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PEOPLE
Erich Segal, Yale professor but mostly author of Love Story, has made it through another Boston Marathon—he has run in 15 of them—but this year his loneliness was enlivened by a girl who shouted as he passed Wellesley, "This is your penance, you chauvinist pig!" Nice guys finish last. Chauvinist pigs, it turns out, finish 489th.
Memo to The Irish Times:
It's about that conservation poem you received in the mail from one Harley Quinn of the U.S. We know who the real Harley Quinn is: he is James Cagney, who retired from the movies years ago, never makes public appearances and is contentedly breeding horses on his upstate New York farm. Cagney is intensely worried about our environment and, in a break from his usual practice, is permitting us to identify the poet by his real name. The poem:
You want to see the Shannon like the Hudson?
Or the Liffey just as filthy as the Seine?
Then bring in the arrogant asses
And their garbage and their gasses,
With pollutants plunging poison down each drain,
Killing everything that's living,
For which Nature's unforgiving,
And the punishment will certainly fit the crime
When Man, the creeping cancer,
Will have to make the final answer
As he smothers in his self-created slime.
Here comes Coach Hank Stram, strolling around Palm Beach, Fla. with his wife and another couple. Hank is carrying a camera and his wife is carrying a large, yellow, flowered bag. Mrs. Stram spots a house she wants to photograph; she takes the camera and asks Hank to hold her bag. This is the moment, naturally, when a couple of teenage girls pass by.
"Hey," says one of them. "Isn't that Hank Stram, the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs?"
"Which one?" her companion asks.
"That one," says the first girl. "The guy with the yellow purse."
Photokinetic and Space Intelligence Man of the Week (not too many contenders in this category) is Ted Owens of Norfolk, Va. Owens signs himself P. K. Man, meaning photokinetic, and has been described as "basically a legal secretary who's also been a knife-thrower in a carnival and a rainmaker in Miami." However, none of these neat pursuits seemed to bring in much money, so back in February Owens decided to cast a spell upon the Baltimore Colts. And charge $100,000 to unhex them. Now, was it Owens' fault that Johnny Unitas tore his Achilles' tendon, Tom Matte got appendicitis and Sam Havrilak sprained his ankle? Well, when a Philadelphia writer challenged Owens to "prove you can do something" the P. K. Man announced he would hex Tom Woodeshick of the Eagles, and within 15 minutes Woodeshick was ejected from the game for fighting. Colt Owner Carroll Rosenbloom has dropped Owens a polite note requesting him to remove Baltimore from his list of losers. "If you will advise me as to a course of action which we could follow...I will do whatever I can to comply," Rosenbloom wrote. But the question seems to be, will he come across with the $100,000?
At Washington & Lee they've finally got that skeleton out of the closet. Back in 1872, two years after the death of Robert E. Lee, the general's favorite horse, Traveller, also died. For many years the horse's assembled bones were on display at the Lee Museum—folks used to enjoy that sort of thing—but then they were put into storage in 1963. Now the skeleton has been suitably and finally buried, complete with marker, in a spot, we are happy to report, not far from the Lee family crypt.
"America Is..." was the theme of the fashionable Cleveland Skating Club's annual ice show, held this year to raise money for the Olympics. Among the things the club felt America was was Bob Feller, out there on the ice pitching a plastic ball to local Little Leaguers. Without spikes—or skates. "This is more dangerous than facing Joe DiMaggio with the bases loaded," Feller observed. Which shows how long it's been since he's faced DiMaggio with the bases loaded.
This week's Folksiness Award (the SPORTS ILLUSTRATED linsey-woolsey muffler) goes to Oriole Third Baseman Brooks Robinson for his remarks at a Saints and Sinners banquet gathering in his honor in Baltimore. "I been aroun' the world—Kentucky twice," Brooks confided. "Been to two great ropin's, three chicken pluckin's, and I never seen nothin' like this in all my born days!" We figured this beat Harold Morris (Gomer) Hodge of the Indians, with his explanation that his home town of Rutherfordton, N.C. was located "somewhere's 'tween Asheville an' Spartanburg, but a whole lot closer to Spindale, Sandy Mush and Frog Level." We figured that way because Robinson's quote had more words in it.
"We're getting old, with nothing to do," a gray-haired witness identified as Grandma Kelly told the Illinois state legislature recently. "I don't smoke or drink or go to racetracks. We've got to have Bingo." Well, after that the legislature voted for the second year in a row to legalize Bingo. So if Governor Richard Ogilvie vetoes the measure—for the second year in a row—it's all his fault if Grandma Kelly takes up smoking and drinking and going to racetracks.
TWO PHOTOS
