WESTERN BUREAU: FANS OF Bob Marley started to gather Friday at MXIII, Negril, for three days of music and football in celebration of the reggae icon's 55th birthday.

On Friday night, Toots Hibbert and Freddie McGregor rescued the festival when headliner Barrington Levy spurned the show after reportedly not receiving an advance in payment and Luciano missed his flight from Gambia.

TRICIA SIMMS -13, Marymount High, St Mary
Tricia Simms is St. Mary's champion speller. She is thirteen years old and attends Marymount High School in that parish. Her interest in the spelling bee contest has been for several years and she has decided to enter for several reasons. She says, "I think the Spelling Bee Contest will build my comprehension skills and help me to better able to write my compositions. The contest will also help me in other subject areas."

Tricia has been studying real hard these days to ensure that she is in top shape. "Having done my usual schoolwork I stay hours after school with my coach and having gone home I put in a number of hours. Sometimes I missed classes and even forget to eat my lunch."

February is celebrated as Black History Month. In 1895 he became the first African American to receive a PhD from the prestigious Harvard University.

"History cannot ignore W.E.B." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

PANZY DUHANEY nurses her grandson with contentment in the shade of a zinc overhang on Charles Street, downtown Kingston.

She has much to be happy about. The matriarch of a family of seven, she will soon be moving into new quarters, one of 19 new houses built by Food for the Poor for residents of 'Big Yard', whose tenement rooms went up in flames during the Christmas season.