The Cincinnati Enquirer from Cincinnati, Ohio • Page 54

ADVICE E-2 PUZZLES E-14 AGIMG E-8 SEWING E-4 GARDENING E-6 A i 3 I 1 i EDITOR: JOHN KIESEWETTER, 369-101 1 THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER Isorly 2Q yosrs qqq, tlio city uas in a Jim Knippenberg TPOFF 'TUTT nwiii'mwiii li iijilli. -n it rt si mm in i j. i4 i Ml? 3 1 i 1 rt I nnnnn an Oh No, More Water As if they weren't getting wet enough on Kings Island White Water Canyon, now there's this: The park found a way to get riders wetter. What KI did was go to the observation deck, where people afraid to ride watch UDU JU uu I 1 those who aren't, try to avoid a wall of water, and install a coin-operated box from which observers can set off geysers a few feet upstream. Observers can't aim fa I I I 1 I I II I 1 i '-1 1 1: i r.

jt i i 11 i fi L. I -Z- 1. i'! fm i I I -i-g I -t4 1 I i 1 hi iH "ZjzsjX fBmmmmf iwiiullu i itmmmm X- i iQ lyt i to if 1 lr r.r 3-1 iff 1 or anything, but for 25 cents they get five shots at floaters which we're sure will be friends and not some poor soul with her hair plastered into 7-feet of Grecian curls such as they wear at bowling banquets so at least one shot should be a hit. Today is KI's last day of the season and the thing will be operating unless it's either too cold or the park's full of people with IVi feet of newly engineered Grecian curls. Head Music Indeed From our file of Things Nobody's Going To Believe But It Was In The New England Journal So It Must Be True: A Dr.

James Allen of the Minneapolis Clinic of Psychiatry and BY DALE PARRY The Cincinnati Enquirer Nancy Carlquist, up in Apartment 12, said the elevator at the Brittany Apartments gave her the creeps, but she wasn't sure why. Her neighbors down in Apartment 7 could have told her. Katie Slater and Megan Balterman had heard stories about what happened in the elevator nearly two decades ago. There was a murder in that cramped little lift not just any murder, but the seventh in a series attributed to a man police came to call the Cincinnati Strangler. And it wasn't just any woman who died.

It was Lula Kerrick, an 81-year-old ailing spinster who lived alone, on the fourth floor of the West Ninth Street building, in Apartment 7. "We lived here for a while before we found out," Balterman said. The Brittany, once run-down and inhabited primarily by low-income and elderly people like Lula Kerrick, has been restored to its earlier magnificence. These days, it's full to bursting with yuppies and incurable urbanites who like being plugged into downtown, who can afford to pay rent in the $500 range and who, the women in Apartment 7 said, don't feel obliged to discuss much of anything in the hallways. A FRIEND eventually told Slater, 35, and Balterman, 33, what had happened in the elevator on Dec.

9, 1966. How somebody had caught Miss Kerrick as she was returning from morning Mass at nearby St. Peter-in-Chains Cathedral. How he had trapped her in the elevator and strangled her with one of her own stockings. Slater and Balterman knew about that.

But, until they were asked about their tenure in No. 7, neither realized they had been living in the victim's apartment. When she saw the old newspaper clippings, Balterman dug through her purse, pulled out a Carlton menthol and lit it with a nervous hand. "It's not haunted or anything, for sure," she said. But she admitted that she was kind of glad they were moving out in a few days.

After 2'A years in the Brittany, Slater and Balterman checked out a week ago. "It's not because we don't like it," Balterman said. Slater's getting a new writing Job and moving back into her parents' home; Balterman, a pastry chef at a nearby restaurant, has a new place, too. Apartment 7 has the vacancy sign out. SO DOES Apartment 1 at the building on Price Hill's Rutledge Avenue, just off Glenway.

The man who had lived there for more than a dozen years died just a few (Please see STRANGLER, Page E-3) i i I' Neurology reports he treated a 70-year-old lady when too much aspirin caused her to hear 'When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" and other golden oldies ringing in her head. Sure, Allen says, aspirin aggravates tinnitus or ringing in the ears, but it doesn't usually ring in tune. The first doctors thought it was radio waves on her hearing aid, but they couldn't find a station playing it. Enter Allen, who cut her from 12 apsirin a day to 6, figuring headaches are better than Irish saloon music, and ended the symptoms. Happily, her condition never got so ugly it starting into "Having Our Baby" or anything like that.

If Oddly Noted The Cincinnati EnquirerAnnalisa Kraft MEGAN BALTERMAN, left, and Katie Slater, until recently, were residents of the Brittany Apartments. And for goodness sakes, haven't they been busy in the filler industry, all the time writing strange little items to fill the paper when real stories come up short? Today's crop: The Magellanic penguin spends five months a year at sea, never once touching land; in Panic Oos City's Eloaetion To 'Strangler5 Wy the other seven A Jr months they dress Jfj up like Esther fl lmiKnmc nr. A (net-all sparklers in their hair. John Tyler, with 15 children, was the nation's 7l: i I I pi 11 ff jrfjllflfli: I' 'ri i.wii.ii.imim,!""!!' I i tl i I 'i 1. I'll Nearly 20 years ago, terror gripped Cincinnati and held it for 53 weeks, as seven women were murdered by strangulation.

Six of the seven were elderly-between 51 and 81 years old; Five were raped in the attacks. The city's reaction was pure panic. City council called special sessions. Police worked around the clock. A clue hotline rang off the hook.

Halloween trick-or-treating in 1966 was moved to daylight hours. Meter readers and mail carriers found themselves locked out of apartment buildings by distrusting tenants. firearms sales skyrocketed and dog breeders all the guard dogs they could train. Hardware stores couldn't keep locks In stock. The chief topic of gossip was a man people began calling "The Cincinnati Strangler." WALNUT HILLS housewife Emogene Harrington, 56, was the first to die, on Dec.

2, 1965. Four months later, Lois Dant, 58, was found dead in her Price Hill home. Mathilda Jeannette Messer, 56, was found bludgeoned, raped and strangled in Burnet Woods on June 10, 1966, and barely a month later Barbara Bowman, 31, was killed in Price Hill. On Oct. 11, 1966, someone strangled Alice Hochhausler, 51, In Clifton.

Nine days after that, 61-year-old Rose Winstell was found dead In her Corryville home. And on Dec. 9, 1966, a neighbor at the downtown Brittany Apartments called for the elevator and found the body of Lula Kerrick, 81, inside. Finally, police arrested Posteal Laskey a 29-year-old laborer and former taxi driver with a record of assaults on women. He was tried and convicted of first-degree murder in the slaying of Barbara Bowman.

Later, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. After several requests for parole, he remains in the London Correctional Institution. Sgt. Paul Morgan, of the Cincinnati Police Homicide Squad, worked on all The Strangler cases and arrested Laskey for the Bowman killing. Morgan says prosecutors pursued the Bowman case simply because it "was the best case." But he says police found similarities and links between Laskey and the deaths of other victims.

"WHEN YOU saw one (of The Strangler's) victims," Morgan says, "you'd seen all of them. All the victims were left in an identical position. All except Barbara Bowman." Bowman was found stabbed In the throat. Attempts had been made to strangle and rape her. She died shortly after being found and without identifying her assailant.

Laskey was not charged with the other sex-related killings. But police named him as the prime suspect. After his arrest, the killings ceased. most prolific president; probably missed a lot of Cabinet meetings, too, but nobody was tacky enough to keep count. Traveling 55 mph, a body could drive to the sun in 193 years, which is less time than it takes to cross the Brent Spence Bridge.

There are 3,500 square inches of skin covering the average adult but Shelley Winters, Orson Welles and Mount St. Helens have a tad more. One Bigg Cake Don't know for sure, but it's our guess there's a very tired chicken out in Clermont County somewhere. That would be the chicken the 49 stores in Biggs Place hired to lay the eggs for their 10-foot birthday cake. It's for a party, don't you know, celebrating the mall's first birthday; but it's also for a contest: Without asking the chicken, guess how many eggs went into the cake and enter the estimate by Saturday at any store out there.

Best guess gets a week for two in Orlando; worst guess has to, we don't know, go comfort the chicken. Do it early in the day, too, on account of the first 50 customers in each store this week get a shot at a freebie shopping spree. And heck, as long as you're there, throw in a round of clapclapclaps. THIS WAS the scene in front of the Brittany in 1966. Anthropologists Apply Method To Marketing Inside BY LAWRENCE KILAAAN The Associated Press When anthropologists venture into the American marketplace, the notes from their journals might surprise even Margaret Mead.

Consider, for example, the finding that Southern men take pride in their pot bellies, and that there's a common denominator between cannibals and non-joggers. Steve Barnett got his doctorate in anthropology at the University of Chicago, then taught at Princeton, Brown and MIT before joining the consulting firm of Planmetrics. NOW, INSTEAD of observing cultural forces in India, where he did his academic research, Barnett is helping to sell clothing, diapers and nuclear power. Barnett has assembled five anthropologists, a sociologist, a social psychologist and a statistician, who are called in for the tough jobs, when traditional market research fails. Where other marketers use focus groups, direct questioning and opinion polls, Planmetrics uses direct observation.

Barnett's group analyzes what it sees. The technique, which can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $300,000, appears to be working. Planmetrics' clients include Royal Dutch Shell, Procter Gamble, Westinghouse, Kimberly-Clark, Del Monte Foods, and the U.S. Department of Energy. The $300,000 job was for a government agency and "it involved secrecy, that's all I can say," Barnett said.

"I GET called into projects that have proved intractable by normal research methods," he said. It was during a project for a department store chain that Barnett made his amazing discovery about pot-bellied Southern men. Planmetrics was asked to determine what features made certain styles of ca sual jackets popular with men. "We felt if you looked at how they tried them on, you'd find out what's Important to them," Barnett said, so the team put video cameras behind one-way mirrors in the mens' clothing section. The technique worked and the client was satisfied, but it was one irrelevant observation which fascinated Barnett: In Southern stores, pot-bellied men would choose jackets that looked too tight, then turn -sideways and admire their bulging profiles.

"WE DISCOVERED people were quite proud of having grown that belly," Bar; nett said. "Rather than get a looser jacket that would hide it, they got one to show it off." A project for a soup company led Barnett to see a connection between the exercise boom and cannibalistic culture. When it comes to exercise, many Americans believe in what anthropologists call "contagious magic" the belief that prompts cannibals to eat their enemies to obtain their power. It is the same belief that prompts some loafers to call themselves Joggers when all they've done is gone out and bought running clothes. Barnett found that some Americans-you know who you are act as if "owning jogging clothes is as good as if you jogged." One client spent $20,000 on a two-month project to find out how to improve disposable diapers.

Barnett set up video cameras in child care centers and watched 70 volunteer parents diaper their babies. For a company using nuclear power, Barnett asked groups of consumers to build nuclear power plants out of common household items. All of them enclosed their models with a cake cover, indicating a connection between enclosure and safety. Advertisements were changed to include the image of the nuclear plant's dome clicking shut like a lid. 'Kids' Helping Kids 1 "Klds on tne BIock" Puppets I are visiting schoolrooms in Cincinnati and across the nation to help children understand and accept the handicapped.

Traditional Women Unite 1j Disenfranchised feminists 1 and other traditional women have slowly begun to organize. They call themselves the Concerned Women for America, a politically conservative, Christian organization that estimates its current donor base at 150,000..