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PEOPLE
In Canada for their latest efforts to promote peace, John Lennon and Yoko Ono took time out over the holidays for their first snowmobile ride. Last May they demonstrated for peace by spending 10 days in bed in a Montreal hotel room. Now, in midwinter, they are thinking of outdoor rallies at the Mosport grand prix track in Ottawa. Surely it would have been cozier the other way round.
Bill Veeck failed to secure the services of Harvard football Coach John Yovicsin as a special summer assistant at his Suffolk Downs racetrack—Yovicsin accepted but promptly resigned because of university disapproval. Veeck was piqued, to say the least, but the least is hardly what he said. "It was the pressure from the stuffy burns, from those who think they're too good to have anything of theirs associated with anything involving gambling," he growled. "I honestly thought Harvard had enough problems of its own, without looking for more. The school has made its way into the papers rather often in recent months. I thought my alumni at Suffolk Downs were being quite open-minded to accept a man from such a place. I think John Yovicsin is a brave, courageous man to be associated with Harvard, the way events are going. Suffolk Downs has paid taxes every year for 333 years—that's right—333. Harvard hasn't paid any." Veeck wondered whether Harvard should continue to accept grants from old grads, such as Peter Fuller, who own race horses, and he added, "I wouldn't want to say that gamblers rob their piggy banks to get down on Harvard's teams—after all, who enjoys betting on the underdog all the time—but more money is bet on college and professional football than is bet at all the racetracks in the country combined." Ah, but not by Harvard men, according to Suffolk Downs Vice-President Tom Beedem. "I don't think Yovicsin would have helped much anyway," he says cheerfully. "The way those Ivy Leaguers bet, it takes four of them to buy a $2 ticket."
The occasion was Tiny Tim's wedding supper, and that old gang of his was there—Tom Lasky, Kirby Warren, Joe Costello, Artie Wachter and Herbie Khaury (T.T. himself)—now all with wives. Reminiscing about Tiny's first childhood in New York's Washington Heights, Lasky said, "Herbie was always dreaming of becoming a star athlete, but he was a very clumsy boy. He was crazy about hockey, but he couldn't stand up on the ice." It was nice that on so happy an occasion Lasky was able to continue, "but there was one sport Herbie excelled in. Thumb wrestling. Nobody could beat him thumb wrestling—he had the biggest thumbs on the block, and he knew how to use them." Asked to exhibit his unsuspected skill Tiny said, "Oh, oh, no, no! I am holding hands with Miss Vicki, you see."
"The poetic suggestiveness...I was often mere decoration on the lid of a Pandora's box of violent and aggressive impulse," a recent London Times Literary Supplement editorial says of the work of dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck. In the same issue contributor Edward Lockspeiser relates that Maeterlinck "allowed unrelenting aggressive instincts to rise to the surface." The TLS editorial paraphrases Lockspeiser as saying that "the brutality latent in Maeterlinck's work was patent in the man," and offers as evidence the information that "though outwardly shy, Maeterlinck was nonetheless a boxer of sufficient professional standing to challenge the redoubtable Georges Carpentier in the ring." All of which comes as a surprise to those who have struggled with the mysterious, not to say foggy, work of the author of Pelléas et Mélisande and The Blue Bird—and no one is more surprised than the redoubtable Carpentier. "Maeterlinck certainly was outwardly shy," he recalled last week. "Also very reserved, very calm and an extremely nice person. He was surely not aggressive. I met him on the C√¥te d'Azur when I was young, at the beginning of my career. He took a liking to me and was a kind friend. No, he never challenged me to a contest in a ring or anywhere. We used to put on the gloves and have a little fun to amuse ourselves, but though he admired boxing, he had no ability."
On a recent TV show in London, Sean Connery revealed that he once won a medal in a Mr. Universe competition. "It was in the class for Tall Men—Scotland," said Connery. "I was the only one in the class. The Scots are not very tall."
Narration of Peter and The Wolf has been done by such diverse personalities as Leonard Bernstein, Bea Lillie, Boris Karloff and Captain Kangaroo, but Joe Garagiola, working with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, still managed to give the musical fairy tale a whole new slant. Describing the climax of the piece, Joe said tensely, "The situation is the bottom of the ninth, and the wolf is coming up, followed by Stan Musial and Red Schoendienst...." "The audience liked Joe's performance," wrote St. Louis Post-Dispatch critic Connie Rosenbaum. "They gave him long, warm applause." Especially those two well-known music lovers in the audience, Stan Musial and Red Schoendienst.
TWO PHOTOS
