Like any good daughter, Mary Olivia Gushing rushed to her father's side when she heard he was ill--even though it meant flying to his safari camp in Kenya. That was last November, and not only did she perk up Daddy--Newport Socialite Howard G. Gushing--she very much cheered Writer-Photographer Peter Hill Beard, Yaleman ('61), great-grandson of Railroad Baron James J. Hill, wildlife conservationist and author (The End of the Game), The stalking went well, and last week word came that the lissome, darkly beautiful "Minnie," 24, and Beard, 29, will be married in August at The Ledges, the Newport cottage built by her great-grandfather in 1850.

It is not so astonishing that The Netherlands received $1 billion in Marshall Plan aid--more per capita than any other nation--but it is surprising that anyone remembers. The man with the long memory is none other than Prince Bernhard, 55, at whose suggestion 60 Dutch companies, organizations, trade unions and individuals have contributed $200,000 for what Bernhard calls "Holland's modest thank-you"--an endowed chair in The Netherlands civilization at Harvard, where Secretary of State George C. Marshall first announced the Plan 20 years ago. Called "the Erasmus Lectorship," the chair will be filled each year by a visiting Dutch professor, beginning next fall with Art Historian Frans Q. Van Regteren Altena.

"How marvelous to see all of you again," said the squat, very old cherub in his gently accented English. "I didn't think I would be here with you this time. But thank God we are together again, and we can make lovely music." With that, Pablo Casals, 90, gravely ill last winter after a prostate operation, put on his conductor's hat for the eleventh Casals Festival in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and made lovely music on opening night with another great cellist, Gregor Piatigorsky, 64, in their first public performance together in more than 30 years.

Eight years is a long time for a man to spend in a state lockup, especially when the Federal Government has already got him for 15. So when Texas socked Billie Sol Estes in 1962 with eight extra years for his cunning way with nonexistent fertilizer tanks, Billie took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, won a retrial on the ground that TV cameras in the courtroom had prejudiced the trial. Last week, tanned and trimmer by 50 Ibs. after two years in federal prisons at Leavenworth and Sandstone, Minn., Billie Sol, 42, returned to the dusty courthouse in Tyler, Texas, and found that the state was willing to ease up on him. In a 45-minute, no-witness hearing, District Judge J. P. Power accepted cheerful Billie's "no contest" plea, handed him a dainty three-year sentence that will run concurrently with the federal rap and make him eligible for parole in 1970.

Two more bastions of male exclusivity, already pitiably small in number, have crumbled before the female onslaught. In Cambridge, Mass., tall, slender Deanne Siemer, 26, was elected president of the Harvard Law School's Legal Aid Bureau, the first woman ever to head one of Harvard's three legal honor societies. But why not? Deanne is a licensed pilot, a crack skier (she barely missed the 1960 Olympic team) and a pretty sharp lawyer, having won all ten of her cases so far for the Legal Aid Bureau, which represents indigents in civil cases involving less than $150.

At the other Cambridge, meanwhile, doe-eyed, ash-blonde Ann Mallalieu, 21, daughter of a British Board of Trade minister, showed up in a black, bell-bottomed corduroy trouser suit to accept her election victory as president of the Cambridge Union, the university's 151-year-old debating society. "I think," said she, delivering the knockout, "that they voted for me as a person and not as a woman."

That great big hole in the ground near Kimberley gives Harry Oppenheimer, 58, chairman of the board of De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., a leeway of personal expression unknown to most South Africans. Taking on the additional job of chancellor of multiracial Cape Town University, which numbers 266 blacks and Coloreds among its 6,392 students, the powerful diamond king coolly defended "the right of the university to run its own affairs"--despite the Vorster government's intensified campaign to force apartheid in all campus extracurricular activities. Said Oppenheimer: "What is the use of a civilization if we are not prepared to share it with men and women of all races?"

Every school should have an old grad like the University of Rochester's Joseph C. Wilson, 57, class of '31. Now board chairman and chief executive of Xerox Corp., Wilson has been a member of Rochester's board of trustees for 18 years, chairman since 1959. This year he took on the added task of heading the university's $38 million fund drive for new buildings and professorships, and kicked in $5,000,000 in stock to get the ball rolling. When the campaign bogged down despite his best efforts, Wilson and his wife Katherine simply signed over 50,000 more shares of their own Xerox stock, worth $15 million at current market prices, putting the drive handsomely over the top and setting this year's record for the largest private gift to any U.S. university.

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