PEOPLE
Auto Driving Champion Jimmy Clark has devised his own unique method of scoring in golf. "Six strokes and three throws," he recently announced to a partner marking up the tally for a hole at Pebble Beach. Clark explained, "It's easier to toss the ball out of the rough than to bash it."
Wagging her tail and yelping for joy, Gina Lollobrigida, the 150-pound mascot of a Big Bear Lake (Calif.) ski resort, bounded out over the snow to watch Astronaut John Glenn (below) take his first turn on skis, along with his wife Annie, daughter Lyn and son David. When word got out that Friendship 7's pilot was soloing on the slopes, crowds gathered to watch the unhappy landings. But within three days and strictly against the orders of Lodge Proprietor Toni Tyndall, Glenn was in orbit and doing A-OK on the precipitous Log Chute—"a mile-and-a-quarter run from 8,000 feet down to 7,300, and quite a test," according to Tyndall.
First in line each morning over the holidays at another ski lift was a whole family of sportsmen whose natural instinct in time of tension or tragedy is to seek catharsis in outdoor sport. In Aspen, Colo. as each day wore on, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, Senator Teddy, and brother-in-law Steve Smith would be joined by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Navy Secretary Paul Nitze and more Kennedys. Of them all, Bobby was rated tops for daring ("he's not much for form," said an impartial judge, "but he's a tiger"), Teddy for style ("he's a pretty skier") and Smith for sheer skill.
A bird watcher by necessity only, Prince Yoshi, second and youngest son of Japan's Emperor Hirohito, studies his feathered friends in order to identify more elusive game. "Only 160 varieties of bird lice are known to exist in Japan," said the young prince in a discussion of his hobby at a recent press conference, "and so far I have succeeded in collecting specimens of 50 of them."
Time enough to start thinking about politics, reckons New Mexico's Oilman-Sportsman Tom Bolack, when someone figures out how to get that crocodile he shot in Africa out of a second-floor Denver taxidermy shop. The 17-foot monster was nothing but a limp bag of skin when the former governor of New Mexico brought it back from Bechuanaland, but now, made rigid by a new steel skeleton, it has grown too unwieldy for the freight elevator. "I guess," said Taxidermist Joe Jonas while political friends urged his client to forget crocodiles and get back in the gubernatorial race, "we'll have to swing it out the window."
After a rich lifetime spent in the pursuit of pleasure as a gourmet, champagne connoisseur, sportsman, friend of Winston Churchill, cabinet minister, self-made man, parliamentarian, author, art collector, magnate and millionaire, Britain's Oliver Lyttelton, 1st Viscount Chandos, had some pithy words about the future of leisure. "I think the end of man's struggle against nature is just over the horizon," he said. "We are now faced with the possibility of a world in which only a minority need work, while the majority laze about in idle luxury. This presents a problem which can be solved only if we debunk work from its pinnacle of respectability."
When the Longhorns beat Navy in the Cotton Bowl on New Year's, they stripped the battle colors right off the U.S.S. Galveston as a trophy of war for Texas Governor John Connally. The governor had put up a pair of real longhorns plus honorary commissions in the Texas navy against the Galveston's colors, but in making the bet, he noted that the state of Texas has never collected on an earlier bet. That was when Governor Jimmy Allred bet a national park against Pikes Peak as Texas beat a Colorado team captained by Whizzer White.
After some 12 years in Ireland, the famed Galway Blazers' American-born master of foxhounds announced to his fellow huntsmen that he was becoming a real Irishman at last. "I believe," said Movie-man John Huston as he surrendered his U.S. passport in return for an Irish one, "that a person should be a citizen of the country in which he lives."
It was a dachshund, all right, but was it the right dachshund? That was the question that plagued U.S. Ambassador James Loeb Jr. after traveling halfway round the world to his post in Guinea with what a Washington, D.C. pet hospital had said was his dog. When the answer turned out to be no, Sam—the rightly inoculated but wrongly identified dachshund—was packed right back on another plane to continue his journey until he reached Washington once again.
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