PEOPLE

A gift for impersonating Tom Jones and Martin Luther in a hit movie and a hit play at the same time is a happy thing, but Albert Finney might very well give it back for tuppenceworth of his father's talent. At home in London, Mr. Finney Sr. is a turf accountant, or bookie, as they say in crude old New York and Las Vegas. "The only reason I went into show business," his son Albert confessed when the two of them dropped in at Aqueduct the other day, "is that I had no talent for picking winners."

Looking every bit as sleek and slim as the shiny new Shinegawa alleys themselves, the two pretty daughters (below) of Japan's Premier Hayato Ikeda turned up to give the sport of bowling a big sendoff in Tokyo. Pretty 23-year-old Noriko Ikeda (right) cut the ribbon that officially opened the bowling center, which claims to be the world's largest. Pretty 21-year-old Sachiko Ikeda rolled out the first ball.

Critics who claim to know gave only an E for effort to the new captain of the White House pool swimming team. Lyndon B. Johnson, they said, "swims only to get to the other end of the pool. His purpose is exercise."

Airports are no places to boast about "bombing the Celtics"—or so Gene Conley found out last week at New York's La Guardia as he took a plane for Boston. An alert attendant heard the threat, turned in an alarm and before the startled New York Knickerbocker center could organize a fast break, he was telling the FBI that the bomb scare was only a manner of speaking. As it turned out, the Celtics bombed the Knicks.

Unseasonably thin and dripping wet, Santa Claus appeared at a San Francisco shopping center minus his beard and his reindeer. His heavily press-agented arrival was supposed to be by parachute, but a stiff wind blew him west of the target and into the bay. Rescued bypassing surfers, the kindly saint was paddled ashore and rushed to his planned destination by ambulance. "It was all very embarrassing," said Santa, emerging, clean-shaven and dry at last, as Sky Diver Ron Young. "I've had 502 jumps, you know."

Chatting in Moscow with his nation's soccer team on the eve of their defeat by the U.S.S.R., Italian Ambassador to Russia Alberto Straneo recalled that Nikita Khrushchev once confessed to being a former soccer player. What position? "He told me he was some kind of forward," said the ambassador, with a diplomat's caution.

In an apparent effort to find out how earth man lives, doctors who have been examining America's astronauts clapped a specially wired girdle on Boston Bruin Hockey Coach Milt Schmidt to test his reactions during a game with league-leading Chicago. The test failed to put Schmidt into orbit, but it managed somehow to lift the Bruins out of the NHL cellar as they beat the Black Hawks 2-1.

The man who made a mess out of SMERSH—Russia's top espionage apparatus—has gone into trade. While Author Ian Fleming rakes in the royalties, his sexy secret agent James Bond is busy in almost every other British ad these days selling sportswear (James Bond Secret Agent Topcoats, James Bond Shoes) and even boats. "James Bond," reads an ad in the current issue of an English yachting magazine, "makes his getaway once again, this time in a Fairey Huntress at 31 knots."

The odds-on favorite when 30 members of the House of Representatives get together to play a golf tournament at Palm Beach next week is Congressman Jack Westland (R., Wash.). Congressman Westland not only shot a hole in one at the Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche course in Paris some time ago, but he happens also to be a onetime (1952) National Amateur champion. Other potential title winners (according to Republican handicappers, anyway): best putter, Leslie Arends of Illinois, a Republican; best driver, Robert Michel of Illinois, a Republican; longest ball hitter, William Bates of Massachusetts, a Republican; most likely to spend most time in the rough, Edward Boland of Massachusetts, a Democrat.

"If I gotta pay that kind of money to carpet my floors," said the outraged Phoenix, Ariz. householder on getting an estimate from the local floor-covering store, "I might as well buy the company." And with that, Dizzy Dean, who used to strike out more batters and murder more English than anybody, wrote out a check for what promptly became the Dean-Poladian Carpet Co.

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T. TANUMA