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A Gothic bell tower soaring 140 feet above the campus of Southwestern at Memphis College, in his native Tennessee, will be dedicated to the late Richard Halliburton, the most roisterous rover boy since Byron, and author of The Royal Road to Romance. Built at a cost of $450,000 by his 92-year-old father, whose wealth came from real estate, the tower bears Halliburton's carefree credo: "I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous and romantic." During his last caprice in 1939, sailing a tiny Chinese junk across the Pacific, the 39-year-old adventurer vanished in a typhoon.
The pace was accelerating for the rum young Englishman who was hacksawed out of the wreckage of his Lotus Grand Prix racer last April and spent two months partially paralyzed from a brutal bruising of the right side of his brain. Turning up at the U.S. Grand Prix at Watkins Glen, N.Y., Stirling Moss, 33, spent the day as honorary track steward, shifting smoothly from clocking cars to charming pretty girls. His former 120-m.p.h. clip was still too much. "But I can now drive 60 m.p.h.," said Moss, "with the standard of perfection I'm used to." Proving it on his way back to New York to hop a flight to the Bahamas, he was indicating a precise 60 when a state trooper nabbed him in a 50-m.p.h. zone. "I won't argue," said Moss, and the cop let him pay the $10 fine by mail.
One month after her 75th birthday, England's unofficial Poetess Laureate Dame Edith Sitwell got around to celebrating the occasion. "Sharp-nosed and inscrutable as a Renaissance Pope," as London's fusty Financial Times saw her at the packed Royal Festival Hall, the arthritic spinster was rolled onstage in a wheelchair, regal in a red velvet gown, her hands glittering with four robin's egg-size aquamarine rings. In her precise, lilting voice, she read seven of her poems, then was seated in a box between her literary brothers, sartorial Sacheverell, 65, and palsied Sir Osbert, 69, to hear musical renditions of her poetry conducted by Composer William Walton.