Very possibly none of St. Petersburg's senior citizens had ever thought of it just that way, but when Maurice Chevalier, himself 77 and one year older than the Eiffel Tower, called the city the "American Riviera," how everyone perked up with pride. Out for a Sunday stroll, Chevalier then followed his nose into Al Lang Field, where the Houston Astros were preparing to play the St. Louis Cards. Once the game got under way the Frenchman, who has become as native as a ball park hot dog, leaned on his malacca cane and looked on blankly. "I don't know the rules of baseball at all," he confessed. "Why they run when they do or why they stop."
Atmospheric in black wool beret and decorative apron left over from some old backyard barbecue set, Manager Bobby Bragan of the Atlanta Braves bent over an easel al West Palm Beach, Fla. (below) to apply the last strokes to his latest painting of a house—for which a 6-year-old then offered him 35¢. Bragan took up painting houses—took up painting altogether—last October and recently progressed to a castle. The castle, his favorite work to date, includes his 20-month-old granddaughter and her black poodle flying overhead on a magic carpet. The castle itself was the headache. "I had to paint the walls over a second time," says Bragan, "because my idea of a castle is ivy on the walls. I must have overdone the ivy, because when I had finished you couldn't see the castle."
Sitting in as guest sports columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, Richard Nixon harked back to a 1965 locker-room debate with Otto Graham that had followed a round of golf with Graham and Yale's John Pont. Lawyer Nixon was enthusiastic over Pont's decision to become head coach at Indiana, a Big Ten school. At that, said Columnist Nixon, "Otto spoke up and said he, personally, had had enough of the big-time pressure...and that, furthermore, he enjoyed his job at the Coast Guard Academy.... I had to disagree with his point of view. I chided him for it." A man with Graham's talent, Nixon meant, ought to take on something much more challenging than coaching the Coast Guard. Result? "I may have had," wrote Nixon, "a subconscious influence on Graham's decision to take the coaching post at the Washington Redskins." "Could be," mused Otto Graham in Washington, "but if old Richard wants credit I'll expect him back down here when things don't go too well to help me coach."
UFO Spotter of the Week: On the night following his 15-round fight with Cassius Clay, reports George Chuvalo, he observed a mysterious, flickery thing flying through the Toronto sky. "My wife saw it too, and Clay didn't hit her once."
With six days to spare, Sargent Shriver sped off to Africa with son Bobby, 11, and nephew Bobby Kennedy Jr., 12, for the express pin pose of "seeing it all." By dint of Land Rover, twin-engine Beech and split-second timing, the remarkable feat was pretty much accomplished, as the three of them jammed a normal two-month safari into 1,200 action-packed miles that included treetop nights huddling in the howling forests and eye-popping days flying past Kilimanjaro and over the game-abounding Serengeti Plains of Tanzania. All the while, the boys, well prepared, gave Shriver a running commentary on the ecological structure of African wildlife. At one intoxicating point, while Bobby Jr. sat photographing from the back of a truck, they were charged by rhinos and elephants. Said Bobby Shriver, "It was great."
He was the only winning pitcher (5 wins, 4 losses) the New York Mets could claim in 1962. Even so, scholarly Ken MacKenzie had it figured out this way: "I'm the lowest-paid member of the Yale class of 1956." If true then, no doubt true today, for nothing much has changed except the job. Retiring from baseball last fall, MacKenzie has returned to Yale to coach freshman hockey and baseball while-working on credits for a master's degree in industrial administration. Miss the majors and all? "Well, I do," says MacKenzie. "This will take some getting used to."
Halfback Mike Garrett's Heisman Trophy, loaded with prestige, is fine as far as it goes. But can it measure up to that all-purpose pocketknife that President Lyndon Johnson gave him, an instrument that also scissors, tweezes, tooth-picks and files? The President met Garrett (below) while Mike was in Washington as a guest of alumni of the University of Southern California. When Johnson handed over the knife Mike reported, "He said, 'When someone gives you something with a sharp edge as a gift you should offer something in return so you won't cut off the friendship.' " What L.B.J. had in mind was a copper cent, but Mike preferred to give the President the tiny gold football tacked through his necktie. "My kindergarten teacher at Wiggins Avenue School had it made and gave it to me when I won the Heisman Trophy," said Mike, "and it's very precious to me. I told the President I would appreciate his taking it, and he did."
Maine's once-fashionable Poland Spring Hotel—it briefly emerged from obscurity last spring as Sonny Liston's training camp—is now being converted to a Job Corps training center for women. Quick to respond to an invitation to join the physical-education staff was Tennessee's Wilma Rudolph, winner of three track gold medals at the 1960 Olympics. "We want the kind of people who can provide strong motivation to the Job Corps girls," said Center Director Sol Ernst. "People just like Wilma Rudolph."
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