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The boys had barely finished their cocktails in La Stella's restaurant out in Queens, when New York's finest burst into the joint to bust up what the Queens D.A. called a meeting even "bigger than Apalachin" of top Cosa Nostra hoodlums from New York, Florida and Louisiana. It did look like a summit at that: Santo ("Louis Santos") Trafficante, 51, boss of Cuba's pre-Castro gambling, Thomas ("Tommy Ryan") Eboli, 55, running the
West Side Manhattan Genovese mob, Carlo ("Don Carlo") Gambino, 64, heir to the late Albert Anastasia's operations, plus ten other bigwigs. The D.A. wanted them to sing before a grand jury on crime in Queens, and a judge set bail at $100,000 each to help clear their throats. No dice. A friendly bondsman put up $1,300,000 for bail, the grand jury got nothing but grunts, and then it was back to La Stella's for that delayed lunch: escarole in brodo, linguini in clam sauce, striped bass, and wine. And just to show no hard feelings, they even raised a glass and fork in toast to newsphotographers and to the D.A.'s plainclothesmen at the next table.
He made the term famous, and now Yankee Baseball Announcer Red Barber, 58, was all tangled up in a rhubarb himself. No sooner was the Yanks' new boss, CBS Vice President Michael Burke, in office than he fired Barber, who had reported Yankee games for 13 years. Reason? None that Burke cared to announce, except that it was part of a general shakeup. Red thought it might have had something to do with the recent night when the Yanks played to exactly 413 paying fans, and he suggested that the cameras pass around so the TV audience could count the house themselves. At any rate, he was happy to be "free to pick and choose" a new job. And it wouldn't be with one of those clubs where "you wind up with more young Ivy League guys in grey flannel britches than you have any idea."
Stalin called his work "noise, not music." Pravda once sneered that it "reeks of the bourgeois." Now the sour notes have died away, and there he was in the Moscow Conservatory, shy, bespectacled and frail as ever, answering cheers at a concert celebrating his 60th birthday. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich received another gift too: the Soviet title of Hero of Socialist Labor. Best of all was the successful first Moscow performance of his new piece, Cello Concerto No. 2, conducted by a similarly slight, bespectacled musician: Dmitri's 28-year-old son Maxim.
Evangelist Billy Graham's huge summer crusade did not so much as rattle a window in Lambeth Palace, residence of the Church of England's Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Michael Ramsey, 61. Stepping off a plane in Vancouver, B.C., during a swing of his own through western Canada, Ramsey conceded that Billy may have "won some converts" but insisted that "we don't need his type of evangelism in England." In these perilous times, he continued, England "needs a thoughtful approach to religion, not bursts of emotionalism." Mused Billy, in thoughtful reply: "Interesting, in view of his ecumenical claims."