Zachary

In Robert Koehler's review, "Julie Halston's Comical Life" (April 16), he compares her performance, in part, to Jayne Meadows in "The Honeymooners." It was not Jayne Meadows who played Jackie Gleason's wife in "The Honeymooners" but Audrey Meadows. ZACHARY A. CHARLES Burbank

Cajun musicians are commonly assumed to come in one of two stereotypical packages. There's the wild man of the swamps epitomized by Doug Kershaw--eyes bugging, feet stomping, voice box yee-hawing as he does his best to come off as a fellow who may at one time have wrassled with alligators. Then there is the folk-traditionalist, the serious preserver of Cajun songs passed down from people who played on front porches and at community dances. Zachary Richard doesn't fit either description.

Early in his career, Zachary Richard (pronounced ree-SHARD) was dubbed the "Cajun Mick Jagger"--his flamboyant, swaggering performance style helped him make him the first person to ever look sexy playing an accordion.

If David Duke is elected governor of Louisiana, can we rescind the Louisiana Purchase? ZACHARY A. CHARLES Burbank

As murder mysteries go, the tale of former President Zachary Taylor ended Wednesday considerably less gripping than anything Raymond Chandler wrote. Anticlimactic might be a better description. "It is my opinion that President Zachary Taylor was not poisoned by arsenic," Dr. George Nichols, the Kentucky medical examiner, said at a press conference in Louisville. Case closed.

Scientists Friday irradiated parts of the remains of President Zachary Taylor in an uranium-fueled reactor to determine if the nation's 12th President died of arsenic poisoning. Hair and nail samples taken last week in an exhumation in Louisville, Ky., were delivered to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The samples were placed in the lab's High Flux Isotope Reactor, the Department of Energy's most powerful research reactor, and bombarded with neutrons.

The June 3 Special Screenings column stated that in the 1928 comedy "Speedy," Harold Lloyd's cabbie character drove Babe Ruth wildly across town to Yankee Stadium in Brooklyn. Obviously, Ruth missed the game that day, since Yankee Stadium was, and still is, in the Bronx. ZACHARY A. CHARLES Burbank

A coroner performed tests Monday on President Zachary Taylor's remains to check the theory that he was poisoned nearly 141 years ago during the pre-Civil War struggle over slavery. About 200 people stood silently as Taylor's flag-draped coffin was removed from a crypt at Zachary Taylor National Cemetery and taken to the Jefferson County coroner's office.

The crypt of Zachary Taylor will be opened Monday to test an author's theory that the 12th President of the United States was assassinated with poison 141 years ago. The Department of Veterans Affairs granted approval Friday for Richard Greathouse, coroner of Jefferson County, to open the crypt. Greathouse plans to see if there is any trace of poison through analysis of a piece of hair, fingernail or bone. Taylor died in office in 1850, 16 months after his election.

When he was a graduate student sweating out his dissertation on Blake, Zachary Leader got the idea for this multidisciplinary exploration of writer's block. This dread literary ailment afflicts lowly Ph.D. candidates no less than great authors, often driving victims crazy or to drink. Coleridge took opium. Hemingway shot himself.