Tragedy

A dream had carried the boys so far from home, some 5,000 miles across the ocean to a cramped and dingy apartment in Philadelphia: a hope that ice hockey could change their lives. Ivan Pravilov could fulfill that dream, they were told. He could take them from the daily grind of post-communist Ukraine to the gleaming ice of the NHL. He'd done it before. He'd done if for Andrei Zyuzin, who went on to play for six NHL teams. He'd done it for Konstantin Kalmikov, a third-round draft pick of the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1996.

Physicians busted for allegedly distributing OxyContin without prescription - even though the pills can be lethal - should be called OxyMorons.

Sicily Minor, 9, remembers walking through the picturesque Wissahickon Valley on a sunny Sunday in Fairmount Park when tragedy struck. Sicily was with Margaret Robertson, 37, when Robertson's 2-year-old son, Nolan Robertson Deal, fell through a partially open sewer and was swept away in a rushing stream of sewage water. The boy is still missing. "We were walking through the park," Sicily said last night. "It was around 4 o'clock. He got out of his wagon and ran through the grass.

IRECENTLY attended a panel at Haverford College titled "Three Women, Three Faiths, One Shared Vision," sponsored by Partners for Peace. One woman was a Palestinian Christian, one was an Israeli Jew, the third was a Palestinian Muslim. They are touring the country speaking out about the Palestinian-Israeli situation. There wasn't anything said that I hadn't read about before, but to meet people who live with this crisis makes it very personal. It was very, very sad to hear what they had to say. It made my heart weep.

John B. Thayer III's adult life was framed and scarred by two of the 20th century's great tragedies. He lost his father on the Titanic, his son in World War II. Finally, on Sept. 20, 1945, a rainy night whose gloom mirrored his despair, Thayer parked his car near a Philadelphia Transit Co. trolley-turnaround at 48th and Parkside in West Philadelphia and slashed his wrists and throat. Although the suicide came long after the supposedly unsinkable Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, exactly 100 years ago Sunday, Thayer was no less a victim than the 1,517 fellow passengers and crew who perished that night in the icy North Atlantic.

What Common Pleas Court Judge Bernard J. Avellino lacks in character, perhaps he can make up for in class by stepping down from the bench. If he would do so, I would then believe he is a man of his own speedy conviction. And, perhaps, more telling in all of this would be a comparison between a "coyote ugly" person who chews his way free to a "judge" who has set his own trap. This points out, more vividly than anything, the tragedy of politicized judicial selection. H. R. Collins Devon.

IT'S BEEN a month since this tragedy has visited us. What have we learned? That fear can replace happiness, anger can replace peace. I recently chatted with a person of the Moslem faith. As a Christian, I was having a hard time dealing with this. He pointed out some of the reasons why it happened. First, most Islamic countries are poor and highly uneducated. Regimes like the Taliban, feed off the fear of the people. Also, believe it or not, some of these problems stem from the days of Isaac and Ismail, a fight between brothers that happened over 8,000 years ago. Are we not all God's children?

Larry Kane is a veteran anchor and author This is a time for memories, mostly the individual flashbacks of the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11: where we were, what we were thinking, the visual recollections. Rushing in to work, headed south on I-95 in the direction of Independence Mall, I was stunned at the traffic headed north. A rush-hour traffic jam, with people heading home at 9:30 in the morning? It was an attempt to escape, caused by fear - fear of what might come next.

The world finally got to see Dharun Ravi cry, and if his tears didn't demonstrate the remorse he has so famously failed to express publicly, they at least looked genuine. The seemingly unflappable Ultimate Frisbee ace barely batted an eyelash Monday when others in the Middlesex County courtroom described his actions as "evil" and so lacking in humanity as to verge on monstrous. But when his mother, Sabitha Pazhani, began sobbing just a seat away, Ravi's enormous brown eyes filled up, then spilled.

At first, the landing of the giant airship seemed routine. Robert Buchanan and other rain-soaked members of the ground crew waited to grab landing lines to help dock the dirigible at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in Ocean County. In the portside dining room of the 800-foot-long behemoth, little Werner Doehner and his family sat around a table, at the end of a transatlantic flight that had just taken them over Manhattan and the Jersey Shore. Then came the horrifying moments, 75 years ago Sunday, that are etched in the minds of Doehner and Buchanan, and captured on historic newsreel films along with the now-famous words of a radio broadcaster: "Oh, the humanity!"

CORCORAN, Calif. - On Aug. 9, 1969, two naive 17-year-old girls were launched on a path that led to the unlikeliest of friendships. That infamous night, four young people under the sway of a charismatic career criminal slipped into a neighborhood of Hollywood glitterati, then bludgeoned and stabbed rising young actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and two others. Across town the next night, the band killed again. The name Charles Manson quickly became a synonym for unimaginable evil, which nobody knows better than Debra Tate, Sharon's little sister, and Barbara Hoyt, the Manson family member whose testimony helped put the killers in prison.

Keen intelligence in exploring the 20th century's greatest maritime disaster is the hallmark of "R.M.S. Titanic" at Widener University, which features many, many hundreds of fascinating objects, images, artifacts, reproductions, and facsimiles commemorating the hundreth anniversary of the tragedy. The exhibition's location is appropriate, as Widener bears the name of a prominent Philadelphia family hard hit by losses in that maritime disaster. Furthermore, everything on view was collected during nearly three decades of intensive searching by one man - the present owner of the entire collection, J. Joseph Edgette, a popular Widener professor and folklorist emeritus.

John B. Thayer III's adult life was framed and scarred by two of the 20th century's great tragedies. He lost his father on the Titanic, his son in World War II. Finally, on Sept. 20, 1945, a rainy night whose gloom mirrored his despair, Thayer parked his car near a Philadelphia Transit Co. trolley-turnaround at 48th and Parkside in West Philadelphia and slashed his wrists and throat. Although the suicide came long after the supposedly unsinkable Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, exactly 100 years ago Sunday, Thayer was no less a victim than the 1,517 fellow passengers and crew who perished that night in the icy North Atlantic.

JERMAINE Alexander learned to ride a dirt bike before he could write or tie his shoes. "Maine" was 5, and he would ride his bicycle only if he smashed tin cans in the wheels to mimic the dirt-bike growl. So his uncle took him to the park to teach him to ride the real thing. When he was a teenager and would hear one roar by on the streets outside, he'd stampede to the window to see who was riding what. He became so adept at fixing them that he could transform scraps of junkers into bikes that, though not beautiful, still flew fast as fireworks.

Lantern Theater Company's Romeo and Juliet begins before it begins: fights on the street, stealthy comings and goings, women are grabbed, rich, highborn men are drunk and belligerent. Everyone is armed to the teeth - swords and knives - and then somebody says "peace. " Yeah, right. What a place Verona is: Feuds, duels, and havoc will, as they say, ensue. The young star-crossed lovers will, through their suicides, teach their parents the need for reconciliation. This old, sad story is about two teenagers from warring families who have a moment of joy only to have things go terribly wrong through an agony of mistiming, mistakes, parental commands, and just plain bad luck.

Quintessence Theatre Group's mission is to tangle with the classics, and this time, they tackle Jean Anouilh's wartime adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone . A response to Nazi occupation of France, the tragedy, as reimagined for a 20th-century audience, trades the wrath of the gods for existential dilemma, allowing man and woman to blunder about on their own, making terrible decisions for terrible reasons. Antigone, you may recall, is the daughter of Oedipus and daughter/granddaughter of Jocasta, both dead.

Reflect on tragedy In light of the recent shooting in Chadron, Ohio, I think we all need to take time to reflect ("No community immune to school tragedies," Thursday). This kind of tragedy can strike in the most innocent places, and anyone who believes his town or his child's school is not at risk is kidding himself. Every parent needs to talk with his child on a regular basis about how to handle the emotions and challenges they face in high school. A few minutes of conversation with your children is all it takes to convince them that they are loved, and that could be the difference between a troubled youth and a killer.

Another fatal school shooting, this one in Ohio, again has parents across America wondering if their children's schools are safe. Details slowly emerging depict the alleged shooter as another troubled youth whose aberrant behavior wasn't predicted, but perhaps should have been. T.J. Lane, 17, allegedly walked into the high school cafeteria with a knife and a .22-caliber handgun and randomly opened fire. Three students died after the rampage Monday at Chardon High School near Cleveland.