PEOPLE
Recently Calvin L. Rampton (below, with paddle), governor of Utah, joined the annual Friendship Cruise, a two-day expedition 110 miles on the Green River to the Colorado River and 86 miles on up the Colorado to Moab. Rampton was the first Utah governor to undertake the trip, and quite a crowd gathered on shore to see him off. As everyone who has ever seen anybody off on anything knows, what is wanted on such occasions is a prompt departure, but of the 612 boats leaving on the Friendship Cruise only 611 got off. The 612th was, of course, Governor Rampton's. A large cable had mysteriously caught on its motor housing. The crowd of people hung around waving goodby and making feeble jokes while Skipper Tedd Tuttle struggled vainly to free the craft, until finally someone got off the line—"I wonder if it's a political tie?"—and, mercifully, the boat got off with it.
The Cincinnati Reds were waiting around to start an exhibition game with the Bears in Denver last week, and to pass the time they arranged a foot race between their two coaches, 46-year-old Ray Shore and Whitey Wietelmann, 48. Shore joggled to victory in what might be described as the 60-yard creep—he had weighed in at about 235 pounds and opponent Wietelmann at some five pounds less. Wietelmann's backers claimed that Shore jumped the gun, but there will be no rematch. Shore announced stoutly, "I won fair and square."
Boston Celtic Larry Siegfried did not turn up in Painesville, Ohio last Saturday when his ex-roommate, John Havlicek, married his ex-girl friend, Beth Evans. Other friends did attend the wedding, including Celtics Bill Russell, K. C. Jones, Don Nelson, General Manager Red Auerbach and, most pertinently, Havlicek's old buddy, Jerry Lucas. Now, John Havlicek and Jerry Lucas are two of the cleanest-living young men you would want to find—nonsmoking milk-drinkers both—so when the two innocents got next to the liquor at the bachelor party before the wedding, it was like babies finding the matches. It is not known exactly what all went into the drinks Lucas mixed. He did not have sufficient experience, apparently, to fetter his imagination, and he seems to have hit upon something from which seemingly there is no rebound. Havlicek drank it. At the ceremony on Saturday the officiating clergyman sized up the stricken groom and, with proper Christian charity, cut the proceedings as short as church and civil law allow. It still required several hours and medical attention to enable Havlicek to pull himself together for the reception. All in all, it was a sobering reminder of the perils of clean living, but there is one happy aspect to consider. Wherever he was, Larry Siegfried may have been feeling more cheerful than he had expected.
Actor Anthony Quinn (right) feels that one is never too young to play fronton—or too old either. Fronton tennis is a murderous amusement that derives from an old Basque game played with baskets. Played with rackets, it combines the more taxing elements of jai alai and squash, and Quinn, at 51, is the unquestioned champion of a group on location in Durango, Mexico for the filming of something called A Wall for San Sebastian. He has been spending his mornings "under the broiling sun, slogging through a dense cactus field," and his afternoons "kicking a vaquero down the steps of a little 1750 church," suitable preparation for fronton in his spare time. Recently, after a morning of golf, Quinn took on all comers for 14 straight sets. He not only survived, he won. Mexico plans to include the game in the Olympics next year: unfortunately, Quinn, who will only be 52, considers that he is good, but not Olympic material.
The King and Queen of Denmark had a lot of people coming for dinner recently—400 to be exact, for the wedding dinner of daughter Margrethe—and King Frederik hied himself off to the forest to help shoot roebuck for the royal table. It was just like the good old days back around 1367, though it is doubtful that King Olav V of Norway or the Duchess of Kent threw any bones under the table.
Florida's 41-year-old Governor Claude Kirk has pretty well established himself as an enthusiastic sort in the five months he has held office. He did not really have to go as far as he went in Tallahassee last week. A softball game followed a barbecue for the capital press corps on the mansion lawn and Kirk, trying to stretch a double, crunched into the tree that served as third base. After two days of discomfort the governor finally dropped by a hospital. He emerged with a cast on the clean break in his right elbow.
The least lowly bat boy in either league has to be the young man who performs this function for the Kansas City Athletics. The son of Owner Charles O. Finley, 14-year-old Paul Finley is a member of the A's board of directors and is quartered alone in the splendor of Kansas City's grandest hotel, the Muehlebach. The real deal, though, is that he is excused from the duty of cleaning the team's white shoes.
TWO PHOTOS