PEOPLE
The public opening of Avery Brundage's monumental collection of Oriental art is set for spring in San Francisco's de Young museum, but already that crusty old guardian of amateur athletic fidelity is showing friends around the premises. Brundage, 78-year-old president of the International Olympic Committee, gave his collection to the city—which thereupon added a three-story wing to the museum to house the 6,000 pieces. And while one estimate places the value of the art at $30 million, the figure tends to depend on your needs. As Brundage put it while lovingly showing off a 3,000-year-old bronze rhinoceros vase that resembles—well, a moldy Rugby football: "Maybe not worth $10 to a housewife. Maybe worth $200,000 in an auction."
His dream is to subdue the Midwest under a blanket of pie crust and tomato paste, all of it bearing his name and making him money. Toward that ambition, Ron Santo has moved by opening, in Park Ridge, Ill., the first of a string of pizza parlors (below). As befits the Chicago Cubs' third baseman, Santo has chosen a motif for his pizzeria built on symbols of baseball—or, more exactly, of the Cubs' Wrigley Field: the counter resembles a dugout, the brick walls are covered with clinging plastic ivy, and so on. But does Santo know anything about making pizza? Oh, sure, he says. How long has he known? A week, roughly, he says.
No matter what the professional football leagues might decide to do, New Orleans is going to build itself a domed stadium—"the finest in the world"—vows Louisiana's new-horizons-minded governor, John McKeithen. "If the NFL wants to give the 16th franchise to Cincinnati and play in sleet and snow, let 'em," says McKeithen. The pros will come running once the stadium is in place. But then that's not the real worry. "If the stadium is not built," McKeithen warned citizens last week, "we'll have to be content to sit along the banks of the Mississippi and tell each other what great people we were in Granddaddy's day."
All he did by way of training, said Clarence Linden Crabbe, was swim an hour or two a day—and then he worried if maybe he was overdoing it. Must have been just right, for Buster Crabbe went to two Olympics and won a 400-meter freestyle gold medal in 1932. How times change, says Crabbe today. "The kids practice eight hours, they don't go on dates, they don't have any fun. If we had been forced to train the way they do now, I would have been a baseball player." But Crabbe admits it pays off: "Roy Saari, with that flip turn they use, would have licked me in my prime by 66 yards."
Right after John Lindsay had been elected mayor of New York, a city hall reporter, rummaging around, discovered a small, all-but-forgotten gymnasium directly under the mayor's office. What a find, considering the athletic postures Lindsay is always striking! Then somebody began to flick switches on the antique wired sweatbox (Jimmy Waller?), the sunlamp (La Guardia?), the electric bicycle (O'Dwyer?). Snap, crackle, pop and fumy smoke. "A bunch of junk," Lindsay lamented, and directed the room be cleared and made over into a spare bedroom.
"Dad was a fight fan in Dublin, and I like the fights, too—except most of the fighters now are headhunters," grumbled two-fisted Maureen O'Hara to Texas newsmen. Beg pardon, ma'am? "You know, headhunters! You don't chop a tree up high, you chop it down low," the lady patiently explained, making chopping signs high and low. "Boxers today go for the head instead of working on the body."
Everybody out in Jennings, Okla. always said Bob Kurland would go to the top—considering he was 7 feet tall and all. And that's what he did, helping Oklahoma A&M to two national basketball championships, going on to win gold medals in the Olympics and firmly establishing the tall man's role in the game. Foothills Kurland is still moving up, having just been named president of the Mehl Manufacturing Company, a subsidiary of Phillips Petroleum. Not bad for a man who started out 20 years ago stacking oilcans in a Phillips warehouse when he wasn't playing basketball for the Oilers.
Barbados will celebrate her independence from Britain sometime this year; that he is sure of, Premier Erroll Barrow told Canadian newsmen in Toronto. The big problem will be when. For "independence ceremonies cannot be held while the West Indies is playing the cricket matches against the Marylebone Cricket Club in England this summer." Plainly nobody in Barbados would leave his radio set long enough to attend.
Her weight was a little uphill, her hip a bit downhill, her bangs were in her eyes, her knickers were rushing the season and her crocheted bunny bonnet was surely more cozy than chic—but Brigitte Bardot was not bad at all as she whipped—cautiously moved, anyway—through a stem turn on a ski holiday in France (below). Bardot's hideaway in Méribel is said to suit celebrities seeking anonymity. As one believing observer said: "BB attracted no more attention than the barkeeper."
TWO PHOTOS