1977 Year

Now that the U.S.-Soviet cultural exchange turnstile is operating again, would Dmitry Sitkovetsky follow the example of Vladimir Horowitz and prove you can go home again? "Although I would love to go there, to play for my childhood friends," he says, "it would be a little spooky--like returning to a previous lifetime." But there's more.

USC has won or shared the last three Pacific 10 Conference football championships en route to three consecutive appearances in bowl championship series games. But the Trojans did that without playing at least one conference opponent each season. Starting in 2006, however, USC and other Pac-10 teams will play a round-robin, nine-game conference schedule if school presidents approve a measure during this week's conference meetings in Portland, Ore.

Ventura's most persistent gadfly, notorious for his citizen's arrests of the mayor and other city officials, was arrested Sunday morning after trying to run down a man serving him with a civil lawsuit, sheriff's deputies said. Carroll Dean Williams, 48, was held in jail for four hours on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon before being released on $5,000 bail, said Sgt. Cole McDaniel of the Ventura County Sheriff's Department. He will be arraigned Friday. Richard K.

John Cannon, president of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in New York whose career began when the medium was in its infancy, died Friday of an apparent heart attack in Cologne, Germany. "He was getting into a cab to visit one of the broadcast stations there, and he just dropped . . . a heart attack," said Malachy G. Wienges, a former CBS executive who knew Cannon for more than 35 years.

On any given weekend this past year, half of America's teen-agers could be found in a house of worship. That signals a reverse of a short-term trend--a drop in churchgoing by teen-agers. Gallup youth polls show that attendance dropped to 48% of teen-agers in 1991, and then decreased even more, to 45%, in 1992.

The Long Beach Naval Shipyard has begun to cut 900 jobs, 13% of its total employees, in a continuing work force reduction that will eliminate as many as 1,500 jobs at the government-owned yard by the end of 1986. A shipyard official said Thursday that the cutbacks, which are being done through layoffs and attrition, are part of a nationwide push to reduce expenses as repair work slows at Navy shipyards. As many as 600 more Long Beach jobs could be cut beginning next spring.

Alarmed by the continuing drought in Northern California, from which flows 60% of the county's water, the San Diego County Water Authority said Wednesday that it will ask San Diegans to voluntarily reduce their consumption of water this summer by 10%. The plea for water conservation will be formally issued June 1, along with specific recommendations on how to reduce water consumption, Water Authority General Manager Lester A. Snow said Wednesday.

His denim-clad hips were swiveling on a television screen at a Ventura post office. His rich baritone was crooning from speakers in a post office branch in Thousand Oaks. His picture was hanging on a wall in another branch in Fillmore. Elvismania swept through Ventura County post offices on Friday as fans and stamp collectors lined up by the hundreds to buy the first-released Elvis Presley commemorative stamps.

Dramatic events elsewhere are drying up the money pool for Afghan guerrillas, and one group has started mining gems to finance the 12-year-old war. The snow-covered mountains and rocky valleys of the Hindu Kush have been known for centuries as a rich source of emeralds and rubies, aquamarines and lapis, but mining has been primitive and irregular.