The News Journal from Wilmington, Delaware • Page 59

Thursday, Nov. 28, 1985 Stocks, D1 5 Business, D1 8 1 SECTION Post office beefieg up parking-lot security The News Journal, Wilmington, occupied by three men. A second employee and Gatson's dinner companion, Delroy Hedley, were also attacked. "I talked to the postal inspectors in Philadelphia and they indicated a team would be out to assist us and get the system in place," Postmaster Richard F. Nye said Wednesday.

"I am not aware of any other assaults in the parking lot within the past six months, but we have had vandalism of cars, stolen hubcaps, and a supervisor's car was scratched up." Nye said a request for better security was forwarded to the federal authorities last spring after the incidents began. "I requested that we have a chain-link sliding security gate that would be activated when employees inserted their cards," Nye said, adding that the request was held up in the bureau- approved installation of a sliding electronic gate, increased parking-lot lighting, closed-circuit TV cameras and a sticker system for cars at the post office at 147 Quigley Blvd. Federal authorities hurried approval of the new security at the side parking lot following an incident at about 7:30 p.m. Saturday. Postal employee Melinda Gatson was beaten and dragged into a car By LORRAINE KIDD Staff reporters Recent incidents of assault and kidnapping, vandalism and theft in the parking lot of the Hares Corner Post Office have prompted federal officials to seek a new security system there.

After months of hearing complaints from employees, and receiving a petition from the postmaster, the federal government cracy. The contract for the fence installation went out for bids Monday and applicants have until Dec. 10 to return their sealed bids, Nye said, "It should be installed before the freezing weather comes." Gatson was held for nearly eight hours before she was released at 3:30 a.m. Sunday in Chester, police spokeswoman Cpl. Susan M.

Brady said. Gatson, who had suffered a broken nose and several minor injuries, was treated at Wilmington Hospital. Hedley was treated for an eye injury at St. Francis Hospital the next day. Both Hedley and Malcolm Smith, president the Wilmington American Postal Workers Union, claim that the incident is just the latest to See SECURITY D8 Money troubles put Channel 64 near shutdown '44 fl Stall photo by Fred Comegys SC3S0I13I cldjllStCr Gaily colored lights mark the holiday season, but for electrician Bill Thomas, at the Graylyn Crest Shopping Center on Wednesday, it was work.

Thomas has to string the lights and install bulbs. Wife's off the hook for burning clothes State decides evidence isn 't so hot, douses charges of arson, endangering others has yet to be named. Even if the bicentennial committee eventually approves the request, the station probably will be unable to obtain the additional funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, according to Leanne Phillips, WDPB's acting general manager. She said the deadline for seeking money from the corporation is in January. No more bicentennial grants are scheduled until about March.

The board of trustees is to meet Tuesday to decide the station's fate. McGinnis, a former Delaware lieutenant governor, said WDPB has several alternatives: It could close temporarily while awaiting funding. But he said returning to the air might be difficult because station employees would find work elsewhere during the shutdown. WDPB could be sold or merged with another station possibly WHYY-TV, Channel 12, in Wilmington. McGinnis characterized those ideas, however, as "thinking out loud" and said he hadn't investigated them.

Phillips said the station employs 1 1 people, seven of them full-time. The bicentennial committee's decision was the second major setback at the state level this year for WDPB. The station's request for $205,000 from this year's bond bill was rejected by the General Assembly. As a result, the station's only locally produced programs, the weekly news shows "Southern Delaware Today" and "Delaware News in Review," were discontinued in September. Only PBS shows have been aired since then.

man arrested Creek slaying pending extradition to Pennsylvania. There he will face charges in the June 23, 1980 shooting, authorities said. DeLoatch is charged in Pennsylvania with criminal homicide and conspiracy to commit criminal homicide in the death of Rivers, a Wilmington man who was 22 when he was killed, a Pennsylvania prosecutor said. See ARREST D8 Stall photo by Pat C'owe degree the old-fashioned way. By BRUCE PRINGLE Sussex Bureau reporter SEAFORD Financial difficulties may force Seaford's public television station, WDPB-TV, Channel 64, to leave the air as early as next week, station officials said Wednesday.

"I think we're going to wind up going out of business. I don't see much hope," said James D. McGinnis, president of WDPB's board of trustees. The possibility of a shutdown of the 4-year-old Public Broadcasting System affiliate became likely Tuesday, when the state Bicentennial Community Improvement Committee postponed acting on the station's request for a $205,000 grant. With that grant, McGinnis said, the station could have qualified for about $600,000 in additional funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The station's annual budget is about $500,000, he said. The state bicentennial committee is authorized to distribute $1.3 million for projects commemorating the 200th anniversary of Delaware's ratification of the Constitution in 1787. WDPB proposed to use committee funds to purchase new equipment and produce programs about the celebration. But the request was questioned on two grounds: Allowing part of the grant to be used to buy equipment might violate committee rules. Most bicentennial grants are intended to spruce up existing buildings.

J. Christopher Farlow, the station's former president and general manager, resigned effective Nov. 11, and a permanent replacement Wilmington in Red Clay By ROBERT ENGLER III Staff reporter A Wilmington man has been arrested on homicide and conspiracy charges in the June 1980 shotgun slaying of Leon Rivers, whose body was found in Red Clay Creek just north of the Pennsylvania state line, authorities said Wednesday. Jerome H. DeLoatch was charged in a Wilmington Municipal Court warrant as a fugitive and held without bail at Gander Hill Henighan is earning her medical Vt 2 a defendant, her husband, Michael Hall, and a couple of the Halls' neighbors, who had been attentive trial spectators.

Defense attorney Arlen Mekler explained his version of the case: At the time of the fire, the Halls had been estranged, and Darlene Hall had moved out of their apartment. After about two weeks, however on May 20 she came back to seek a reconciliation, only to find that Michael Hall wasn't there. She waited, and when he still hadn't come home after a long time, she got burned up, Mekler said. She wrote her missing husband some nasty notes, including one that said, "You jerk. It will get worse." She took his clothes off their hangers and dumped them on the floor.

Mekler said that while she was in the apartment, his client had washed a pair of her husband's work pants and one of his shirts. To dry them, she hung them on the inside of the partly opened oven door and turned on the oven, which, unknown to her, had a faulty thermostat. Joseph Scarmozzi, who lives in the apartment house, testified that he smelled smoke, determined it was coming from the Halls' apartment and reported it. Under cross-examination, Scarmozzi, who said he had been a volunteer fireman, testified that the water firefighters sprayed on the source of the smoke the scorched clothing could have forced the oven door shut. The only fire had been inside the stove, said Mekler.

"You don't start By TOM GREER Staff reporter What happened to some of Michael Hall's clothes shouldn't happen to a Thanksgiving turkey. His wife burned them in the oven. Even worse, Darlene P. Hall, 29, was charged with first-degree arson and three counts of recklessly endangering the lives of three other-occupants of Building 6, Du Pont Parkway Apartments, where the fire occurred last May 20. But the Halls will have a happy holiday after all.

During the second day of Darlene Hall's Superior Court trial Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General Leo J. Ramunno suddenly told Judge Clarence W. Taylor that he was dropping all four charges. There were whoops of delight from the Spunk smooths tough path Determined medical student nearing her goal a house fire in an oven." Ramunno said he decided to drop the charges for several reasons: The damage was minor; and a recent death in the family of a key prosecution witness prevented that witness from testifying. There were also problems with some of the evidence, he said.

The clothes hangers and photos of the scene were lost. And most of the prosecution's witnesses recanted the statements they had made earlier to the fire marshal, he added. Ramunno decided it was an "uphill battle" and that it would be best to "save the taxpayers some money," he explained, adding that the best he could have hoped for if the trial had continued was a hung jury. Violet A. I "i i She quit her job, put the house she'd owned for two years on the market, sold most of her furniture to pay bills, loaded what possession were left into her father's pickup truck and headed home to Lawrenceville, Va.

Her daughters, Millicent, then 15, and Maureen, then 13, looked up at her, she recalls, and asked, "Is our lifestyle going to change?" "I said, 'You bet your bippy it's going to Today, Millicent is an architectural student at Hampton (Va.) University, and Maureen, who entered college at 16, is a senior dance major at Goucher College in Baltimore. "They are beautiful girls," Henighan says. "Not picky, and we all have worked three or four jobs at once" to pay for schooling. Before she could think seriously about medical school, Henighan had the small matter of college before her. She got a scholarship to St.

Paul's College, an Episcopalian college in Lawrenceville, but still had to hold as many jobs as she could to support her daughters and herself. She enrolled in January 1980. By spring of 1983, she had finished four years of course work to get a bachelor's degree, summa cum laude, first in her class, in biology and chemistry. The college had advised her she was too old to get into medical school, but she said she was determined. "I said, 'I'm going to try until I'm Then I said, 'No, I'm going to try until I get She had lined up a fellowship in public health at an Ohio See DOCTOR D8 By JANE HARRIMAN Staff reporter Someday in the not-too-distant future, Violet Alfreda Walker Henighan will take her daughters and check into the Homestead, the very luxurious resort in Hot Springs, where she used to work as a "butter girl." A "butter girl," she explains, is the rarely tipped servant whose job is to keep butter, rolls and salad dressing flowing in the hotel dining room.

The job was rough on the feet, and the fancy, low-cut uniform was uncomfortable, but Henighan, 38, is not bitter about it. Neither is she bitter about working as a laundress, cleaning woman, or any of the multitude of boring and physicially draining jobs she's held. In fact, she's grateful because they were all part of her dream of becoming a physician. This month, Henighan, now a third-year student at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, has been doing her surgical rotation, observing and assisting in the operating room at Riverside Hospital, Wilmington. What makes her story remarkable is that she fell in love and married right out of high school in a small town in Virginia.

She had two daughters, was divorced, and then, having to support her children single-handedly, went to work as a clerk for the U.S. Postal Service in Baltimore. "I'd always wanted to be a doctor," she says. As a child she'd known and loved the kindly black family doctor who made house calls, and had delivered her and three of her brothers and sisters at home. One day in July 1979, she says, "I decided, 'I'm going to try for 1.