PEOPLE

In her Oscar-winning performance in The Miracle Worker, Patty Duke played a girl who was both blind and deaf. She gets a far better break in her new movie, Billie, playing a girl so physically sound she can beat all the boys on her high school track team. Of course, 18-year-old Patty (below) had some off-camera help. Rafer Johnson, 1960 Olympic decathlon champion, coached her and even her dog Clown and Executive Producer Peter Lawford joined in the workouts. Co-star Jim Backus merely cheered them on.

The Baltimore Bullets' training camp roster includes a man who probably has the shortest law enforcement career on record. Reserve Center Bob Ferry was vacationing at Wildwood, N.J. before camp opened and decided one day to take a stroll. "I walked out of the hotel and everybody was hustling to the beach," he said. "I followed the crowd to see what's up and it looks like a riot getting started. This guy taps me on the shoulder and says, 'Who are you with?' 'Nobody right now,' I told him. So he puts a club in my hand and says, 'Come on and help me. I'm making you a deputy.' Next thing I know I'm on the outskirts of the crowd, holding this stick and wondering how I got involved in this, when a policeman fires three shots in the air. Then everybody took off and I wasn't a deputy anymore."

Runner Michel Jazy, holder of three world middle-distance records, was clocked at 50 mph going through Niort, France—in an automobile. He will have to appear in court to answer speeding charges. Lamented Jazy, "It is the first time I've been criticized for going too fast."

Among the 150 golfers at the 65th National Amateur Championship in Tulsa was an old familiar name—Bobby Jones. It was not the golfing immortal, of course, but his son, Robert Tyre Jones III, who was competing. Jones, 38, is a soft-drink distributor in Pittsfield, Mass., and he only plays on weekends. Even so, he manages to shoot in the mid-70s. Usually. At Tulsa, after a shaky first-round 79, Jones shot a disastrous 91, thereby missing the cut and proving conclusively that he is no chip off the old block.

The American lady was on her way into the Air Force post exchange in Madrid to buy some golf balls when a guard barred her because she was wearing slacks. Was she a newly arrived service wife unaware of the apparel rules designed to protect Spanish sensibilities? Not at all. She was ex-fashion editor Robin Duke, wife of U.S. Ambassador to Spain Angier Biddle Duke, former Chief of Protocol.

Juan Marichal and John Roseboro apparently are not the only ones stirred up by the intense National League pennant race. Witness this letter to Lovelorn Columnist Abigail Van Buren: "Last night we had two couples in for dinner. One man brought a transistor radio, tuned to the baseball game. When I announced dinner, he brought the radio to the dinner table with him, and it blasted away all during dinner. After dinner we played cards, and he kept that thing alongside him. Is this to be condoned, even in the age of casual manners? Hurt Hostess."

Visitors to France's picturesque gambling town, Divonne-les-Bains, have a new place in which to spend their francs—a racetrack just opened by Baron Elie de Rothschild. Horse racing is nothing new for the Rothschilds, who for many years have been leaders of the sport in France. Entered in the first Grand Prix de Divonne were Thoroughbreds from the stables of Elie's two cousins, the Barons Guy and Edmond de Rothschild.

Politicians competing against each other with shotguns would seem to be a dangerous idea, but only clay pigeons suffered serious wounds at the annual Southern Governors Conference skeet shooting contest at Sea Island, Ga. John Connally of Texas successfully defended his title by blasting 22 clay pigeons, one more than Oklahoma's Henry Bellmon. Oh yes, there was almost one human casualty. Charles L. Terry Jr. of Delaware came within an inch of sitting on a lighted cigar, which Alabama's George Wallace had left on a bench while taking his shots.

"We were a little uncomfortable and felt a little silly at being lost," said the 67-year-old New Hampshire lady who had been missing with a companion for 24 hours on a routine hike up a 3,500-foot slope in Maine. Miriam O'Brien Underhill, one of the nation's foremost female mountain climbers who in 1929 scaled the Matterhorn without a guide, explained that she had strayed from the trail and had been forced to find her way back following a stream.

Fans who went to see seven past heroes inducted into the National Professional Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio got a bonus—an in-person view of Jane Russell, who was there with her husband Bob Waterfield, ex-quarterback of the Los Angeles Rams and one of those honored. With them were two of their children, Tracy, 14, and Buck, 9, but a third, 15-year-old Tommy, was left home. "He's a football player," said Miss Russell, "and his coach didn't want him to miss practice."

The question is: Is southern California ready for the Stengels? Edna Stengel, for a switch, will be the one to put the answer to a test when she appears at her swimming pool in a full-fledged bikini. Perhaps the shock won't be all that bad, since, as Edna puts it, "You see, we have this high board fence."

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