As Yale's President A. Whitney Griswold struggled to patch up relations between his students and New Haven cops—askew after last month's snowball-and-night-stick war (TIME, March 30)—an old grad unkindly recalled some carefree words addressed to a student mob in 1951, less than a year after Griswold had taken office. Said the president, in the green days of administrative youth: "I love a riot . . . I loved them when I was an undergraduate . . . I can yield to no one the record of smashed light bulbs . . ."
Hale as could be on his 85th birthday, salty, shaggy Poet Robert Frost huffed lamely at a birthday cake, tackled the inevitable press conference. "Someone said to me that New England's in decay," rasped Frost. "But I said the next President is going to be from Boston. That doesn't sound like decay." Who, he was asked, might that be? "Can't you figure that out? It's a Puritan named (John) Kennedy." Aha, but did Frost want the boyish Senator to win? "Anything from Boston is all right with me."
With the will of the late Vincent Astor (TIME, Feb. 16) waiting for probate, the temporary administrators of the estate petitioned Dutchess County, N.Y. surrogate's court for help on a little problem in part created by Philanthropist Astor's uncanny financial touch. The request: permission to invest earnings of the mammoth estate (at least $100 million), which is burgeoning at the rate of more than $200,000 a month.
Europe-bound aboard the Queen Mary, Negro Cinemactress Dorothy Dandridge, who has finished her chores as Bess in Sam Goldwyn's forthcoming movie version of Porgy and Bess, hoisted the conventional pretty wave for the flashbulbs on the day of a proud revelation: her engagement to Jack Denison, white proprietor of a Hollywood supper club.
In a Boston University dormitory, Freshman John Thomas, 18, gangly (6 ft. 4¾ in.), growing Negro who in February jumped higher (7 ft. 1¼ in.) than any other man in recorded athletic history, slammed shut the latticework gate on an upward-bound elevator. When it rose, Thomas' size 12 left foot was jammed between the car and the shaft walls. Result: severe lacerations and bruises. After surgery, doctors predicted that High Jumper Thomas would be off the sawdust for six to twelve weeks.
On a jaunt with Grandmother through an exotic bazaar in Beersheba, Israel, pert, 16-year-old Nina Roosevelt* spied the cutest souvenir ever, begged Grandma to bargain for it with the canny Bedouins. Obligingly, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt shelled out $77 for a scrawny baby camel (named "Duchess" by Nina), which, if Daddy approves, will stalk the Roosevelts' Hyde Park estate until it gets big enough to deserve permanent residence in any interested zoo.