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For a change someone was snapping his picture, and Master Photographer Edward Steichen, 86, was grinning "cheese" through his whiskers. He'd just been made a Commandeur de l'Ordre de Mérite of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where he was born. After Luxembourg's Ambassador to the United Nations, Pierre Wurth, presented the order's cross in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, Steichen reported that he'll be starting off on a new photographic collection, something like 1955's magnificent "Family of Man." Only now, he chuckled, "it's about Woman, the greatest undeveloped resource today."
"I remember one problem," winced the Greatest. "There are twelve bushels of apples. They cost $10 each. You buy them, but before you do, you take a third of the apples out of each bushel. How much do you pay for the apples?" That one floored Heavyweight Cassius Clay, 23, and after he'd taken the count on two Army aptitude tests, the U.S. declared that the champion just wasn't bright enough to fight. Now Colonel Everette Stephenson, director of Selective Service in Kentucky, will "more than likely" summon Clay for another round of brain crushers. Meantime the champ won another kind of split decision. He got a Miami divorce from his wife Sonji because her slacks were too tight and her makeup too much for his Muslim eye, but was ordered to pay $1,200 a month in alimony for ten years and $22,500 in lawyers' fees. All of which added point to Cassius' remark: "I just said I was the greatest, not the smartest."
A bad notice is better than no notice at all, and so the folks in Sauk Centre, Minn., decided to keep right on making the best of that bad review native son Sinclair Lewis gave them 45 years ago. To prove that the place was never the philistine hotbed that the late author pictured in Main Street, the fictional "Gopher Prairie" celebrated Lewis' 75th birthday five years ago and started calling Main Street "the Original Main Street." Now they're heaping more coals of praise on old Red's head by raising $25,000 through the Sinclair Lewis Foundation to buy his two-story boyhood home and restore it to look the way it did when he was there.