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PEOPLE
It is bad enough when the big one gets away, but it is really more than any man should have to bear to have somebody else land the same fish less than three minutes later. Fishing the Deschutes River in Oregon with Businessman Ross Hammack, a sponsor of the Portland Open, Jack Nicklaus hooked into a 22-pound steelhead, a sure bet for a major 1966 fishing-contest prize, and worked it to the surface for one brief look before the trout tore free and vanished. Nicklaus got a longer look minutes later when Host Hammack hooked and boated the fish. "That's where my hook pulled out. It was still bleeding when Hammack landed him," Nicklaus told newsmen later, and Hammack contributed politely, "I had a half mile of good shoreline in which to work him." Then the principals in the drama posed for their picture. Understandably enough the photograph (below) shows Hammack smiling a lot, Nicklaus smiling a little and the steelhead not smiling at all.
Football fan and Vice-President Hubert Humphrey was commiserating with Browns' Quarterback Frank Ryan in the vice-presidential suite of the Sheraton-Cleveland Hotel last week. The Browns had just blown the Packers game 21-20 and Humphrey said to Ryan, "I know what it's like to lose. My daddy always used to tell me, "When you're flat on your face on the ground, there's only one thing to do—turn over and look up!' " The advice rings courageous and idealistic, considered in the contexts of politics and pro football, in view of the fact that in either case anybody who turns over and looks up is likely to get a cleat in the face.
The wilderness of the Pacific Northwest is getting positively cluttered up with people bent on preserving it in all its majestic emptiness. First, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara invaded it to climb Mt. Rainier. Then Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman went West to claim the area in the name of the Department of Agriculture. He was followed by Washington's Governor Dan Evans, who took his 5-year-old boy on a cross-country trip in the nice remote wilderness, and now Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall is on his way out. It is beginning to appear, with everybody going to clamber around in the high Cascades, that searchers for peace and solitude will have to come East and refresh their souls in the majestic empty reaches of Washington, D.C.
Greta Garbo celebrated her 61st birthday last week by smiling at the press. The press, still reeling from the impact, reports meticulously that she arrived at the Monte Carlo Beach pool from her villa at Cap d'Ail and, wearing a two-piece white bathing suit, descended the ladder into the pool and swam about for a full 10 minutes. Then she emerged to lunch, still in her swim suit, upon a tomato, several slices of cucumber and a small bottle of champagne, and stated that at 61 one is "much less taken with the glitter of events and people, and more concerned with their value." Miss Garbo is not a woman who ever gave the impression of having been taken with the mere glitter of events or people, and one is not surprised to see her affirming the enduring value, on her birthday, of such sound pleasures as swimming and cucumbers and champagne.
"I was eating breakfast in Boston," reports former Davis Cup Captain Bill Talbert, "and this guy says, 'Hey, you're running today.' " Where he was running was in an early race on the Timonium track, and since he was in Boston for a tennis match it shaped up as a pretty tiring day. However, the reference was to Bill Talbert, the horse. Bill Talbert, the human, had already learned of the horse's existence. "I was at the Town Tennis Club in New York when I first heard about this," he said. "A friend was looking at the racing record and told me, 'There's a horse named after you.' " Talbert investigated and discovered that the horse was a 2-year-old maiden, bred in Kentucky, and the tennis players assembled in Boston loyally got up about $50 and bet on him, or her, or it. "Three of those early-bird, morning-line guys picked me," Billy said. "I had a good workout, but I was scratched. I never even got out of the barn." That was a blow, but when the horse finally did run some time later it won by five lengths and paid $10.80. "I may be over the hill as a tennis player, but I'm a hell of a 2-year-old maiden." Billy mused, then paused. "No, I'm not. I'm a winner," he said, contradicting himself with a certain quiet pride.
Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas also went fishing during a lull in a governors' conference last week. The fish he displays (below) isn't much, but, like Shakespeare's Touchstone and unlike Jack Nicklaus, he was able to say of it, "An ill-favored thing, Sir, but mine own."
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