"I hadn't been using my voice," said Gospel Singer Mahalia Jackson, 53. "Just a little humming around the house. The muscles were all relaxed, and I wondered how it would come out." After eleven months' convalescence following a heart attack, Mahalia was still a little weak and scaled down from her old 250 Ibs. to a relatively gaunt 160 Ibs. She needn't have wondered about her rich contralto: it came out just fine. To save her the wear of traveling to studios on the East or West coasts, Columbia Records hauled some special tape equipment to Chicago. And there last week in the choir loft of the South Side's Greater Salem Baptist Church, where she began her singing career more than 30 years ago, Mahalia rolled vibrantly through Never Turn Back, We've Come a Mighty Long Way, and eleven other resounding gospels. "I don't think I can take it like I used to," sorrowed Mahalia, "but I'll keep faith."

"Have a booze!" bellowed Jackie Gleason, 49, as the 14-car train pulled out of Manhattan and headed south. The Great One promptly took his own advice, and so did most of the other 113 passengers. Gleason was highballing to Miami Beach to begin taping his fall television series. CBS donated $18,000, plus $1,500 in tipping change, to sponsor the rolling bedlam called the Great Gleason Express. Amid the blares of the stuck diesel horns ("BAAAAH!") and a familiar howl ("HOW SU-WEET IT is!"), the dancers, cronies, reporters and flacks attacked 500 Ibs. of assorted meats, 30 cans of mock turtle soup, 2,614 one-shot whisky bottles and, as they dragged into Miami next day, 40 boxes of aspirin and alkalines.

It was the sort of event that Chronicler Artie Schlesinger would give a day's royalties to have reported. Out of the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport swarmed a large assortment of the famed clan, including a U.S. Senator or two, bound for a little light boating on the Marlin. At about the same time, who should traipse up the path to visit old Joe Kennedy at his 17-room cottage but Frank Sinatra, 49, his girl friend Mia Farrow, 19, and Hollywood Duennas Roz Russell and Claudette Col bert. After a greeting from Jackie and a lively chat with Joe, Frank and his crowd ambled back to Sinatra's 168-ft. chartered yacht Southern Breeze. What tantalized pursuing newsmen most was the notion that Frankie and Mia (who plays Allison Mackenzie in TV's Peyton Place), were married--or about to be. All anybody knew for sure, as the Southern Breeze lay at anchor off colorful Cape Cod that afternoon, was that among the fresh foodstuffs taken aboard at Hyannisport were several boxes of a body-building breakfast cereal called Fruit Loops.

A traffic cop stuck a couple of $3 tickets on his Volkswagen when it was parked in a space reserved for Government officials, and Washington's U.S. Attorney David C. Acheson, 45, son of the former Secretary of State, promptly sent the tickets to be fixed. "Since I am a Government official," said he with a combination of hauteur and logic, "it would seem to me that the place was reserved for me." He had not reckoned on Oregon's Democratic Senator Wayne Morse, 64, a man of many scattered parts, who is known to headline writers as the "archfoe of tick et fixing," and who is credited by some with having raised Washington's annual revenue from traffic fines by nearly $500,000 in one year. Getting wind of the Acheson incident, Morse took to the Senate floor for an irate recital on the "inexcusable violation," the "shocking case." Acheson, whose only real offense was not displaying a window sticker naming him a Government official, had the right words for it all: "An irritating episode."

The State Department, invoking its 1961 ban on travel to Cuba, turned down U.S. Chess Champion Bobby Fischer, 22, who wanted to compete in Havana's international Capablanca Memorial Tournament. Checked tem porarily, the moodily brilliant high school dropout studied the board, then maneuvered thus: he cabled Cuba's Na tional Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation, asked if he might play the tournament by telephone or cable from New York. Havana has agreed, says Bobby's attorney, and if arrangements can be made through the World Chess Federation, Brooklyn's grand master will be moving the non-political pawns over the wire in the Aug. 25 tournament. Checkmate, State.

West Virginia's handsome 41-year-old executive mansion in Charleston, once thought to be a safe place in which to brood about the ills of Appalachia, was suddenly declared a disaster area. A crew of workmen sprucing up the house lifted some floorboards, discovered that termites had chomped into the wooden beams and joists, and now the building is tilting and the stairways are slanting. Eaten out of house and home, Democratic Governor Hulett C. Smith, 46, evacuated his wife and five children to his own place in Beckley, 52 miles away, there to await the restoration and to ponder the imbalance of nature that produced overfed termites and underfed coal miners in his domain.

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