1939Year ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., March 20.--When Bill Dickey came into the Yankee dugout and began to buckle on his shinguards, Lou Gehrig looked over at him and said, jestingly: Sports of the Times Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.

1985Year Once some order is made of the boxes of papers in the basement of the Vassar College Library, the life of Mary McCarthy, class of '33, will become an open book. The school recently bought, for an undisclosed sum, Miss McCarthy's letters, manuscripts and other notes, which are sure to occupy scholars and literary types for some time. Headliners

1941Year FAR HILLS, N.J., Oct. 22 -- John Hay Whitney's The McClain, a winner on the flat at the Mon-mouth County meet last Saturday, captured the Froh-Heim Chase, a two-mile test over twelve brush obstacles, as the twenty-sixth annual two-day meeting of the Essex Fox Hounds opened on the estate of Evander B. Schley today. WHITNEY JUMPER FROH-HEIM VICTOR

1997Year M P Dunleavey article on making of documentary film The McCourts of Limerick, documentary history of McCourt clan, whose most famous member now is Frank McCourt, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela's Ashes

1957Year TEX McCRARY and his wife, Jinx Falkenburg, began a new interview program at 1 o'clock yesterday afternoon over Channel 4. It is entitled "Close-up," and in its production technique it is derived from Mike Wallace's "Night Beat." TV: Daytime 'Night Beat'

1990Year When the McDermott Trio made its New York debut, in 1982, the three sisters who formed it were students at the Manhattan School of Music. Now Kerry McDermott is a violinist in the New York Philharmonic and Anne-Marie McDermott and Maureen McDermott are occasionally heard as piano and cello recitalists, respectively. They have also kept the family trio going, and on Wednesday evening they played works by Schumann, Shostakovich and Mendelssohn at the 92d Street Y. To say the McDermotts are energetic players is to understate the case. In Mendelssohn's Trio No. 2 in C minor (Op. 66), they played the opening movement's final pages with such fire and passion that one wondered if they would be able to summon those qualities in the greater measure required by the work's finale. But evidently they had kept some power in reserve. After a warm, nostalgic reading of the Andante espressivo and an account of the Scherzo that was both fleet and precise, they played the closing Allegro appassionato with a galvanizing drive and an enormous, rich sound. The Shostakovich Trio No. 2 in E minor (Op. 67) shared the forcefulness of the Mendelssohn performance. But the work, composed in 1944, is far removed from the Romantic ardor of Mendelssohn's time, and from a late-20th-century listener's perspective it is of greater emotional substance. The McDermotts played it hauntingly and aggressively, and did a fine job of turning its bitter, icy currents into a scorching, urgent cry. The program also included Schumann's "Fantasiestucke" (Op. 88), a rarely heard, modest trio. Review/Music