The News on T Shirts

Americans usually keep up with current events by reading newspapers and magazines and watching television. Now they have their choice of still another news medium: the T shirt. Not long after a warrant was issued for the arrest of Angela Davis, for example, a

T shirt appeared on store counters bearing her likeness. Shortly after Mystery Man "D.B. Cooper" parachuted from a skyjacked Northwest Airlines 727, a T shirt went on sale illustrated with a parachute-borne satchel, a vanishing jet and the question "D.B. Cooper, where are you?"

Now T-shirt journalism has established a new deadline record of sorts. Last week, even while the Howard Hughes manuscript case was still unfolding, a two-week-old company named Flame Enterprises began distributing two timely T shirts. One shows the great recluse, in scarf and goggles, at the controls of a plane called Helga (for Helga R. Hughes, the name used by Author Clifford Irving's wife in opening a Swiss bank account). The other is simply a portrait of the mustachioed billionaire signed "H.R. Hughs." Were the T-shirt journalists guilty of a typo in the misspelling of Hughes' name? Purely intentional, said Manhattan Photographer Bill Stettner, who founded Flame Enterprises; the incorrect spelling was used to avoid any legal action by Hughes.

Despite the precaution, ever alert Hughes attorneys brought action in the New York courts last week to halt sale of the shirts. Like any good editor, however, Stettner was standing behind his T shirt. "We feel we're in the right," he explained. "Hughes is a public figure."

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