Veterans

Tonight provides an easy opportunity to see quality television on Channel 12, without getting wrapped up in a Masterpiece Theater story that might not end until summer. On Sunday nights, the commercial networks usually present sexy movies or specials to attract our attention. Tonight the competition against PBS is meager: a repeat of The Women of Brewster Place on ABC, a new Perry Mason telemovie on NBC and the depressingly moronic People's Choice Awards on CBS. Even Fox is showing repeats.

Joseph Newsham can breathe easier today. The veteran and retired Philadelphia firefighter, who is almost entirely paralyzed and must rely on a machine to pump oxygen into his lungs, was evicted from his Bucks County nursing home at 1:25 p.m. yesterday. An hour later, he had been accepted into the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Medical Center and Hospital, where he might spend the rest of his life. Like thousands of other veterans, Newsham had exhausted his ability to pay for nursing-home care.

With all due respect to opening acts, most don't command attention from audiences on hand to see the headliner. But there are rare occasions in casino showrooms when you get two headliners on the same bill. Now, that's a bargain. There is just such a booking this week at Caesars Hotel-Casino, where George Burns and Peggy Lee are providing the entertainment. Lee happens to be opening the show, but in no way is she an opening act. And the audience on Wednesday night responded accordingly.

Instead of mud, there was spongy gray carpeting. Instead of Beatles, there was the Boss. But as at Woodstock in 1969 and the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, a spirit of community prevailed at JFK Stadium last night: There was a cause - Human Rights Now! - and there was rock and roll. "Where's the mud?" joked Ilene Cohen, 43, of Brooklyn, N.Y. "We were rolling in it at Woodstock. " Cohen, who drove down with three friends, was sitting on one of thousands of stadium-provided yellow folding chairs.

For years, Walter P. Wilson had wondered what it would be like to qualify for the title role in an organization called the Society of the Last Man of 40 Veterans. Now he knows. "There's one big drawback," Walter Wilson, 89, was saying yesterday at Saunders House, a long-term-care facility at City and Lancaster Avenues, where he is a resident. "When you're the last man, there's nobody to have a drink with. " Wilson, formerly of Upper Darby, became the last survivor in the Philadelphia-based organization of veterans of World War I when Henry F. Bamberger, 94, of Center City, longtime head of the group, died Sunday.

Pat O'Connor's deeply moving A Month in the Country opens with an elegy in a country churchyard. A young man makes his way through a maze of tombstones, a man so broken by his terrible experiences in war that he is himself dead inside. Filmmakers have always found a rich theme in the plight of men who can find no peace when a war is over. And A Month in the Country is good enough to stand beside The Best Years of Our Lives, Taxi Driver, Coming Home and The Deer Hunter. The film is set in rural England in 1919, and it seems especially pertinent to our own times because World War I was even more pointless and barbarous than Vietnam.

Eugene V. Mele, 90, a marine engineer and decorated World War II veteran, died Thursday, Jan. 27, at Springfield Hospital in Springfield, Delaware County. He was a resident of Springfield for 58 years. A native of Westmoreland County, Pa., Mr. Mele studied at Keystone Engineering Institute in Pittsburgh and was a draftsman at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard before joining the Army in July 1944. He saw combat in Europe and was awarded the Bronze Star for his actions defending the Meuse River during the Battle of the Bulge.

The annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars was at the King of Prussia Hilton. On Friday night, members marched in a four-mile parade.

Veterans of the armed forces and those on active duty can get discounts of 3 percent to 15 percent at participating stores with a free color photo ID issued by Bucks County. Under a program started last week, veterans can get a discount card by registering their original Veteran DD-214 discharge papers at the Recorder of Deeds Office on the second floor of the County Courthouse in Doylestown. Those on active duty can also register there for a discount card. Besides getting a discount at stores such as Boscov's and Team Toyota, veterans will have their records preserved permanently, county officials said.

Lawyers for Pennsylvania veterans and veterans' widows yesterday accused the state of dragging its feet in a way that made a dozen aging veterans' and widows' last days a little harder. The lawyers asked a federal judge to hold Public Welfare Secretary Karen Snider in contempt of court for not swiftly implementing a Jan. 29 court order to return monthly benefit checks to veterans and veterans' widows in nursing homes funded by state Medicaid money. In his decision, Judge Clarence C. Newcomer ruled that the state acted illegally last year when it forced an estimated 4,000 veterans and widows to give back the monthly benefit checks to help defray the cost of their nursing- home care.