• November 28, 1994
• Vol. 42
• No. 22

Jeanne White

Ryan's Mom Takes on His Cause

NEARLY five years have passed since Ryan White, the boy who made America pay attention, died of AIDS. His mother, Jeanne White-Ginder, 47, keeps his cluttered room in the house in Cicero, Ind., just as the 18-year-old left it—although the door is closed to keep out Wally, the family's mixed-breed dog. "Wally still thinks Ryan is coming home," says White-Ginder, who married brick mason Roy Ginder in 1992. (Her daughter, Andrea, 21, is a college sophomore.) The curious still come by the house, although not in the same numbers as before. Says White-Ginder, who travels the U.S. as president of the nonprofit Ryan White Foundation, preaching AIDS awareness and compassion: "The thing that keeps me going is I know Ryan would really be proud of me."

We also found ...

Desiree Washington, 21, the beauty contestant whose rape charges sent heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson to an Indiana prison, is a senior at Providence College in Rhode Island. Washington plans to graduate in June; Tyson should be free the month before.... Daring German flyboy Mathias Rust, 26, who spent 432 days in a Soviet prison after landing a rented Cessna in Red Square in 1987, returned to Moscow in a more conventional manner last spring: to work for a German-owned chain of restaurants and boutiques. Rust's popularity in Germany evaporated after his conviction in 1991 for the attempted manslaughter of an 18-year-old Hamburg nursing student who had spurned his advances.... Writer Clifford Irving, 64, jailed for 17 months in 1972 for writing a hoax autobiography of Howard Hughes, has since penned six novels and two nonfiction books. Now living part-time in Aspen, he has taken up painting. His next novel, Shangri-La, will be published in '95.... Nicole Schoo and her little sister Diana, the St. Charles, Ill., children whose parents, David and Sharon, left them on their own for nine days over Christmas and headed for Acapulco two years ago, were given up for adoption. The children, now 11 and 6, are still in the Chicago area and doing well. Last year their parents separated and filed for bankruptcy.... When last seen, Rasheeda Moore, 43, was on a 1990 surveillance videotape helping set up her drug buddy, Washington mayor Marion Barry. She entered the federal witness protection program, which placed her in an overwhelmingly white New England town—much to the African-American Moore's consternation. Mary Lacey Moore King says her daughter has since dropped out of the program and is in hiding on her own.... It has been seven years since the nation heaved a sigh of relief when 18-month-old Baby Jessica McClure was pulled out of an abandoned well shaft in Midland, Texas. Her parents, Reba "Cissy" and Lewis "Chip" McClure, divorced in 1990 and share custody of their only child. Jessica, now 8 and in second grade, doesn't remember her famous tumble but does have one memento: a trust fund compiled from donations estimated at more than $700,000. She gains access to the money at age 25.