Tempestuous Diva Maria Callas gave her first U.S. recital of the season in Kansas City, Mo., showed a celebrity-studded white-tie S.R.O. audience that she is as great a performer as she is a singer. Told that a bomb may have been planted under the stage of the Midland Theater, Callas sang a Don Giovanni aria before she allowed Governor James T. Blair Jr. to shoo her fans outside, kept to her dressing room nearby while cops searched high and low for half an hour, finished her program after the bomb scare was pronounced a hoax. After a thunderous ovation, Callas greeted Harry S. Truman with a courtly "I am honored," made her manners to Kansas Governor George Docking, who was also in the audience, even attended a post-concert party at the River Club where she danced with local millionaires and nibbled caviar snacks, an "almost blue" filet mignon and the "Delice Callas" dessert (peppermint ice cream, brandy-flavored chocolate, meringue, whipped cream, pistachio nuts).

Proving that old teamsters never die, fading ex-Teamster Boss Dave Beck, 65, convicted tax dodger out on bail pending his appeals, put on a natty brown suit, shuffled down to his Seattle parking lot, put in a day's work. Huffing and puffing, he explained: "Business was not building up the way it should."

In Taipei to celebrate his 72nd birthday after an inspection trip of Quemoy, Nationalist China's President Chiang Kai-shek vetoed all hoopla because of recent floods.

Journeying to Salonika, Queen Frederika and King Paul of Greece attended a Te Deum at St. Demetrius Cathedral, marked the 19th anniversary of the Italian invasion that forced Greece into World War II.

Backed by four smoothly concocted "eyewitness" reports, Trud, Russia's official trade-union journal, landed a punch on United Auto Workers President Walter P. Reuther. Three of the "witnesses" were described as Reuther's shopmates when he put in a stint as a worker at the Gorky automobile plant in 1934; the fourth was a mysterious "N" who claimed to be his long-lost wife, described how Walter wooed her ("an inexperienced girl") with talk of "capitalist chains" and "bloodthirsty exploiters." After eight months of marriage, said she, "he said 'I am going to America.' He promised to write me but I knew it was a lie. He was a scoundrel." Without a smile, Reuther denied the whole thing.

In Volume III of his memoirs, Le Salut (The Salvation), just published in Paris, General Charles de Gaulle, who was once dubbed a spoiled prima donna by Franklin D. Roosevelt, insists that F.D.R.'s "bitter words showed his bad humor rather than a deep sentiment toward me. If he had lived longer, he would have understood and appreciated the reasons which guided me."

"I hope to be here next year," said Pope John XXIII, 78 this month, as he celebrated the end of his first year on the throne. "But if the Lord should call me, I am ready." The Pope greeted 162 villagers from Sotto il Monte, his birthplace in northern Italy, told the 15,000 gathered in St. Peter's that the year had "passed like a day," then prayed for peace.

Celebrating his 80th birthday, onetime German Chancellor Franz von Pa pen, who, when he helped Adolf Hitler to power in 1933, was already widely known as a specialist in diplomatic dirty work, rejoiced in a fine gift: appointment as Privy Chamberlain to the Pope. Though the position, which Von Papen held before (under Pius XI), is strictly honorary, many Germans found it hard to take. Said Cologne's Deutsche Zeitung: "That excellent horseman Von Papen cleared many a hurdle. He survived the collapse of the Nazi state, the Nuremberg Tribunal, denazification and the contempt of German democrats. Now it seems he has even overcome the resistance of the otherwise cautious Curia. What one needs in life is slyness, a flexible spine and perfect manners."

False teeth rather than solemnity, historians agree, kept George Washington from smiling at his portraitist, Gilbert Stuart. One of his dentures has long been on exhibit at the University of Maryland's Dental School. But why wife Martha rarely laughed remained a puzzle. At an auction in Manhattan's Parke-Bernet Galleries, one of Martha's letters, sold to Boston Rare Books Collector Maury Bromsen (for $1,400), finally filled the historical cavity. Writing on April 19, 1799, the first First Lady begged her dentist for a new set of teeth, insisted that they be "bigger and thicker in the front."

Back in Charlotte, N.C. after a visit to Israel, the Carolina Israelite's Brooklyn-born Publisher Harry Golden, 57, gloated over news that M-G-M had bought his bestselling Only in America, announced that his next book will be called Only in Israel.

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