PEOPLE
The suite named after the Minnesota Twins in the Hotel Leamington in Minneapolis looks pretty much like the suite named after the Minnesota Vikings in the same hotel, but the tab is slightly different—$74 a day for the Twins suite compared to $53 a day for the Vikings. How come? Well, the Leamington's Bob Short (who, as a former owner of the Lakers in the National Basketball League, ought at least to be neutral) has an 8-by-10 photograph of Minnesota Twins Owner Calvin Griffith hanging in the Twins suite. The Twins won the championship in their league and the Vikings didn't, and that, football fans, is as good a reason as any why it costs $21 extra a day.
The whole concept was new and revolutionary, said Casey Stengel, as he took a bank holiday and showed up, same as always, for Florida's annual rites of spring training. But the staunch old fundamentalist reckoned he was for it. The idea, as he got it, was that Wes Westrum, his successor as manager of the New York Mets, would introduce a baseball bat this year that was straight. And no matter what the results might be, the team batting average would probably exceed previous years when the Mets used a bat, said Casey, shaped like his eccentric walking stick—which, wryly, he then held up (below).
The idea of warm hospitality in Finland is for everyone to turn out in sub-zero weather, strap on cross-country skis and race 2 million millimeters (about 1¼ miles) around the rim of a rock-hard frozen lake. Which is what Ruth Thompson, wife of U.S. Ambassador Tyler Thompson, did the other day near Helsinki along with a congenial gathering of diplomats, ministry officials and their families. True, there was a rest stop for blueberry juice or whiskey grog halfway round the lake, and on such compulsory nourishment most contestants more or less finished the course—Ruth Thompson scooting to a respectable second place in the ladies' division.
"I don't know anything about football," Atlanta Millionaire Rankin Smith was frank to say when he founded the NFL Falcons, but some of the things that go with football are another matter. A recent Smith idea, for example, calls for a four-color Falcon uniform that pays homage (red and black) to the University of Georgia, Smith's own alma mater, while not overlooking the home folks (gold and white) from Georgia Tech. Such a wide-awake outlook has sold gobs of season tickets, among other things, and Smith is not through. Latest idea: a Falcon fight song to be written, he likes to hope, by Savannah's Johnny Mercer.
Humming with pride, the front-office boys were showing the boss a preview of a promotional film that tries to blend the hoary traditions of the made-in-Manhattan Giants with such San Francisco fixtures as Fisherman's Wharf and fog. And Giant President Horace Stone-ham, whose idea it had been, was eating it up until a dim, fuzzy figure in an antique newsreel was identified as Christy Mathewson. "That's not Christy," gasped Stoneham. "That's Buck Herzog!" Barely recovered from that, Stoneham spotted another blooper: some ninny in the cutting room had scrambled the batting-order appearances of Joe Cronin and Jimmy Foxx, two of the five Hall of Famers Carl Hubbell struck out in a row in the 1934 All-Star Game. Great catch on that, Horace, but could he really be certain about identifying Herzog in that grainy old clip of film? "You bet I can," blustered Stoneham. "Herzog always walked in a crouch. Even though more than 50 years have passed, I still recognize that crouch."
He was the conference middleweight boxing champion, he held the mile record (4:24) in track, he caught for the baseball team and he was right in there at center for every minute of every game played by the insatiable 1909 football team at Sewanee (the University of the South), the team that one week played four games. No wonder Grant-land Rice was moved to call him Iron Man—and no wonder that the Rt. Rev. Frank A. Juhan, an Episcopal bishop, was elected to the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame along with the likes of Dick Kazmaier and Norm Van Brocklin. Says the 78-year-old Iron Man (who ought to know), "Sport builds character."
Lady Bird called the Cabinet wives together to celebrate Muriel Humphrey's 54th birthday, and this was the angle: the girls could lose a little weight before lunch by swimming in the White House pool, or by bowling (as Mrs. J. and Mrs. H. elected to do) in the Executive Office Building next door. After an hour of that, everybody regrouped to count lost ounces, then sat down to a perfectly delicious stuffing of creamed chicken and cheese soufflé, strawberry ice cream and yellow cake with red-icing roses.
As every schoolboy who won't grow up knows, all it takes to fly like Peter Pan is a sprinkling of fairy dust applied while thinking lovely thoughts. That's O.K. for kids, maybe, but Betsy Palmer, who is somewhat over 21, and who must learn to fly for a touring production of Peter Pan, has taken the more practical step of enrolling in exercise classes at a New York gymnasium. Working out with Trainer Walter Rozhen last week, her joints popped a trifle but, judging from the looks of things as she looped and flipped among the rings and parallel bars, Betsy is within an ace of soloing.
Since they already had on display a bronze casting of Bob Feller's pitching arm (and down in the basement, or somewhere, a Joe Louis fist and a Bobby Jones grip wrapped around a golf club), it figured that officials of the Cleveland Health Museum would have a hankering for the prolific toe (1,195 points so far) of the Browns' Lou Groza. That longing has now been satisfied, thanks to Groza's willingness ("It tickles") to hold still while the museum people, given an inch, went for the whole 12D foot. Very shortly the dismembered foot will be mounted just short of booting the daylights out of a bronze football.
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