The snowshoes went for $11, the lacrosse equipment for $3, the Jackson Pollock for $12,000, and the Franz Kline for $5,000. In all, it was a fairly good auction out at the Slezak place in Larchmont, N.Y., until the men who arranged to buy the Pollock and the Kline discovered that the paintings would have made better snowshoes. Last week a federal grand jury indicted Connecticut Art Dealer Richard A. Rainsford and a Chicago accomplice on 26 charges of fraud for inventing elaborate pedigrees for the forged paintings, then sneaking them in to be sold with some of Walter Slezak's gear left after the actor moved to California.

What with the griping about Congressmen's children filling up summer Government jobs that might have gone to needy teenagers, Wisconsin's Senator Bill Proxmire, 49, did the simplest thing, wrote out checks totaling $1,806.80 as an "unconditional gift" to the U.S. Treasury to repay the wages his son and step-daughter made for two summers in their vacation jobs with the Post Office, Navy, and National Park Service. As for the kids, they got to keep their money "because they earned it." Besides, added the Senator ruefully, "if you know teenagers, they don't give back money anyway."

In one form or another (Ginger Rogers on Broadway, Betty Grable in Las Vegas, Carol Channing in Los Angeles), the Dollies are multiplying infectiously. The overseas form is Mary Martin, and Producer David Merrick thought that his globe-trotting troupe of Hello, Dolly! was in just the right shape to send to Russia as a gesture of cultural amity. "Nyet!" gestured back the Kremlin, obscurely protesting U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. Then the man who's most involved in Viet Nam took over. Lyndon Johnson phoned Merrick at 5 a.m. one foggy dawn in Tokyo, where that same evening Mary brought down the house at the opening of Haro, Dori!. The President said he'd personally see to it that the cast got to Viet Nam and put on a show for U.S. troops. It isn't exactly the South Pacific, chirped old Nellie Forbush, but it was out there where she belonged.

Thirty years after the flamboyantly autocratic "Kingfish" was assassinated in a hallway of the state capitol in Baton Rouge, the man who used to be known back home as the "Princefish," Louisiana's Senator Russell Long, 46, offered some revisionist thinking. "By any objective standards," said Huey's son, taking the long view, "Huey Long was the best Governor Louisiana ever had." As a matter of fact, said the Senator, recalling what Dad dictated in the way of social and welfare programs (abolition of the poll tax, free night schools for illiterates, free textbooks for children, doubling the capacity of charity hospitals), "many people think that Roosevelt became interested in social security because he needed something to build a backfire against some of the headway Huey Long was making." Now, added Russell, "we've not only done most of what my father advocated, but we've gone beyond it."

In Manhattan's Chinatown, the bands blared When the Saints Go Marchin' In. On Capitol Hill, the Congressmen gave her a luncheon, and an admiring State Department man quipped, "She knows the United States so well I wouldn't be surprised if she produced a hot dog from the sleeve of her dress." A lot of people persisted in saying that Madame Chiang Kaishek, 67, had something up her sleeve as she sampled U.S. cooking and opinion for the first time in seven years. But Nationalist China's graceful First Lady, moving into the presidential suite of Washington's Shoreham Hotel for a brief stay, merely repeated that the trip was private, "just to visit old friends and make a few speeches."

Venezuela's Prieto Quintuplets are two years old, and as fine a bunch of healthy, pot-banging toddlers as anyone could wish. All of which would keep Mrs. Ines Cuervo de Prieto, 36, and her oilfield worker husband hopping--even if they didn't have a new set of nine-month-old twins and five other kids around the house. Last week Mrs. Prieto sighed and reported that she is again expecting in December. "It's frightening," muttered the father. Wailed the mother: "It's impossible."

"Just once or twice in a century," said Clare Boothe Luce, "a man appears on the political scene who is brilliant, witty, courageous, honest--and articulate. What a wonderful thing it is to be on his side of the political barricades." The man she was talking about, William F. Buckley Jr., editor of the National Review and Conservative Party candidate for mayor of New York City, reacted in a way that measured up to at least part of the billing: "Normally, when Mrs. Luce makes a political evaluation, I find myself nodding my head and thinking, 'She is profoundly right.' This time, I adore her."

His first car was an open-tonneau air-cooled 1903 Franklin with a side crank. And over the years he tooled around for more than 1,500,000 miles as a traveling salesman on his way to a business fortune before going into politics. But now, what with the traffic and cloverleafs and all, says New Jersey's former Republican Senator Albert W. Hawkes, 86, "this driving is getting to be an engineering feat." The Senator is "perfectly able physically" to perform the feat, he says, but just a little tired of it. Chauffeured over to Trenton's Department of Motor Vehicles, Hawkes turned in his driver's license forever.

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