Edition: U.S. / Global


Published: September 1, 1996

Out to Lunch. Forever.

Q. I heard an urban legend recently about a city official who took a six-month lunch break. Is this true?

A. During the summer of 1913, Charles B. Stover was doing the things Parks Commissioners do best -- naming lion cubs, talking about hickory trees, bickering with other city officials.

Then, one fine afternoon in mid-October, Mr. Stover, who had been appointed in 1910 and had never taken a vacation, got up from his desk and walked off, according to Jonathan Kuhn, director of art and antiquities at the Parks Department. When he didn't return that day or the next, Parks officials, a bit chagrined, quietly put out the word that the boss was on a well-deserved vacation.

Three weeks later, people -- like the Mayor -- began to wonder where exactly he'd gone. There were rumors of a covert marriage, a body with a similar face in a Delaware River, and sightings in San Francisco, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C. Finally, on Nov. 28, 1913, approximately six weeks -- not months -- after Mr. Stover walked away, the Mayor received a letter of resignation, postmarked from Cincinnati.

The resignation was accepted, editorials howled, and Mr. Stover soon disappeared from the papers in the same way he had vanished from his desk. He finally returned to his apartment on Eldridge Street on Jan. 28, 1914. He said he'd had a lovely vacation and done a full survey of the South and its parks. Then he ate a light dinner and went to bed.

Radioactive Watches

Q. I was brought up in an age when the dials of watches were made of radium. This was before they realized the stuff could kill you. Recently, I bought a watch and when I got home I noticed that the hands and dial were made of tritium. My dictionary said tritium was ''a radioactive isotope of hydrogen.'' I returned the watch. Was I ridiculous?

A. Let's just say you're being a tad overly cautious.

Tritium is indeed an isotope of hydrogen -- it's got two neutrons in its nucleus, instead of just one, like deuterium, or none, like ''normal'' hydrogen. Tritium's unstable structure means that a quantity is in a constant state of decay, a process that allows the ''radiation'' of alpha, beta and gamma particles. (This condition is known as radioactivity. All things ordinarily emit -- and absorb -- radiation, but some isotopes and elements have radiation that is especially dangerous to the human body because of the capacity to penetrate skin and change the chemical structure of cells.)

Now, tritium is used -- very gingerly -- in research and military applications, including studies of nuclear fusion and fission. But it is also commonly used in very minute, very diluted amounts in exit signs, smoke detectors, and yes, watch dials.

That said, how dangerous is your watch?

''You could be buried under a mountain of these things and the weight of them would crush you before the radiation got you,'' said Bob Miltenberger, a health physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. His partner, Henry Kahnhauser, said it would take some 400 million watches to inflict a fatal dose of radiation, ''and that assumes you took all the material out of those watches and ate it.''

Mind you, radium, a radioactive metal, is very dangerous. In the early 1920's, a group of young women from Orange, N.J., began to suffer an array of ghastly mouth ailments: crumbling teeth, rotting gums, ulcers on the tongue. Their doctors realized that the patients had all worked at the United States Radium Company. Their job? To paint watch dials with a glow-in-the-dark, radium-based paint. As a matter of habit, the women would sharpen the tips of their brushes by putting them in their mouths.

The result was disease, death and the end of radium dials on watches.

Subway Math: C = E