Gondola

The parents of an 11-year-old girl who fell to her death from a Wildwood Ferris wheel June 3 have sued Morey's Piers, operators of the amusement ride. "It's a really sad story; she was a promising little girl," James Beasley Jr., a lawyer for the family of the victim, Abiah Jones, of Pleasantville, N.J., said yesterday after filing the suit. The lawsuit, which didn't specify an amount sought but asked for a jury trial, was filed by Twanda and Byron Jones in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, instead of New Jersey.

Robert Z. Snyder, 81, who operated the centrifuge that helped prepare John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom and the rest of America's earliest astronauts for their rocket rides into space, died Feb. 6 in Nashville. Mr. Snyder, who was born in Philadelphia and earned his electrical engineering degree at Drexel University, supervised the centrifuge at the Naval Air Development Center in Warminster in the early 1960s. It was an exciting time at Warminster, where the astronauts came to ride the centrifuge, a gondola rigged like the cabin of a spacecraft that whirled at the end of a 50-foot scaffold.

Everyone came, or so it felt Thursday night at the final concert of the Chamber Music Society's season, featuring pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the Borletti-Buitoni Ensemble, young players supported by an unusual noncompetitive trust that Uchida founded and to which she gives much time and thought. In the Perelman Theater were pianists, poets, composers, professors and, leaning over the balcony rail, some children. They heard a program more unusual than usual: late Bartok, very late Liszt, and Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time.

Four children were hospitalized last night for injuries they received when one of two towers supporting a bungee ride on Steel Pier collapsed onto a children's bumper-car ride below, police said. A 16-year-old girl, two 12-year-old boys and a 10-year-old boy were taken to Atlantic City Medical Center, where they were being evaluated late into the evening, said Atlantic City Police Sgt. Joseph LaTorre. The children, whose identities were not released, were among five or six people riding on the bumper cars when the tower collapsed, he said.

WHEN the Eagles' new stadium was named Lincoln Financial Field, we were told by the CEO of Lincoln that nicknames were being discouraged because they would dishonor the memory of Abraham Lincoln. That sounded silly. Now, it sounds silly and hypocritical. During the broadcast of the Eagles' first preseason game, we were treated to two commercials for Lincoln Financial. In the first, an Abe Lincoln look-alike gave a man golfing tips. In another, he rowed a gondola through the canals of Venice.

About the only skill that Vladan Mitrovic lacked as a popular representative of this resort - which specializes in spiriting American skiers away to an ambience of Austria - was the ability to yodel. The 26-year-old native Yugoslav promised with a smile that he would work on it. Mitrovic was our combination ski instructor and mountain guide during an "escape" week at the Stratton ski resort in March. His was the crucial role in a ski-vacation package that surpassed the hype of Stratton's own brochure.

A painter working high on the Walt Whitman Bridge plunged to his death yesterday after a scaffolding cable broke, authorities said. Robert Smith, 34, and another painter were near the top - 364 feet up - painting the huge bridge suspension cables from a scaffolding rig called a painters' box. Suddenly, around 9:30 yesterday morning, a safety cable snapped and the scaffolding swung loose, authorities said. Smith, of Gloucester Township, N.J., plummeted to the ground on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River.

The steam engine, the amphibious troop transport, the dirigible gondola and rows upon rows of antique cars - all can be auctioned tomorrow, according to a ruling by a Burlington County Superior Court judge yesterday. Judge Harold B. Wells 3d said that the auction was in the best interests of the estate of John V. Mahalchik, the Springfield man who accumulated the antiques and unusual junk. Hazel McGlory, a longtime companion of Mahalchik's, had tried to stop the sale, saying that some of her property was still on Mahalchik's storage yard on Route 206. McGlory's attorney, Rudolph L. Zalowitz, had asked that the auction be postponed until a jury could hear the case.

With little fanfare, Conrail recently opened the 13th terminal in a network designed to capture more of the business of hauling finished steel products from mills to manufacturing plants. But establishing the new SteelNET terminal in a sprawling warehouse in the Tinicum Industrial Park in Essington was more than just another ribbon- cutting. For the Philadelphia-based freight system, the steel industry and the small new company that operates the warehouse, the opening represented another important piece in the industrial recovery of the Northeast and Midwest.

If your taste runs to large cement mixers, you might want to check out the two models at an auction in Springfield on Saturday. If you have more petite tastes, that's all right; there are two small cement mixers there as well. But cement mixers are only the beginning of what's in store for the droves of antique-car owners, museum curators, curiosity seekers, and junk lovers who are expected to assemble on the property of the late John V. Mahalchik for an estate auction, which one professional auctioneer said would be unique.