PEOPLE

The rhubarb about to erupt in a board of regents meeting was over the proposal to enlarge the University of Wisconsin's Camp Randall Stadium, one member querulously suggesting that the athletic department had provided unrealistic estimates of future football revenues. Not necessarily, said President Fred Harvey Harrington. Admittedly, last year's home-game receipts had been nothing to brag about in view of the Badgers' 2-7-1 season. But this fall the deficit was sure to be recovered on road trips. "We're going places," said the crafty Harrington, "where they don't know about us."

It was only a pet they had purchased a few years back, but the next thing Announcer Don Wilson and his wife, Lois, knew they were showing their new poodle and winning prize upon prize. The other day Wilson made his debut as a judge in a Los Angeles puppy-dog show. "Showing dogs is one of the most satisfying hobbies I know," says Wilson, "but I often wonder what folks think when they see Lois and me, out at 5 a.m., walking our dogs on Sunset Boulevard." Confided Judge Wilson: "All dog lovers have to be a little crazy, but poodle owners are insane."

While a conservative candidate for the Maryland senate was challenged to a duel of custard pies, "in keeping with his Keystone Cops logic" (invitation declined), and a Bethesda candidate for Congress raised $500 in campaign funds by sponsoring a tennis tournament in a friend's backyard, Maryland Attorney General Thomas Finan, running for governor, pulled on swimming trunks and plunged into Chesapeake Bay. The 52-year-old Finan, responding to an opponent's charge that "shocking political mismanagement" had allowed pollution of the bay, emerged from the water after 30 minutes, refreshed, exuding high spirits and with no visible ill effects outside of a slightly sunburned bald head.

Out of La Jolla's Western Behavioral Sciences Institute think tank and into the San Diego Chargers' training camp came the University of Michigan's famed philosophy chairman, Abraham Kaplan. As far as abusive language goes, said the professor, it was pretty much the same as that heard in the Wolverine practice sessions he often attends back home in Ann Arbor. But the pulverizing physical abuse handed out by the Chargers set Kaplan to pondering the mysteries of life in the professional leagues. "How do they build team spirit when they hit as hard as that?" he wondered. "I believe I would give them the back of my hand."

Even though the lowly Braves had just knocked off the Giants in the first game of a double-header, the weather was hot and muggy, the hour was growing late and the incoming traffic was fierce. Thereafter (as the policeman told it), Mrs. Henry Aaron, on her way to the second game, failed to obey a signal and cursed him, and the policeman (as Mrs. Aaron told it) pulled his pistol and cursed her. This week Mrs. Aaron will be tried in court, and the policeman, now suspended, will be given a hearing. "I'm sorry this happened," said Henry Aaron himself, "but I'm not going to let it drop."

Personally he never dug the nickname, but Wilt Chamberlain, newly in the music recording business in San Francisco, is bowing to public taste and will issue a "Stilt" label early next month. About to push off for Philadelphia and his eighth season in professional basketball, Chamberlain hated to go. "Here you have a swinging town like San Francisco," he said, "with all those hideaway spots for rising musicians and singers, and not one major recording company. I've always liked music better than basketball, but only now have I the means to express it."

Charting the perils of teen-age marriages for a Sept. 6 television show on CBS, Producer Merrill Brockway asked Chicago Bear Halfback Gale Sayers and his wife Linda (left) how they met. Here's how it went. Gale: It was my sophomore year in high school, but I wasn't much interested in girls then, just football. She called me up, right? Linda: Don't tell everybody that. Gale: Well, it was true. You called me up and I offered to take you to a basketball game, and we started going together, right? Linda: Well, more or less, I guess. No, he was going with another girl and I was going with another boy, but we—Gale: You got tired of the other boy friend and called me up, right? Linda: No, that wasn't the reason. No, oh...you...our dating history.... Well, actually, Gale was very shy when we first started dating and—really, can we just forget about this?

There was the visionary prospect of smooth sailing, meanwhile, when Viking Halfback Tommy Mason gave the Lions' defense a workout in an exhibition game in New Orleans, and up in the stands his fiancée underwent her first exposure to football. Tommy and Rita Ridinger (below), a history major at the University of Minnesota, plan to marry Dec. 29, not forgetting the possibility of the Vikings' playing in the NFL championship game three days later. After all, calculated Mason, proceeds from that, combined with those from the NFL-AFL playoff, could mean "a wedding gift of about $16,000." Said Rita, eyes rather dewy: "Football seems to be a wonderful profession."

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