A Smile Helps Schoolboy Bear the Trauma of AIDS

--Ryan White is sometimes “pretty scared. Sometimes I just sit with mom and we talk.” The 14-year-old AIDS victim, who was interviewed on ABC’s Good Morning America, was also scheduled to attend a star-studded AIDS fund-raiser hosted by designer Calvin Klein and Elizabeth Taylor. Since his return April 10 to his seventh-grade classes, Ryan said, pupils have “treated me really good. They treated me just like anybody else.” Ryan resumed studies at Western Middle School near Kokomo, Ind., after a judge dissolved an injunction that kept him from class. The injunction was obtained by parents who were afraid their children might contract acquired immune deficiency syndrome from Ryan. Ryan contracted AIDS, which destroys the immune system, through a blood transfusion during treatment for his hemophilia. Experts say it cannot be transmitted by casual contact. Jeanne White said that when Ryan first was diagnosed in December, 1984, “I thought the same thing these parents thought. . . . You know it’s fatal; it’s scary. But the medical profession has reassured me and my daughter that we don’t have anything to worry about, and I don’t worry any more at all.” Said Mrs. White about her son: “He doesn’t give up. He has been through a lot of painful things, but he always keeps smiling and just keeps charging through.”

--Conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein says he “wouldn’t dream” of canceling his visit for a festival of his music over fears of terrorism. “There’s been tremendous exaggeration and anything that inspires panic or contagious fear is deplorable,” Bernstein said in London. In answer to a question, Bernstein agreed that the cancellation of European visits by tourists and notables like film director Steven Spielberg after the U.S. bombing of Libya looked like unjustified panic. The 67-year-old maestro spoke just before the opening of a two-week concert series of his music by the London Symphony Orchestra.