Paper Chase

Clark Linderman of Swarthmore, a self-employed contractor, has had a home-equity line of credit from Chase for nearly four years, about as long as he and his wife have owned their house. "It's proven to be a valuable financial tool for us," Linderman says. Although they have run up what he calls a "decent balance," a lot of untapped equity remains. The original intent was to finance adoption of their youngest son. Because Linderman is self-employed, however, the credit line has been a safety net in lean times.

The thump of a Philadelphia judge's gavel should have freed them that very day. But fouled-up paperwork kept dozens of petty criminals behind bars for weeks and even months afterwards. That was the Kafkaesque situation a few months back, as reported recently by Inquirer staff writer Suzanne Sataline. In the spanking-new Criminal Justice Center, a pair of overburdened clerks fell behind on filling out forms by hand - forms needed to free people eligible for parole, work-release or drug-treatment programs.

We're up to page 10 of the "new revised" questionnaire for getting a gun permit. And we're stopped by questions 18 and 20. The first wants to know whether you're an "alcoholic," and the second whether you're just a plain everyday "drunk. " There's a difference? If you're the former, the questionnaire wants to know what you drink. The inference seems to be that if it's $18.11-a-fifth Chivas Regal, you need a gun - you've got money to protect. The questionnaire expresses no such curiosity about what your tipple is if you're just another rummie.

I recently attended my high school reunion. They had sent out a questionnaire and one of the questions was, "What was your greatest accomplishment in the last five years. " People put stuff like "ran a marathon" and "climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. " Kid stuff. I did something much harder than that very recently: I got my New Jersey driver's license renewed. I had heard rumors about the state Motor Vehicle Commission's tough, new six-point system - requiring various documents in three categories, each worth a certain number of points that had to total six. I read the brochure carefully and was sure I had the requisite points.

Look, up there in the sky over Belmont Plateau in Fairmount Park! It's a bird! It's a plane! And it's Superman! Yep, all three of them - and dozens of other shapes and forms, animal, human and geometric - all in the air at once. That will be the scene tomorrow from noon to 4 p.m. as hundreds of kiteflyers - young, old and in-between - get to show off their skills and their aircraft. Yes, a kite is an aircraft - "aircraft restrained by a towline and deriving its lift from the aerodynamic action of the wind flowing across it," says the Columbia Encyclopedia.

Finally, there is something constructive that Philadelphians can do with all that junk mail: Bundle it, put it out by the curb, and let the city make some money off it. Starting today, the city is adding mixed paper to the cans, bottles, newspapers and other items in its recycling program. Got any old phone books, catalogs, magazines, office papers? Alfred Dezzi, the city's recycling coordinator, wants them all. He even wants such things as cereal and cookie boxes (with the liners removed)

In 1979, an obscure subsidiary of the General Electric Co. in King of Prussia submitted the winning bid for building a new computer system, one that could be housed in a tractor-trailer and monitor supplies for Army field commanders. The contract was a major turning point for GE's Management & Technical Services Co., known as Matsco. It was Matsco's first manufactured product. The company had been created in 1972 as a vehicle to provide GE "service contract" employees to the government for maintenance of defense and military equipment.

Step right up, choose what you like. For once, there's good stuff from a lot of sources. EVENING HIGHLIGHTS DYNASTY (7 p.m., Ch. 61) - Part 1 of 2. The two-hour episode that introduced the Carrington clan starts this series of syndicated reruns. In these early episodes, Bo Hopkins played Linda Evans' "other man" but disappeared quickly. Pamela Sue Martin, as Fallon, was the token Nasty Lady, going so far as to take the bride figurine from the wedding cake of Blake (John Forsythe)

Don't look now, but the Mummers Parade may return to Channel 3 for the first time since 1948 - at least if KYW-TV general manager Jim Thompson has anything to say about it. Thompson, 39, is a dyed-in-the-feathers Mummerophile. In the last 30 years, he has missed just one Broad Street strut - in 1968, when he was an Army sergeant in Saigon. His brother, John, is captain of the Ukrainian-America n String Band. So it comes as no surprise to learn that when Thompson was named GM almost a year ago, one of his first projects was to get rights to the Mummers Parade.

It's been a good week for Aileene Halligan. The social studies teacher at Kensington Urban Education Academy just got funding for five cases of paper, enough to last her school through the end of the academic year. Sounds like no big deal, right? It's actually a major deal. Ask any teacher, especially any Philadelphia School District teacher, how much they have to spend out of their own pockets to keep their kids in paper and notebooks and other supplies, and the answer is usually in the hundreds.

By Allegra Goodman Dial Press. 394 pp. $26 Reviewed by Jeffrey Ann Goudie Allegra Goodman's enchanting and sensuous new novel operates in pairs and opposites. Two sisters, one of them with two suitors. Two worlds, separate, even as they coalesce. In The Cookbook Collector , Goodman has written a romance that dissects ambition with a jeweler's precision and a culinary novel with a collection of rare cookbooks at its core. She also has produced a novel of ideas peopled by full-blooded characters.

Allegra Goodman's enchanting and sensuous new novel, "The Cookbook Collector" (Dial Press, $26), operates in pairs and opposites. Two sisters, one of them with two suitors. Two worlds, separate, even as they coalesce. Goodman has written a romance that dissects ambition with a jeweler's precision as well as a culinary novel with a collection of rare cookbooks at its core. She also has produced a novel of ideas peopled by full-blooded characters. This taxonomy of dot-com ambition is a narrative about the turning of the wheel of fortune, the one that the ancients and medievals believed in, not the one co-opted by television.

Clark Linderman of Swarthmore, a self-employed contractor, has had a home-equity line of credit from Chase for nearly four years, about as long as he and his wife have owned their house. "It's proven to be a valuable financial tool for us," Linderman says. Although they have run up what he calls a "decent balance," a lot of untapped equity remains. The original intent was to finance adoption of their youngest son. Because Linderman is self-employed, however, the credit line has been a safety net in lean times.

I recently attended my high school reunion. They had sent out a questionnaire and one of the questions was, "What was your greatest accomplishment in the last five years. " People put stuff like "ran a marathon" and "climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. " Kid stuff. I did something much harder than that very recently: I got my New Jersey driver's license renewed. I had heard rumors about the state Motor Vehicle Commission's tough, new six-point system - requiring various documents in three categories, each worth a certain number of points that had to total six. I read the brochure carefully and was sure I had the requisite points.

Five would-be owners of The Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News have until 5 p.m. today to deliver signed bids for the newspapers. A sixth potential buyer, MediaNews Group Inc., of Denver, is standing by a bid it submitted last month, according to people familiar with the company's plans. Seller the McClatchy Co. says it will announce the new owner once it picks a buyer and cuts a deal, probably later this month. The sale is likely to return Philadelphia's major dailies to private control after 35 years as part of publicly traded Knight Ridder Inc. and its predecessor, Knight Newspapers Inc. Knight Ridder went on the auction block last fall under pressure from shareholders disappointed by the chain's failure to boost profits.

Maybe you had to be on line at 10 p.m. in a Philadelphia polling place last election day. Then you'd grasp the lunacy of a federal mandate for ATM-style printouts of every citizen's vote. Anything that would have delayed or further complicated voting that day - when Philadelphians already faced hour-long waits due to a lengthy list of candidates and ballot questions - would have made voters boo louder than fans at the Linc. Yet that's just what mandating paper printouts would mean.

In perhaps one of the strangest big-city press events in recent history, Mayor Street gathered members of his numerous transition committees together yesterday afternoon for a brief ceremony to mark the delivery of their reports. However, the details of the reports were not announced. What was announced is that the reports have been turned in, or at least most of them. The ceremony lacked pomp, circumstance or substance. The documents - ranging from thick bound reports to a few sheets stapled together - were pulled from a box and piled on a side table like homework turned in to a teacher.

Mindy Barbakoff sits in her small office on the third floor of the Childspace Too day-care center in Germantown, in the grips of her all-too-usual identity crisis. Each day, she spends several hours on the phone with various caseworkers from the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, trying to get reimbursement for the child care that the center provides. "Am I really a day-care director?" she asks. "Or am I a bill collector?" The Welfare Department owes $43,000 to two Childspace day-care centers, in Germantown and Mount Airy, for providing day care to children of mothers in welfare-to-work programs.

Freeman's Auction House will hold a sale Thursday for bookworms and paper treasure collectors of all persuasions at its fifth-floor Rare Books, Manuscripts, Prints & Ephemera Department. "In addition to books, others items in this sale of some 860 lots are fine examples of comic book and cartoon art, prints, historic Nazi documents signed by Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler, and other assorted ephemera," said Rare Books Director David Bloom. The term ephemera is derived from the Greek word ephemeron, which translates to short-lived, or lasting for only a day. In collectible circles, it is applied to people who collect sundry paper items like posters, sports programs, stock certificates, sheet music, post cards and Hollywood movie press kits.