Jessica Savitch

THOSE OF US who remember Mort Crim might find it difficult to think of the sobersided former KYW-TV, Channel 3 news anchor as having a "bucket list. " But Crim does indeed have a number of things he'd like to do and achieve before his Final Sign-Off. And one of them is the focus of his return to local screens Saturday afternoon.   "Flight Level 74 and Still Climbing," which airs on his alma mater at 3 p.m., chronicles Crim's 7,800-mile round-trip, solo cross-country journey three years ago. "The trip itself was something I had on my ‘bucket list,' he said during a recent phone call from his Jacksonville, Fla., home.

He invented "Denenberg's Dump," Hank Sperka's "Sidewalk Gourmet," Dick Sheeran's "Energy Warden" and Bill Custer's "Custer's Garden. " He has provided more advice and fatherly support to aspiring young television journalists than a platoon of Dutch uncles. His name is Dave "Neal" Gomberg. Approaching 69, he's working behind the scenes at WCAU-TV (Channel 10), mostly assigning New Jersey news. Over the past 30 years, he has also worked for WPVI-TV (Channel 6), KYW-TV (Channel 3)

Forget anything you may have heard or read about the late Jessica Savitch being the inspiration for "Up Close & Personal. " Real life is never so satisfying to Hollywood as the stuff they already have lying around on celluloid, so while the credits may say the story was "suggested by" Alanna Nash's Savitch biography, "Golden Girl," it's a suggestion screenwriters Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne largely ignored. Instead, they've dished out "Broadcast News" meets "A Star Is Born," with a side order of "Pygmalion" to go. The rise of Tally Atwater (Michelle Pfeiffer)

The best thing you can say about a New York gumshoe's theory that former NBC anchorwoman Jessica Savitch was murdered is that the prober wouldn't answer repeated phone calls to talk about it. The worst? Well, we won't say it ourselves. We'll leave that to the people who investigated the 1983 plunge of a car into the rain-swollen canal behind a New Hope restaurant that killed the former Philadelphia TV anchorwoman, her newspaper executive boyfriend and her dog, Chewy. Local officials were a bit testy yesterday at the New York Post's story about private eye William Callahan's suggestion Savitch might have been slain in a "sensational Vatican bank scandal.

David Gomberg, 86, a legendary behind-the-scenes "idea man" and mentor in Philadelphia TV news, died Wednesday, May 30, at his home in Cherry Hill. Known professionally as Dave Neal, Mr. Gomberg had suffered from congestive heart failure and kidney failure, his family said. Mr. Gomberg worked for all four TV news operations in Philadelphia as well as KYW radio. He was an assignment manager, producer, or adviser to such luminaries as Larry Kane, Jessica Savitch, and NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams.

After ramming a police car and starting a 100-mph chase from Atlantic City to Wilmington, Preston Lit had just one thing to tell TV news reporters. "I love Steve Levy and Paris in the summertime," Lit said as police led him away. Lit, 47, an unemployed electrician from Northeast Philadelphia, said he believes that Levy - the Channel 10 early news anchor - is Jesus. He had been harassing the TV personality for months, police said, attempting to p p p deliver to him cartons of stolen U.S. mail, travel brochures and an auto alternator.

Arthur G. Raynes, 72, founder of Center City law firm Raynes McCarty, who represented high-profile wrongful-death cases for more than 45 years, died of complications of lung cancer Monday at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He lived in Wynnewood. From 1960 to 1977, Mr. Raynes represented more than 50 children who were born with birth defects after their mothers took Thalidomide during pregnancy. The landmark cases were featured in the book, Suffer the Children: The Story of Thalidomide, written by investigative reporters for London's Sunday Times.

In the Savitch household, meatloaf came with the Marshall Plan. Growing up in Kennett Square, Chester County, in the 1950s, a young Jessica Savitch regularly played a game of current events at the dinner table. Her father quizzed her on the day's top stories, and she answered his questions, sometimes pretending to read the news like family hero Edward R. Murrow. Two decades later, Savitch was reading the news and more. She was an NBC anchorwoman covering Capitol Hill in a field that even today remains an old- boy bastion.

A pyramid of reflected laser beams is hardly what Frank Lloyd Wright had in mind when he referred to the Elkins Park synagogue he designed as an incandescent vision of Mount Sinai. But the historic Beth Sholom Congregation building is being re-created as hundreds of thousands - if not a million - points of light, all in an effort to preserve it. The 1959 structure of aluminum, glass, and steel is part of a global initiative to create high-definition 3D digital models of important historic sites.

It has been a bad spring for TV newsfolk, and not just in Philadelphia, where CBS3's Larry Mendte is under investigation by the FBI. Two Bostonians are off the job, one after doing an Alycia Lane imitation with police at the airport. A Tampa executive was pinched in a raid at the Fantasy Land Adult Video Store. A New York anchorwoman bellowed an obscenity on the air. And, in California, an old Philadelphia friend, sports guy Rod Luck, was suspended from his reporter job after being charged with domestic violence.