-page stories that the accident occurred when Gandhi, 42, accelerated his Mercedes-Benz to 72 m.p.h. Friday in downtown New Delhi en route to the Mahatma Gandhi memorial. An escort car, a slower, Indian-made Ambassador, accelerated to keep up, but the prime minister suddenly slowed and the escort vehicle rammed a curb to avoid hitting his car, the papers said. The driver was bruised and the escort car was badly damaged, the reports said. S.G. Lal, a spokesman for the prime minister’s office, confirmed there had been a minor accident, but gave no details. Said the Observer: “Apart from posing a danger to his own security escort, pedestrians and stray buffaloes have had miraculous escapes several times in the past from the Rajiv-mobile.”