PEOPLE

Question: What are those people doing scattered out there in the street? Answer: Observing Survival Day, of course. In Ottawa the Society to Stop Pollution (STOP) convinced the city council to ban downtown automobile traffic for a day. People walked, cycled or jogged vigorously to work. And some two dozen public figures, including three members of Parliament and Jean Chrétian, Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, signed up for a bike race in all that clean, healthy air. Chrétian is the chap temporarily upright there on the left—seconds later he was down, bonking his head on the curb. He wanted to go on, stout fellow, but the antipollution point had been made. He was talked out of it on the grounds that survival isn't worth killing yourself for.

Sporting Bust of the Week:

Here come Manuel Sala, a Louisiana businessman, and J. C. Williams, Treasury Department regional executive, both struggling for the 4th green at the Gulf Hills course in Ocean Springs, Miss. Williams slices another shot into the rough and, looking for his ball, spots two fully packed suitcases. Authorities are notified and the suitcases are staked out. Sure enough, along comes a sixsome to claim them. This makes for an arresting moment, since the suitcases are fully packed with something like $30,000 worth of LSD, hashish and marijuana.

Next morning the two are back on the course. This time it takes Sala 30 strokes to cover two holes and Williams, he says, wasn't much better. "We are awful golfers," he admits. Which isn't all bad. If there had been any more dope out there, they surely would have found it.

To celebrate the centenary of the Rugby Football Union a new paperback called Touchdown has been published in Britain. It contains, among other things, Richard Burton's account of his last attempt at rugby, a game "played against a [Welsh] village...with a team composed almost entirely of colliers." Burton, who played serious rugby from the age of 10 to that point in his career where clauses forbidding it were written into his contracts, says of his last game that he was in trouble from the early cry of "Ble ma'r blydi film star 'ma?" (Where's the bloody film star here?). After an account of the beating he took, Burton recalls that he played Hamlet on the following Monday "with my head permanently on one side and my right arm in an imaginary sling, intermittently crooked and cramped with occasional severe shakes and involuntary shivers, as of one with palsy. I suppose to the connoisseurs of Hamlets it was a departure from your traditional Prince...a melancholy Dane he was, though. Melancholy he most certainly was."

And a postseason salute to the Unsung Hero of the Series:

Last year Gordon MacRae did The Star-Spangled Banner—a capella, yet—at Shea Stadium. This year "I was really looking forward to singing it again in New York or Chicago," he said. "I'm working in Chicago, so it would have been convenient if the Cubs had won the flag. But I was even willing to fly to New York in the event the Mets took it. But what did they do? Both lost. I am disappointed."

Actually, Gordon, the Cubs and the Mets didn't feel too terrific about it, either.

Of course, the One-Liner Award of the Week goes to Casey Stengel, also at the Series, who growled in one line, "One thing about the Orioles even the pigeons have confidence in them when Cincinnati is at bat the pigeons fly down and start eating peanuts off the field."

A special toy-car race will be televised live on the Ed Sullivan Show Nov. 15—but kids don't get to play. The contestants will be those big boys Stirling Moss, Jackie Stewart, Graham Hill and Dan Gurney. "They must assemble their own racing kits, provided by the toy company, in order to practice," says Gurney's manager, Max Muhleman, "and so far they've all been too busy." Reason for practice is that the tiny cars require a delicate touch; too heavy a hand on the power switch, and they jump the track. But come showtime all four will bring to bear some of the wildest driving ever seen. That's because the race is for $50,000, and the first-place purse will be $35,000—which compares pretty spectacularly with $10,800 for a first at Le Mans. "I have never raced for money like that before," says Moss. "You're darned right I'm going to practice." Still, at week's end the three European drivers were all traveling, and as for Gurney, was he in shape? "Much to our dismay," says Muhleman, "he is not. But you may report that he will shortly be practicing feverishly. In fact, you may report that his manager hopes that he will be practicing his fanny off."

Where have you gone, Vince DiMaggio—or whoever you are—has been the big question around Dallas ever since it turned out that the guy who hit town last spring saying he was Vince DiMaggio was not. He had a lot of scrapbooks and a good line, and persuaded Dallas financier Henry Helm to back a DiMaggio spaghetti house featuring "the same recipes we use at the family restaurant in San Francisco." But when the local press printed his picture "Vínce" was suddenly called out of town. Then Helm saw a shot of Joe and his brothers in a national magazine and got suspicious. One quick call to San Francisco and the real Vince DiMaggio stood up, "I want to get this guy off the street before he gives me a bad name," Vince said of the scrapbook-bearing sneak who had pulled the imposter trick before. O.K., but what happens to Helm and the spaghetti house on Lemmon Avenue? "You've got money invested," DiMaggio told him, "and if you feel like the name is everything, then leave it." And off he went to brief Helm's chef on those recipes they use in the family restaurant in San Francisco.

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