`PERSONAL TIME' LAME LINE FOR SEPARATING.

Byline: Dennis McCarthy 

Leave it to the rich and famous to spin a marriage on the rocks into comic relief.

In case you missed it, America's No. 1 odd couple, Jane Fonda and Ted Turner, have announced they're taking some ``personal time'' from each other after eight years of marriage.

Where you and I live - Earth - that means they're separating.

Now, I don't know how strong your marriage is, but mine isn't strong enough to pull off a lame line like that and get away with it.

If I walked in and told my wife I needed some personal time from our marriage, I'd be picking up my clothes from the front lawn and spending the night at the Y.

If my father walked in and told my mother he needed some personal time, she'd crown him with the frying pan.

``You want some personal time? Take it in the hospital,'' she'd say.

Of course, I come from an old-fashioned Irish-Italian family - who can see when people are spinning the truth from a mile away.

My brother and I were raised before the advent of ``time outs.'' When we screwed up as kids, our parents just cut right to the chase and threatened to kill us.

Crude, but effective.

I'm not sure exactly when we started calling a spade a heart in this country but, for me, I started noticing something strange was going on when our garbageman became a sanitation engineer.

The guy was still big and ominous, with that cigarette butt hanging out of his mouth. And he still smelled bad.

But now, as an engineer, he had somehow acquired a certain dignity as he tossed our trash cans back on the sidewalk with disdain, leaving half our garbage on the curb for me to pick up.

It was the same dignity we in the newspaper business acquired when some genius in the industry decided we needed a face lift and an image makeover.

We weren't newspapermen and newspaperwomen any longer. We were journalists.

Now, Webster's defines journalist as ``a person who keeps a journal or diary.'' I'm pushing 30 years in this business, and I've kept neither.

The only time I use journalist as a job description is on a bank loan. It seems to add a little more weight (spin) to the financial lies on my application.

A co-worker said she thinks spin originated with her New Jersey milkman back when she was a kid growing up in the '60s.

The guy was running for local office and listed his occupation as a ``sales consultant for a large dairy firm.''

Not bad, but he still lost. The town knew the difference. They didn't want to hand over the keys to City Hall to the milkman.

Lincoln was right. You can spin it all you want, but you can't fool all of the people all the time.

A garbageman is still a garbageman, and a newspaper man is still a newspaper man - no matter how many airs we may want to take on.

And Jane and Ted are separating, not taking personal time.

They're also giving the true definition of that term a bad name. Everyone knows personal time is something you lie to the boss about when you want a day off in the middle of the week to go to the track or to a movie.

--TUESDAY'S FRONT PAGE COLUMN on the uplifting attitude of 79-year-old Gloria Dreben when she's out in public in her wheelchair brought her a lot of attention this week, the Winnetka woman said - but none nicer than the scene when her doorbell rang Tuesday night.

``One of my granddaughters answered it and I could hear her repeating, `Tell me what it is you want again?' '' Dreben said.

``It was two little neighborhood boys, 5 and 8,'' she said. ``They were standing there with the newspaper and wanted us to autograph it for them. So my granddaughters and I did.

``It was so funny. We felt just like celebrities.''