>I'm researching an exhibit on cultural perception. Does anyone remember >the name of the young girl who wrote to Gorbachev, later met him and >founded a peace organization? She was later killed in an air crash with >her father. > Detail are fuzzy because I'm casting back to my own childhood in Maine, (she and I would be the same age now), but yes, her name was Samantha Smith. She was from Manchester, Maine, and in the early 80's she wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov that essentially expressed her fear of dying in a Soviet nuclear attack. (Believe it or not, Maine actually was a primary Soviet missile target site, mostly because of the Bath Iron Works shipyard and the now-closed-but-then-critical Loring Air Force base in Limestone.) Samantha became a world-wide symbol for peace (and the pessimists among us would say an instrument of Soviet propaganda) when she and her parents went on a tour of the USSR - on Andropov's invitation - to meet ordinary Soviets face-to-face and see first-hand that the Soviet Union wasn't quite the evil empire she feared. She later hosted a group of Soviet students who came to a summer camp in Maine. I believe that more exchanges were planned (could this be the work of the "foundation" you mentioned?), but then she and her father were killed in a Bar Harbor Airlines commuter plane crash in the mid-80's. I'm not sure whether Samantha herself started a "peace foundation," but I do recall that shortly after the crash her mother, Jane Smith, set up a foundation in Samantha's name to further her legacy. Last I knew, Jane Smith still lives in Maine, but I'm not sure of the status of the Samantha Smith Foundation or where it resides if it's still in existence. _________________________ Nicole M. Bouvier SITES <[log in to unmask]>