Maybe it was all those deep dives into the ocean, but Swiss Scientist Jacques Piccard, 45, son of the inventor of the bathyscaphe, saw in the immediate future nothing but an abyss of human self-destruction. He was, he said, "seriously doubtful" about whether mankind would last out the century. Atomic weapons are perilous enough, Piccard told a symposium at Hoboken's Stevens Institute, but man's whole technology "is little else than a widespread suicidal pollution affecting the air we breathe, the water we drink and the land we till. Every infant born in America today has detectable quantities of DDT in his body." Possibly to get away from it all, Piccard announced plans to submerge himself in a four-to-six-week underwater "free drift" from Florida to Nova Scotia next summer.
Hollywood really knows how to make a guy welcome. Barbra Streisand, Jack Lemmon, Steve Allen, Lucille Ball, Pierre Salinger, Gene Kelly, Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston, Merle Oberon, Fred Astaire, Ava Gardner, Omar Sharif, Milton Berle, Danny Thomas, Mario Thomas, David Niven, Alan Jay Lerner, Donna Reed, Gregory Peck, Natalie Wood, Andy Williams, Tom Smothers, Don Adams and Shirley MacLaine—all of them, plus about 400 others, paid $250 per couple to do honor to Paris Couturier André Courrèges, 44, at a showing of his new collection in Los Angeles. Courreges could only assume that their presence was tribute enough. Out of the whole elegant gang, only Véronique Peck, 35, wife of Gregory, and Nicole Salinger, 28, Pierre's bride, actually wore outfits that Courreges had designed.
Along with 54 other hopefuls at the annual Miss World contest in London, Peru's lissome (35-23-35) Madeleine Hartog-Bel managed to stay upright through four preliminary rounds. But she swooned gracefully away when she was named the winner. Smelling salts brought her to for the presentation of a $7,000 check and a ceremonial visit to the Lord Mayor at Guildhall. Next will come a trip home for Christmas to the family cattle ranch in Piura, said Madeleine, who sold her car to get air fare to Paris to begin a career as a model. Now, she added, "I won't have to worry about air fares any more."
How gratifying for Rochester's Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, 72, to learn that somebody out there was paying attention to his appeal last month for funds to aid "the poor of the world." Just three weeks later, a winning ticket in New York State's monthly lottery was pulled from the barrel plainly marked "Bishop Sheen World Poor, Rochester, N.Y." One of 1,445 winners, the ticket will be worth between $150 and $100,000, depending on future drawings.
The white-maned cheerleader exhorting the Stanford rooting section looked less like a student than, say, the dean of the Graduate School of Business. And the dean it was—Ernest C. Arbuckle, 55, voted Stanford's "red-hot prof" in a campus-wide poll and thereby condemned to wield the megaphone in the football game with Oregon. Arbuckle, who will take over as board chairman of the Wells Fargo Bank next year, forgot his ticket to the game and had to talk his way past a Pinkerton to get into the stadium.