On his 24th flight in the record-blistering X-15 rocket plane, Ace NASA Test Pilot Joe Walker, 42, was just supposed to nudge the 59.6-mile altitude record. But when he touched down at California's Edwards Air Force Base, he found that he had busted it wide open. NASA's tentative estimate of the new record for winged aircraft: 350,000 ft. (almost 67 miles). Walker's speed was 3,818 m.p.h., close to six times that of sound, and as he blasted upward into the blackness, he trailed a small balloon designed to make air-density measurements. "Yup," cracked Joe, on his return, "must have got some lift from that balloon."

. . .

"An odious little girl," rasped Italy's Communist daily L'Unit`a. "She thinks she is the navel of the world. She is a Fascist." Who drew the Red scowls? Why, none other than Lucy, 6, devastating heroine of Charles Schulz's Peanuts comic strip. With the appearance of a Peanuts collection in Italy, L'Unit`a decided to pseudoanalyze her. "She gossips continuously about others, blackmails them, hollers about other people's complexes, but remains turned in on herself. One hates her." To all this, there was only one thing to say, and Cartoonist Schulz let good ol' Charlie Brown, 7 (whom L'Unit`a called "quite normal though tormented"), say it: "Oh, good grief."

. . .

The small ones craned. The big ones beamed. And the littlest one drowsed through it all. It was christening day for Christopher George Kennedy, 15 days. Resting in the arms of his aunt and godmother Mrs. Pat Lawford, the eighth child of Ethel and Bobby Kennedy was baptized by Richard Cardinal Cushing in St. Francis Xavier Church in Hyannis, Mass. The gathering of the clan all but buried Family Friend Dean Markham, who works in Washington as executive secretary of the President's Narcotics and Drug Abuse Committee, and was, after all, the baby's godfather. Said Cardinal Cushing, after administering a special papal blessing: "God bless you, Christopher George--if you don't become a priest or a cardinal it's not my fault."

. . .

The rescue helicopter lifted from a barge 2 1/2 miles out in the Pacific, off San Diego, at the site of a sewer-construction project. Strapped to a pontoon was an injured workman, his leg broken by a whiplashing cable. Suddenly the chopper tilted and crashed into the water. Aboard the barge, preparing to inspect the pipe 217 ft. down on the ocean floor, Jon Lindbergh, 31, deep-sea-diver son of Air Hero Charles Lindbergh, stripped off his gear, dived in and swam 100 yds. to the crash. Working under water, Lindbergh swiftly cut the injured man free from the wreckage. But the odds were against him. By the time a skiff got the man back to the barge, he was dead. Said Lindbergh: "A man doesn't have much time in the water."

. . .

Once each week the morning mail brings a $1,000 check to Actress Jane Russell, 42, and she doesn't have to work a wiggle for it. It's all part of a $1,000,000 movie contract that she signed with Howard Hughes in 1955. Hughes is out of the movies now, and Jane keeps busy running the Women's Adoption International Fund (WAIF), which has placed 11,000 homeless children since she founded it in 1954. But once in a while she slips back into harness. And she has not lost much of the old (38-24-36) Outlaw oomph. Poured into a gown for a three-week engagement in Las Vegas with Singers Connie Haines and Beryl Davis, she found it all choked up, and grabbed a scissors. "I just cut it to a decent V," she murmured. "What was cheesecake in The Outlaw days is like a Mother Hubbard today--just look at what the current crop of dames wear!"

. . .

Her older brother was already away at school near Scotland's bleak coast. Now it was time for Princess Anne, 12, to leave Buckingham Palace. She will be one of next year's "new girls" at upper-middle-class Beneden School, in Kent, 42 miles from London. She didn't have to take an exam to get in, but that was the only curtsy to royalty. Along with her 300 schoolmates, she'll be up at 7, make her own bed, take her turn setting the table and washing the dishes. And that's fine with her parents, although they will be permitted to visit no more than three times a year.

For almost two months, FBI agents have kept a round-the-clock watch on Chicago Rackets Boss Momo Salvatore ("Sam") Giancana, 53, heir to what remains of Al Capone's empire. And the tail gives Sam a pain. He sneaks out of his house at odd hours, lies on the floor of a relative's car, changes cars on a crowded street, once even pulled casually into a car wash, then zoomed out the rear while attendants cheered, "Go, man, go." But the feds are always there, even on the golf course and on his dates with Steady Girl Phyllis McGuire, 32, youngest of the singing sisters. So Sam started photographing the FBI and went to court to prove that his civil rights were being infringed. U.S. District Judge Richard Austin agreed. He ordered the FBI to remove four of the five cars the feds have staked out around Sam's house--and told them to keep at least one foursome behind him on the golf course so poor Sam can swing a little.

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