PEOPLE
It was winners weepers for the Cards' Bob Gibson (below) by the end of the week after the Series. Gibson came home to Omaha to be named honorary governor by Governor Norbert Tiemann and honorary mayor by Mayor A. V. Sorensen. Gibson acted briskly in both of these capacities, saying, "I hereby repeal the state sales tax and declare an open-housing law in Omaha." A crowd of 1,500 turned up for a chamber of commerce luncheon—the largest such luncheon ever held—and Mayor Sorensen commented upon Gibson's work in the ghetto area of the city. "Omaha, which had a bad riot in the summer of '66, didn't have a riot last summer," he said. "I give some measure of the credit to Bob." Gibson took this composedly, but when he visited his old grade school in that same poor area, a little girl called out, "Bob, we love you." Gibson wept.
The sensation of Australian Jockey Bill Pyers' victory in France's Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe (SI, Oct. 16) was clouded almost at once by a sensation of quite another sort. Pyers had scarcely had time to savor his triumph before he was jailed on charges arising from a year-old traffic accident, and "clouded" is certainly the word for the whole mess at the moment. In July 1966 Pyers collided with a Mme. Géraud de Seguin, and the two of them went off to the police station. Mme. Géraud de Seguin did not appear to be hurt, and admits that "it was only afterward that I learned my head had been injured." The charges which landed Pyers in jail have to do with a failure to appear at a subsequent hearing, as a result of which he was sentenced in absentia. Pyers claims that, owing to unfamiliarity with the language, he was unaware that he had been either summoned or sentenced, or that a warrant for his arrest had been issued. He had 10 days in which to appeal: they were up on the Sunday he was engaged in winning the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. There are some murmurs to the effect that Mme. Géraud de Seguin's lawyer has had quite a long time to track the jockey down and did not actually descend full of indignation until after his victory in the Arc. The lady herself has observed that she is glad he won, because "at least he's solvent." The case will not come up for weeks. Pyers will spend the weeks in prison, but a special effort has been made to get him some English books to read. He might better use the occasion to learn to read French.
"Knowledge is of two kinds," Boswell once observed. "We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information." Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, 79, is a soccer fan and president of the Portsmouth Football Club, but he decided recently that he was short of knowledge, in Boswell's first sense, as regards betting the treble chance in the English football pools. He knew where to find information, though. He simply got in touch with a large pools firm in Liverpool and requested an instructor. The firm obligingly dispatched one of its senior experts, who traveled 150 miles to Montgomery's home to "unravel the mess he had got himself into with his pools efforts," as an English paper put it. Then, having explained the whole complicated business to Montgomery's satisfaction, the expert turned around and traveled the 150 miles back to Liverpool. If the field marshal places his bets with this same firm and hits for £100,000 it is going to seem somehow ungracious.
The Jewish High Holy Day Yom Kippur occurred shortly after the World Series this year, a fact that presented NBC's Bill Mazer with a problem. Mazer has a radio program in New York on which he takes phone calls from the public and discusses their sports questions on the air, and during the time he would be off for the holy days he needed a replacement who knew baseball. He made a sound choice. For two days callers to NBC heard, "Hello. This is Carl Yastrzemski substituting for Bill Mazer." Yaz (above) was a natural, friendly and poised, and the poise held up through the following exchange with one boy who announced that he had rooted for the Sox. "All season?" "Yeah." "How about next year?" "Yeah." "How about if we're in ninth place.?" "No." "Well, at least you're honest," Yastrzemski said cheerfully.
The ad reads, "I will teach you to drive safely up to 150 miles per hour," and it is signed Curtis Turner. Now, Curtis Turner is one of the truly tough good old boys, a stock-car racer whose strongest recommendation for his National School of Safe High Performance Driving, based at the Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina, is probably the fact that he's still alive. The North Carolina Highway Patrol would never deny that Curtis is a fine driver, but they had to drop a fly into his driving-school ointment when they lifted his license for doing 80 in a 60-mph zone. It was a safe 80 mph, of course.
Ralph Yarborough attended West Point in 1919 and 1920, departing after two years when it became apparent that a severe hang-up in mathematics was going to harm a possibly brilliant military career. The passage of 47 years having eased the pain, Yarborough recently attended an old grads' reunion in Dallas after the Army-Southern Methodist game, and he was approached by a former classmate who burbled that it was certainly too bad that Ralph had not made it all the way at The Point. "What are you doing these days?" the friend went on to ask. "I am a United States Senator," Yarborough replied. "What are you doing?"
TWO PHOTOS
