- Publish date:
PEOPLE
The cowpoke just ahead of him had been hauled off moaning in an ambulance, but before his agitated wife could deliver a dismount and desist order, Californian Adrian Jack Barker, running hard for the state assembly, exploded from a planked rodeo chute atop a red-eyed critter answering to Cyanide (below). Unable to get his name mentioned as a visiting dignitary over the El Dorado county fair P.A. system because that honor is strictly reserved for rodeo participants, Barker, though utterly inexperienced, simply signed up for the Brahma bull event and hung on grimly for six seconds before he was crunched to the ground. His time was just two seconds shy, he was more than pleased to learn, of the eight seconds required to qualify for another ride.
Peering through the Sussex salt-marsh fern fronds at the wary redshanks, plovers and oyster-catchers was Billy Fury, the Elvis Presley of the British Isles of another day. Now mellowing into his middle 20s, Billy is bearing down on bird watching (field studies, he terms it), an old pursuit of childhood that he found "wonderfully relaxing" during his rise to rock 'n' roll fame. But Billy's popularity, while on the ebb, still nets him roughly $100,000 a year, 10% of which he put into his high-powered camera and considerably more of which he hopes to put in a 100-acre woodland game sanctuary. "I want to have it right in the heart of fox-hunting and pheasant-shooting country," says Billy, who is firm in his opposition to blood sport. "Then I can tell these people: 'This is my home; you may not hunt or shoot over it.' "
As every Indiana motorist knows (thanks to the proliferation of Hoosier booster highway signs), Mitchell is the home of Astronaut Gus Grissom, Lebanon is the home of basketball's Rick Mount, and Bippus, proudest of all, is "The Home of National Sportscaster Chris Schenkel." Undisputed, too, is the fact that Lawrenceburg is the home of the Cincinnati Reds' top relief pitcher, Billy McCool—except that a two-by-three foot sign proclaiming that news at the town limits has been snatched down after only 72 hours by highway department workers who said it was an improper use of the state's right-of-way. Who to blame? "Blame Lady Bird," said one state official. "The pressure's on us to cut down on highway signs. We could lose millions."
At a flat-out 18 mph in the straightaways (but judiciously easing into the bends so as not to tip over the cargo), Jim Clark, twice the world's driving champion, crouched behind the wheel of an electric milk float and whined around a¾-mile racing track near Edinburgh. Clark, ordinarily more of a sobersides than that, agreed to the simple business, agrarian jock that he is, as a favor to the Scottish Milk Marketing Board. Still, failing to reckon on the outcome and finishing second to a Glasgow milkman, he was bound to admit: "I felt a novice among all those professionals."
Ten years ago, as pastor of a Baptist church in Raleigh, N.C., Horace Albert McKinney, better known as Bones and better known as basketball coach at Wake Forest College, had frequent occasion to visit a nearby state prison. Now, 11 months after retiring from coaching, Bones has gone to work for the state prison department in the role of assistant director of rehabilitation, a job that will oblige him, among other things, to educate the public on its responsibility to former prisoners. "I love the work," said Bones. "I hope I can be helpful."
Ever since he popularized the notion that through the rigors of a golf tournament nothing sustains like a hip-pocket, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, PGA Champion Allen Geiberger has been deluged by commercial offers and gross quantities of rival brands of goo. Skippy, beating out the competition, has at last put the man to contract and is now suggesting that he author a peanut-butter recipe book, a task for which he admits an impoverished imagination. "Oh, sure," says Al, "I like peanut butter with grape jelly pretty well, and for quite a while it was peanut butter and strawberry, sometimes peanut butter and raspberry and once in a while peanut butter and apricot. But after you have made a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich—well, how many things can you do?"
To millions in the bleachers Duke Snider is a very fine ex-center fielder for the Dodgers, but to Madison Avenue he is a very fine specimen of virile manhood horribly incapacitated by prematurely gray hair—or just the ticket for one of Clairol's half-and-half ads for a masculine hair coloring. On the TV commercial appearing soon, the Silver Fox slyly introduces himself as roguish Edwin D. Snider, 39-year-old brunette avocado grower of Fallbrook, Calif. (below). Then, turning the uncolored side of his head to the camera, he (gasp) reveals the telltale gray of the Duke of yesteryear. Disorientation has already set in. Lamenting the passing of old times and old friends, the new-look Snider returned to the minor league team he manages in Kennewick, Wash. to discover that some of his players failed to recognize him.
THREE PHOTOS
