"The most unique trade in baseball history," Susanne had gigglingly called it when the press learned that her husband, Yankee Pitcher Mike Kekich, and his best buddy, Yankee Pitcher Fritz Peterson, had exchanged wives. The new arrangement did not take, and Mike ended up losing not only Susanne, his kids, Fritz and Fritz's wife—but his dog as well. The final blow: Mike himself was bartered last week to the Cleveland Indians for Minor League Pitcher Lowell Palmer.
-"Go home and forget the war" went the disk jockey's sexy, close-to-the-mike line to the G.I.s. Broadcasting from Berlin, alongside her German lover, Mildred Gillars, alias "Axis Sally," sandwiched Nazi propaganda between records by "der Bingel" Crosby. Her broadcasts eventually drew Mildred a twelve-year stretch in a federal prison for women. Out on parole in 1961, she taught French and German in a suburban school. A long-ago dropout from Ohio Wesleyan University (she had been the first coed to wear knickers on campus in 1920), Mildred, at 72, quietly finished work for her degree—an A.B. in speech.
Her husband Joe and her sons Joe Jr., Jack, Bobby and Teddy had all been Harvard men. In Harwich Port, Mass., at the class of '38's reunion, Rose Kennedy, 82, thanked Joe Jr.'s classmates for their gift of roses and a pewter bowl in memory of the Navy lieutenant whose fatal plane crash in 1944 had been the family's first violent tragedy.
Was that really Elizabeth Taylor's face under the faded blue denim cap?
Sure enough, Liz and Richard Burton had landed at Kennedy Airport on one of their guest appearances in the U.S. They were off to Quogue, Long Island, and then to Arizona to see Liz's mother. In July, Richard will star in a film from a Pirandello short story and Liz in the cinematic adaptation of Muriel Spark's chiller The Driver's Seat. But Richard still maintains that some day he's going to throw it all over and become an Oxford don. According to Oxford, it is up to him to choose the date.
There is only one class on the Lermontov, the first Soviet passenger ship to sail into New York harbor in 25 years. One member of that classless society was Composer Dmitry Shostakovich, 66, who after disembarking with his wife Irina, took in Aïda, one of his favorites, at the Metropolitan Opera.
Shostakovich was on his way to get an honorary degree from Northwestern University. After talking to the composer about his visit to the campus, his host, Dr. Irwin Weil, said, "I feel like I've just talked to Beethoven."
"You showed you could do it... get rid of your suet," sang Bob Hope to the tune of Applause. His Manhattan audience of losers was celebrating the tenth anniversary of Weight Watchers International Inc. and cheering their heroine, Founder Jean Nidetch, who shrank from 214 Ibs. to 142 Ibs. in 1962.
"Isn't this something?" she asked, happily noting that a few years ago these same 16,500 people could not have squeezed into a hall even as cavernous as Madison Square Garden.