PEOPLE

Now that Pancho Gonzales and his ex-wife Madelyn intend to remarry (SI, July 7), the once and future Mrs. Gonzales says, "People always ask me how I can possibly live with such a vicious-looking terror. That's easy. I'm the only person Pancho can't live without."

Rudy Vallee, 67, can't swim, and so he refused a friend's invitation to float down Arizona's Salt River on an inner tube. But the friend, Julian Peagler Jr. of Phoenix, persisted, and finally Vallee agreed to give the sport a try, only to slide out of the tube he'd been talked into when it hit some Salt River rapids. Peagler dived in and rescued Vallee, depositing him both safe and sorry upon the shore. Vallee was fine, but his bathing trunks were down about his ankles. NB: since the Salt River is very shallow in many places near Phoenix, floating is locally referred to as "bottom bouncing."

John Mary Lynch, Ireland's prime minister, was famous years ago as plain Jack Lynch, hurler and footballer. He captained several championship hurling teams and was himself awarded six consecutive All-Ireland medals, five for hurling, one for football. It is still remembered that on St. Patrick's Day 1944 Lynch played three matches, football in the morning in Bray, County Wicklow, and two hurling matches the same afternoon in Croke Park, Dublin—and cycled the 13 miles between playing fields.

"I said to myself, 'Boy, this has to be a put-on,' " reports Skydiving Instructor Dennis Scietti. But the kid who turned up in Orange, Mass., saying he was Bobby Kennedy Jr. was Bobby Kennedy Jr., so after a quick call to Ethel in Hyannisport to double-check that the 16-year-old really had his mother's O.K., Bobby was duly instructed, taken up to 2,500 feet and launched. He floated like a butterfly.

Judith Anne Ford, Miss America 1969, recently explained how it is that she is not playing major league baseball. She abandoned her childhood pitching career, she says, "when I was hit in the stomach with a line drive. Then I went to the outfield, but one of the fellows was a poor sport. He hit a long fly he didn't think I'd catch, but I did, and he came over and threw his glove at me and hit me. I ran into my house and went back to playing with my dolls." It's a pity the militant feminists protesting the beauty pageant in Atlantic City last fall didn't know Judith's story. They might have stopped picketing and hailed her as a victim of the male Establishment.

Residents of Lincoln County, N. Mex. are busy celebrating the county's centennial this month. The town of Capitan held a rodeo in honor of its most distinguished personality, Smokey Bear, and the town of Carrizozo had a quarter-horse show. Lincoln is going to stage a pageant, as it has in the past, depicting the escape of Billy the Kid from the courthouse jail. The county's leading citizen, Artist Peter Hurd, has played the lead in this epic before, but this year he invited everyone to a centennial polo match at his ranch. Now NASA has invited him to Mission Control Center in Houston to do drawings of the Apollo 11 operation. "I tried to get the launch postponed until after the match," Hurd assured his guests, "but we're going to have to put off the match." That's a lot of trouble. Hopefully, NASA will not look at his work and snort: "That's the ugliest drawing of a rocket we've ever seen."

Senator Stephen M. Young (D., Ohio) works out daily in the Senate gymnasium and plays tennis several times a week, not so much for exercise as for blood. At least he played tennis until recently, when he reached too far for a backhand shot and used his left hand to brace himself for a fall. He didn't notice the swelling until after the match, when he was having a few beers, and he didn't learn that the hand was fractured until his staff bullied him into going to a doctor. Some people never learn, and Senator Young probably is one of them—he's 80 years old.

Buffalo Bills' Owner Ralph Wilson had a filly, Miss Charisma, running at Ascot. She went off at 88 to 1, unbacked by Wilson, and, of course, she came in first. "I fly 4,000 miles to see my horse run. She wins in front of the Queen. She's 88 to 1, and where am I?" Wilson moaned. "It's the first time in my life I've not made even a token bet on one of my horses." The odds on O.J. Simpson are a little shorter than 88 to 1, to be sure, but it may not hurt Wilson to be reminded that when you don't put any money out you don't get any money back.

Joe Pepitone has purchased a new blue outfit. The moment he laid eyes upon the thing he whooped, "That's me!" Anyone who sees him in it will be in a position to agree that it's Joe, all right—both top and trousers are see-through mesh.

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