The sea was a bracing 59° F. and the shore was littered with bomb-hunting equipment, but U.S. Ambassador Angier Biddle Duke, 50, diplomatically endorsed the Spanish swimming. “Exhilarating! Sensational! Magnificent! Superb!” raved Duke. Well now, it couldn’t have been all that good, but it did help put the idea across that the U.S. H-bomb lost when an Air Force B-52 collided with its refueling tanker had not contaminated the sea. Why, while the ambassador splashed around with two of his children and some chilled conscripts from the embassy staff, local Andalusians even strung out a banner: WE HAVE CONFIDENCE.
It was supposed to be a party in honor of New York Mets General Manager George Weiss, but former Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick stepped to the microphone in St. Petersburg, Fla., and announced: “Charles Dillon Stengel has been unanimously elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.” Observed Casey, who retired last summer at 75 as manager of one of the most awful teams in the history of the sport: “Amazin’.”
With her wedding only two months away, French Olympic Slalom Champion Christine Goitschel, 21, was treating the slopes gingerly. “I am afraid of falling and getting hurt,” she told a teammate at Méribel in the French Alps. Next morning while Christine and her fiancé, Team Trainer Jean Béranger, were studying the course, a vacationing Austrian lost control of her skis at 50 m.p.h. and plowed into the bride-to-be, breaking her right leg and ankle. Ah well, cracked Christine’s sister Marielle, herself a slalom champion: “A white plaster cast won’t go so badly with your wedding gown.”
Veteran Soviet Character Actor Evgeny Samoilov, 53, certainly seemed out of character that night in Moscow’s Mayakovsky Theater. A few days later, readers of the Evening Moscow knew why. “Dear Comrade Editor,” Samoilov wrote remorsefully. “I was not sober for the evening performance. My delinquency defames the title of Soviet actor.” In the future, moaned Samoilov, who holds three Stalin Prizes, “I will wash out this stain with my work.”
Lord Nelson was an Englishman,
A man of great renown,
But when Ireland gets her freedom,
We will pull his pillar down.
It was a full 44 years after independence before the Irish fulfilled the Dublin street ballad. Last week, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rebellion, someone grandly pulled down (or, more literally, blew up) the top half of Lord Nelson’s 134-ft. monument in the heart of Dublin. As W. B. Yeats predicted in his poem Easter, 1916, “All changed, changed utterly.” Lord Nelson lay in a pile of rubble on O’Connell Street. Said the Dublin police, scarcely concealing their admiration: “An absolutely expert job.”
The ceremonial Caribbean cruise was ended, so Britain’s Prince Philip, 44, saw the Queen off to London and taxied out for some less formal fun on his own. At the controls of a twin-engined turboprop Andover, the pilot prince buzzed in for a night in Miami and the start of an eleven-day U.S. tour to promote British trade and Variety Clubs International charities. Then he flew to Houston, where after some coaching, he simulated three perfect space dockings with an Agena rocket at the Manned Spacecraft Center. “A natural,” marveled White. So natural, in fact, that when a reporter asked in Palm Springs later about the “tremendous American enthusiasm for British royalty,” the prince grinned, “There’s no accounting for tastes.”
The oath is so simple that even at the academic freedomland of Harvard no one ever refused to sign—until Economics Instructor Samuel Bowles, 26, came along. “It represents a politically inspired interference with the independence of the university,” said Bowles. And so he declined to sign the oath, required of all the Commonwealth’s public and private teachers, to uphold the constitutions of the U.S. and Massachusetts, leaving Harvard no choice but to fire him at the end of this month. The instructor’s father, U.S. Ambassador to India Chester Bowles, who has been known to take some unique positions of his own, was philosophical about it all. Said he: “Sam is old enough to decide this sort of thing for himself.”
Somehow, during some Soho pub crawl in October 1953, the lyrical tosspot lost the manuscript of Under Milk Wood, a play in poetry and prose. The BBC had already made a copy, fortunately, and since Poet Dylan Thomas had to be off for his final and fatal U.S. lecture tour, he told BBC Producer Douglas Cleverdon to keep the original if he should find it. Cleverdon found it, in a pub on Old Compton Street. Later he sold it to the Times Book Co. for $5,600, and Dylan’s widow Caitlin Thomas, 50, sued, saying: “The idea he would give it away is unthinkable.” After a three-day trial, however, a London high court justice decided that give it away is precisely what Thomas did, in a “generous and impulsive gesture.” The widow and her children went home without so much as an iamb.
