NATO Pilot Just One of the Guys

--”I don’t feel very special. I just did everything the guys did,” said Lt. Nelly Speerstra, 23, of Holland. And what the guys did was to complete the yearlong Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot training program at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Tex. Speerstra, who collected more than 300 hours of flying time in T-37 and T-38 trainers, received her wings at the base, becoming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s first woman combat fighter pilot. “I love to fly,” she said, “especially the low-level flying with sharp turns.” She will soon return to the Netherlands, where she will receive a year of training in the ultra-sophisticated F-16 jets. The shy, soft-spoken woman said she had few problems in cracking into one of the world’s most exclusive men’s clubs. “From the very beginning, the other students totally accepted me,” she said.

--Three weeks ago, Stacie Cummings was told by her doctor that she might have cancer of the colon and require surgery. While she waited for test results, the phone rang at her Bremerton, Wash., home--a wrong number and she almost hung up. “He sounded really groggy, and I could barely understand him at first,” Cummings said of the caller. “. . . He said he wanted to talk to his sister and was going to kill himself. I said, ‘No, you can’t do that,’ and stayed on the phone.” At one point, the man threatened to hang up, but Cummings, 26, told him that she had cancer and “that no matter what happened, I planned to live my life to the fullest. . . . I think that’s when it really started sinking in that he had something to live for.” She kept him on the phone for two hours, accepting charges when he hung up and called back collect, while authorities traced the call to an Augusta, Ga., hotel. The man was found there and taken to a hospital for mental evaluation. Meanwhile, Cummings said her doctor told her Friday that the tumor turned out to be benign.

--When is a doodle art? It may depend on the doodler. In this case, it was Nixon White House aide John D. Ehrlichman, who served 18 months in prison for Watergate offenses. His five pages of ink sketches and notes done while he was chief domestic adviser auctioned for $2,050 in New York. A profile of President Richard M. Nixon and other officials sketched during a budget meeting was the top seller at $577.50. “It’s not a bad drawing,” said auctioneer Herman Darvick. “He’s (Nixon) got a pretty big nose.” A buyer of one sketch, James R. Jard, a Houston lawyer, said he would probably hang the drawing in his office “to remind me and the others to do a better job as lawyers.”