The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 29

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 1987 The Palm Beach Post SECTION Accent pau.i i Did Soviets hide identity of executed teen in 1941? Investigators claim girl Jewish, denied honors Mind your bumpers and you'll be driven to good behavior I saw a bumper sticker the other day that stopped me in my tracks. Well, that's not true because I was going 55 mph. I guess what it did was give me pause, and during that pause, I solved the problem of making everybody in the U.S.A. happier, better citizens. The bumper sticker said: "Please flash lights to pass." What a great idea.

Any courteous act on the highways that keeps other drivers advised of your intentions is good for everybody. Now I will 73v 1 TtrN always flash my lights. And when drivers pass me I'll do just like the truck drivers and flash my lights to indicate it's safe for them to cross back in front of me. Even though we're grown up, we still need a mom and dad telling us to shape up. Maybe a new generation of didactic bumper stickers TV Ron Wiggins Wmm -Jir -us Ajf4 ffimM LINA LAWSONStaff Artist can become our surrogate parents.

Correct behavior, I choose to think, is teachable if it is passed on in a polite, non-judgmental manner. Bumpers can be that bully pulpit for a more civil union. Here's some bumper stickers that would do some good: "Please acknowledge your waitress." Did you know that many people treat waitresses and waiters as if they were the drive-through speaker at Burger King? No eye contact, no greeting, just eyes on the menu and "Waddaya get with the turkey club?" Such people don't mean to be insensitive. They probably think the waitress appreciates an efficient, let's-get-on-with-it attitude. Yes, they do like decisiveness.

They also want a moment of person-to-person civility with the people they serve. "Please don't throw trash out the window." You argue that the kind of people who trash the roadsides will ignore that message. I'm not so sure. If you threaten them with a $50 fine for littering, they laugh because they know that's not going to happen unless a cop catches them in the act. I maintain that a polite request showing up on bumper after bumper carries the weight of community sentiment.

Most of us want clean roadsides. Because there are so many litterers I am sure those who throw their refuse out the windows asssume "everybody does it." Most of us do not do it, and I think we should acknowledge litterers for what they are: people who could do better. "Please pay your share of taxes." I would guess most of us have fudged on our taxes at one time or another OK, cheated on our taxes. Would we cheat a little less if politely asked not to? My guess is yes. "Send a thank-you note." My wife is much better at this than I am, and I squirm in shame to think of the many kindnesses I have enjoyed and acknowledged only by promising to return the favor.

My wife always remembers to send a gracious note when we have been a guest or received a favor. But when I was growing up, my mom made me send thank-you notes and I was a better person for it then. I need to be exhorted to better behavior. "Good guests help with the groceries." When you stay with someone for a few days, do you chip in? Of course you do. Have you ever known anyone who was under the impression that you got your groceries free? Some people need reminding.

"Please signal a lane change." Signaling before changing lanes should be reflexive, but I'm sure I need to be reminded from time to time. So do others. Put it on bumpers. I wonder if the signs on convenience store doors that remind armed robbers of the prison term they face do any good. I suspect they turn the occasional first-timer away from time to time.

Could it hurt to post another sign saying, "Please do not rob this Maybe I'm getting too ambitious. I think the thing to do is start small and work up to the major character issues. So what do you think would you become a better person if everywhere you looked there were bumper stickers admonishing you to: Soak your cereal bowl. Let the phone ring at least six times. Don't crack your knuckles.

Close your mouth when you eat. Don't cross your eyes what if they got stuck that way? A TOWN BY ANY OTHER NAME By BILL KELLER New York Times News Service MINSK, U.S.S.R. The sequence of photographs is among the most vivid and famous from the Nazi occupation, reproduced in Soviet textbooks, encyclopedias, films and museums. Oct. 26, 1941: Impassive SS men lead a teenage girl, a boy and a man through the streets of Minsk and hang them side by side at the gates of a yeast factory.

To the guides who escort tourists throught the Minsk Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War and to Byelorussian Communist Party leaders, the girl remains officially, resolutely "nyeizvestnaya" "unknown." But a trove of evidence compiled by Soviet journalists, backed by the testimony of survivors and endorsed by a prominent criminologist, supports the claim that the girl is Masha Bruskina, a Jew from the Minsk ghetto who was active in the Partisan resistance. Ultimate 'refusenik' Many Jews of Minsk regard the unknown Partisan as the ultimate "refusenik," refused her place in history because she was a Jew and to honor her would be to honor the heroism of Jews in World War II. Now there are promises of a book, a new scholarly investigation, and perhaps a lawsuit aimed at overcoming official objections and winning recognition of Masha Bruskina in her native city. "It is only stupidity and meanness that stand in the way," said Ada Dikh-tyar, a Moscow journalist who became swept up in the story 20 years ago and remains haunted by it. "The times are changing, and I'm convinced that in the next year we'll finally bring this to a proper conclusion." The girl in the photographs is widely believed to have been the first person publicly executed during the Nazi occupation of Soviet territory.

The two companions hanged alongside her Kirill Trus and Volodya Sherbatsey-vich, Partisans of Byelorussian stock were identified by family members within a few years of the war, and posthumously decorated. Picture identified in 1967 Twenty years ago Lev Arkadyev, a screenwriter working on a film about the war, saw the photographs in the Minsk Museum and resolved to identify the unknown Partisan. He enlisted Dikhtyar, then a reporter for the Soviet Youth radio station "Yunost," and they began a painstaking investigation. A local reporter for the Minsk evening newspaper helped by publishing the photograph in early 1968, with a plea for information. It brought independent letters from several readers who said they recognized the girl as Masha Bruskina.

One of the most authoritative witnesses was Zahir I. Azgur, Masha Bruskina's uncle, with whom the girl lived before the war. Azgur is a professional sculptor, a connoisseur of faces. Now 80 years old, he recalls that he recognized the picture with absolute, painful certainty. "That's why I rarely go to the war museum now," he said during a tour of his studio, which is lined to the high ceiling with idealized busts of Soviet leaders and cultural figures.

"I'm afraid to meet with Mashinka. There she's considered a person without a name and without relatives including me." 20 witnesses not enough In all, the investigators turned up more than 20 witnesses, including Ma-sha's father, school principal and classmates, whose signed statements and tape-recorded interviews Dikhtyar keeps in her apartment by the Moskva River. At the end they took their evidence to an official police expert in Moscow, a specialist in identifying war and accident victims. He presented them with a signed statement that their evidence was conclusive. During the early occupation, the witnesses recounted, Masha Bruskina worked as a medical assistant in a hospital that the Nazis had converted to a prison camp for wounded Soviet soldiers.

In league with Partisan groups operating near the city, she smuggled in civilian clothes and false documents to be used by escaping officers. Dikhtyar sees her heroism not in any dramatic exploits but in Masha's pride and poise. She lightened her hair and used her mother's name, which was not distinctively Jewish. She re-' Please see PARTISAN9D ceded that Tequesta is a more attractive name than the tribe which had resided in the area the Jeaga. Jupiter, Jupiter Inlet Colony: These towns got their names in a complicated way, DuBois said.

When the Spaniards arrived in the 1500s, they found a local Indian village called Hobe (pronounced ho-BAY). That name survives at Hobe Sound in Martin County. The English, arriving in the 1700s, saw the name Hobe on the Spanish map and thought it was Spanish for Jove, the Latin name for the Greek god Zeus. The British favored the more common Latin name for Zeus Jupiter. Juno Beach: When a sister settlement to Jupiter was built on Lake Worth, settlers decided to name it for the god's wife, Juno.

In 1890, businessmen developed a 7 -mile railroad linking Jupiter to Juno, which had become seat of the giant Dade County (now split into several counties.) They named two other stops Mars and Venus, and cleverly named the entire operation "The Celestial Railroad." After Henry Flagler's railroad put it out of business six years later, a section of Jupiter was named Neptune, for the Greek god of the sea. It was swallowed by the town of Jupiter in 1908. Boca Raton: This is probably the most disputed of town name origins. Boca Raton is Spanish for "mouth of the rat." Many believe the name has something to do with the curved shape of the inlet. The official Please see TOWN NAMES7D By ELIOT KLEINBERG Palm Beach Post Staff Writer WEST PALM BEACH-Yes, it's named for the palm trees.

But Greenacres City has nothing to do with Eddie Albert. And Tequesta was named for the wrong Indians. Here then is the definitive word, according to local historians and town officials, on how the towns in these parts earned their names with the warning that many of the explanations have been disputed at one time or another. Palm Beach, West Palm Beach, North Palm Beach, South Palm Beach, Royal Palm Beach, Palm Beach Gardens, Palm Beach Shores: They all sprang from the original "Palm Beach" named in 1886 for the proliferation of coconut palm trees descended from the cargo of the Providencia. The ship, carrying 20,000 coconuts from Trinidad to Cadiz, Spain, wrecked on the beach Jan.

9, 1878. Two entrepreneurs claimed the wreck and began selling the coconuts for 2Vfe cents apiece, according to the book Yesterday's Palm Beach. Settlers bought huge amounts and planted them on their homesteads, and within a decade, the area was lush with trees. Greenacres City: When the town was settled in 1926, residents were asked to submit names, said Evelyn Wheeles, city council member and retired town clerk. She said the winning name was drawn from a hat, and no one knows why the contestant selected it.

Earlier this year, resi- dents asked the city council to consider a name change because of the adverse publicity garnered from the 1960s comedy, Green Acres. The council declined. Tequesta: This city was established in the 1950s by developer Charles Martyn. He liked the name, but apparently did not realize it referred to a tribe farther south in the Miami area, according to Bessie Du-Bois, who has written books on Juno Beach, the Jupiter Lighthouse, Loxa-hatchee, and the many shipwrecks off the coast of Jupiter. She said she and other historians tried to convince Martyn to select a name reflecting local tribes.

But Martyn told them he had already printed promotional material bearing the name "Tequesta," and would not change. DuBois con- Cable TV shifting emphasis to original programming By DIANE HAITHMAN Los Angeles Times News Service HOLLYWOOD Instead of the familiar menu of theatrical movies and second-run network programming, expect a broader array of original productions on cable TV this fall as the companies scramble to carve a unique and marketable niche in the competitive video market. Although most cable companies will continue to rely at least in part on recent theatrical releases and syndicated programming to fill out their schedules, cable representatives say that original offerings including comedy, variety, special events, made-for-cable movies and that nebulous commodity called "reality programming" are by necessity becoming the staple of cable TV. Some cable companies are developing situation-comedy and drama series, but the focus is on specials and movies that do not fit the current network issue movie mold. "I think the entire marketplace has changed," said Rick Bieber, a senior vice president at Home Box Office.

"We certainly no longer see ourselves as just a distributor of theatrical films to the household. We see ourselves as a full-fledged production company." HBO has stepped up its production of original movies because they have become at least 50 percent more popular than the theatrical movies that inspired the Home Box Office name, Bieber said. The number of movies produced per year has risen from six to eight in 1983 to 10 to 12 in 1987. "We see a great deal of interest in original programming," said Fred Schneier, executive vice president of Showtime-The Movie Channel. He estimated that 30 percent of the company's prime-time offerings this fall will be original productions.

"It's very much a part of the staff of our lives. These are the things we can provide as a major alternative to network and (other) pay-TV services." Please see CABLE8D 1 I mUXMs 1 Remember 'College Bowl'? The Disney Channel has revived the student quiz show on Sundays..