PEOPLE

Last year, despite rigorous training under the eye of a Canadian Football League veteran, Prime Minister Trudeau flubbed the kickoff of the Grey Cup classic—the ball sailed five feet, rolled five more (SI, Dec. 9, 1968). This year he was careful not to overtrain and, jaunty in a white cap and flowing muffler, he got off a 28-footer—24 feet in the air, four feet on the ground. Obviously less practice makes perfect—Trudeau broke the late Viscount Alexander of Tunis' record by one yard.

During halftime of the Saints-Eagles game in New Orleans Carol Channing made an entrance to the strains of Hello, Dolly. Riding a camel, she looked more like Mame, and what she sang was from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—Diamonds Are a Girl's Best friend. Gentleman John Mecom Jr., the Saints' owner, responded by presenting her with a diamond-studded football, eliciting the response that it was "just what I needed!" But Miss Channing backed the wrong camel. In a match race (against another camel) hers lost, even though Larry Snyder, the nation's leading jockey in races won, was up.

Actor Robert Morley has just talked his mother-in-law into buying half a racehorse. He himself bought a whole one, after years of going shares, but he is not as ecstatic as mum-in-law Dame Gladys Cooper. "I can't think why I never bought a horse before," says Dame Gladys, who will be 81 this week. "I'm terribly excited about it all! I will start racing it next spring under my own name and my own colors. My colors are light blue, dark blue and mauve, and I first used them many years back when I organized a theater cricket team. I chose the varying shades of blue to match the colors of delphiniums, of which I am very fond." The owner of the other half of the brown yearling colt is Mr. Alan Palmer, of the Huntley & Palmers cooky company. May the blue, mauve and blue never crumble!

At the 1967 University of Louisville football banquet, then county judge and present U.S. Senator Marlow Cook won the autographed football. This year the number of Louisville Mayor Frank Burke was drawn—on the day after his inauguration—making it two times out of three that the ball has gone to a politician. Dark insinuations are lost upon the new mayor, however. Said Burke cheerfully, "This is the first scandal of my administration."

Sweden may have outlawed boxing, but according to the Stockholm paper Aftonbladet the move won't interfere with Floyd Patterson's intentions of earning a living there. "I've had plans for a long time to live in Sweden some months of each year," Aftonbladet quotes him as saying, "and now I've decided to go to work on them. I'll get myself a restaurant somewhere in the area of Stockholm." Floyd already has family ties with Sweden—his present wife, Janet, is of Swedish descent, and his brother Ray is operating a gas station in M√∂lndal. For friends, he knows that he can count on the entire population, which has worshiped him for years. And as for patrons of a new restaurant, there's always Ingemar (Gothenburg Fats) Johansson, these days practically a clientele in himself.

One might say that Bob Feller and Denny McLain have pitched themselves into jams. Feller's trouble is 10 checks that bounced when he wrote them (by mistake, he claims) on closed bank accounts, while McLain is faced with a pair of lawsuits and has had his airplane taken away. One suit seeks collection of $10,000 on a $10,500 promissory note Denny used as the down payment on his new Cessna, plus $3,500 for odds and ends, like gas. Cessna has repossessed the plane pending settlement and for safekeeping has chained it to a runway at a Boulder, Colo. airport. The other suit is for $600 worth of storage fees and gas at a suburban Detroit airport, and the claimants there may wish they had thought of chaining down the plane in question, an Aero Commander on lease to Denny. After a fuss about the second batch of bills, in which an airport attendant got a bloody nose, McLain and his pilot had to be headed off at the flight line by squad cars.

"It is not as if we were fighting a losing battle. We haven't even started to fight at all," said Prince Philip recently, addressing the University of Edinburgh on the subject of environmental pollution. Philip had heard it said in Canada that if anyone fell into Lake Erie he would not drown, he would just decay. "It so happens that all [Western Europe's] main rivers drain into three inland seas, the Mediterranean, the Baltic and the North Sea," he continued. "If these...are not to go the same way as lake Erie, we will need to start taking drastic action right away.... This process can be reversed...but there is a solid mass of vested interest ranged against any rapid action." While Philip thus earnestly advocated getting a move on with regard to pollution, he also observed a bit glumly, "I rather suspect it has already overtaken our present capacity to deal with it."

Kilaguni Lodge, in Kenya, is busily preparing for a visit next month from a royal game-watcher, King Frederik of Denmark. This principally involves the solution of what has been referred to as "the problem of King Fred's bed," His Majesty being almost 6'6" tall and beds at Kilaguni only 6 feet long. Sikh and African carpenters are putting together a properly majestic structure which, a lodge spokesman says confidently, will be "not only long enough, but broad enough. His wife, Queen Ingrid, is coming too."

TWO PHOTOS