Daily News from New York, New York • 3

-'iOlonclayMay 1986 DAILY" News 3 IflliiliiiM iwlllililiii" -fliiM itt Si8 FAMOUS FACES JOIN HANDS: At Battery Park, it was (I. to Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, Matilda Cuomo, Cardinal O'Connor, Gov. Cuomo and Harry Belafonte. MISHA ERWITTOAILV NEWS off fcll fc M(a fast For 15 shining minutes, they bridged the land with hands, hearts and harmony and with symbols over the barren, burning miles where flesh could not meet flesh.

i (ii GmD Qmd on clto'te Qbqd diQj And when they broke the Hands Across America human chain that stretched 4,124 miles between little Amy Sherwood, in Battery Park on the tip of Manhattan, to the seven homeless members of Bill Jones' fami- taongoir ffir mgdqdgD onus By DON GENTILE Tbls story was reported by Robert Gearty, Don Gentile and Thomas Hanrahan. It was written by Charles W. Bell. She stood in shocking pink pants, with pink ribbons in her hair and' a Hands Across America T-shirt drooping down around her knees. She gripped her mother's hand, grinned and sang, "We are the world, we are the children Little Amy Sherwood, 6 years old and all of 3-feet-6, was No.

1 in the most famous line of them all. She also was a most suitable symbol of the cause aid to America's homeless and hungry. Until two weeks ago, Amy and her family lived in a seedy New York welfare hotel, dodging drugs and prostitutes during the day and going to bed hungry at night. "I'd like everybody to have a nice home, and everybody to eat properly," said Amy, who just moved with her mother and five brothers and sisters to their own apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The kindergarten girl's mother, Jean Sherwood, 40, said she and her six children, ages 3 to 14, joined the city's homeless last summer when she was evicted from her apartment.

She said they slept for two weeks on wooden benches in a city-run shelter and then lived for 11 months in a seedy welfare hotel near Penn Station. "It was so hard," Amy said. "I was scared." Organizers of the event said they found Amy at the hotel when they were filming a music video to promote the fund-raiser. Today, Amy attends PS 142 iq. Bay Ridge.

She says she would like to become a doctor. Or a dancer. Or a nurse. Charles W. Bell Daily News Stan Writer Fred Klein, who is 43 and has been on welfare "for a year," arrived by subway from the Inwood section of Manhattan.

Sandra Kas-chube, a 25-year-old music teacher, drove down from Connecticut and "actually found a parking spot." And me well, I was thankfully covering a story that spoke of only good news. We three Klein to my left and Kaschube to my rightr wound up hand in hand on the West Side Highway at 96th St. yesterday. For 15 minutes, we were one in spirit with fellow countrymen in the charity event dubbed Hands Across America. Critics may have thought it hokey, but it was a heartless person who didn't feel pride about a national attempt to raise money for the hungry and homeless.

Klein felt it midway through the song "We Are the World," as he got into the spirit of things and did his impersonation of Bruce Springsteen. Then he got a bit teary-eyed watching a mother, hug her infant and sway to the music. Before the event, Klein, who grew up poor on the lower East Side, described his life as a "hard-luck one." He has been hopping around from job to job since an honorable discharge from the service in 1971. The last job he held was two years back, in the computer room of the city Hu- See PRIDE Page 15 ly, at the pier in Long Beach, they had contributed uncounted millions of dollars to feed America's homeless and hungry. In New York, officials estimated that more than 200,000 men, women and children jammed the 12-mile Big Apple leg, five times the number needed to fill the line.

"America," said actor Ben Vereen, "you're looking good today." 'It was fun' "It was fun," said Amy Sherwood, the 6-year-old daughter in a homeless fami- See HANDS Page 15.