Every year Chiang Kai-shek decrees that there be no official observation of his birthday. Every year the Formosans disobey. This year, for the Gimo's 81st, dragon and lion dancers pranced through the streets of Taipei, and a delegation of 3,000 overseas Chinese presented gilt scrolls enumerating their achievements of the past year. Nationalist Vice President Chia-kan Yen proclaimed that Chiang's "achievements in the promotion of nationalism, democracy and the people's livelihood have made him the No. 1 man in the world."
No. 1 himself spent the day in seclusion with his family, explaining that a Chinese birthday celebration also marks the solemn mu nan chih jih, or "day of a mother's suffering through childbirth."
Though she hardly thought so during the years she was married to him, Marina Oswald now figures that everything Assassin Lee Oswald ever touched has turned to gold. Oswald's Russian-born widow, 25, now married to Texas Saloonkeeper Kenneth Porter, is suing the U.S. Government for $500,000 in payment for Lee's confiscated personal effects--a treasure trove including old Christmas cards, Russian maps of Moscow and Minsk, his Marine Corps discharge and an Oct. 20, 1963 copy of the Worker that Marina thinks collectors would dearly love to own. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Mighell conceded that Marina "definitely will receive compensation" for the mordant memorabilia. "The question," he added, "is how much."
The timing probably had nothing to do with it, but it was fitting all the same that the Air Force chose the middle of the football season to announce that Lieut. Colonel Felix Blanchard, 42, has been assigned as an F-105 pilot to the 388th Tactical Fighter Wing at Korat Air Base in Thailand. Two decades after he ended his rampaging career as fullback on Army's undefeated teams of 1944-46, three times making All-America, the Doc still ranks as West Point's greatest power runner. But he has also built himself a reputation as an equally skilled flyer on tours of duty in Alaska and England.
Her subject was miniskirts, and her judgment was that "never in the history of fashion have so many illusions been destroyed in so short a time." Such sentiments were catnip both to the readers of Harper's Bazaar and to the judges of the first annual Magazine Awards given jointly by the J. C. Penney Co. and the University of Missouri. The panel awarded a $1,000 prize in the fashion and beauty category to stylish Stout-Heiress Gloria Guinness, 53, for her article in the June 1966 Bazaar deploring the "short, short, short skirt" as "that crazy young look that took over with the rapidity of a plague." La Guinness, a best-dressed, quarterly contributor to the magazine, gave the $1,000 back as a donation for needy students and added her modest judgment of ladies' magazine prose: "That kind of writing comes easy."
"The longer you stay up destroying other aircraft in time of battle," mused Colonel Francis S. Gabreski, 48, "the luckier you've got to be." By that measure, the retiring commander of the 52nd Fighter Wing at New York's Suffolk County Air Force Base is the luckiest man in the air. Though it has been 15 years since his last combat mission, the Colonel is still the nation's top-ranked living combat ace, with 371 kills to his credit from World War II and Korea. Gabreski is leaving the Air Force for a job as a p.r. executive for Grumman Aircraft. Part of his reason is that it's tough educating nine children on Air Force pay, but the rest of it goes deeper. "I think I've had a full career," said Gabreski. "I've been leading a charmed life."
Not since Polyneices' sister Antigone went to her death trying to give him a proper burial has anyone had as much trouble getting interred as the late showman Billy Rose. For 20 months, Billy's mortal remains have lain in temporary storage while his two sisters, Polly and Miriam, fought with his executors over how much should be paid for his mausoleum, and by whom. Now the body has been entombed at last, in a $125,000 white granite shrine in a Westchester County, N.Y., cemetery. The inscription reads: "Billy Rose--the fabulous legend who is really real."
Two months to the day after he fell ill with what was first announced as a urinary infection, Pope Paul VI, 70, underwent surgery for removal of an enlarged prostate gland. The 45-minute operation, performed by a team of six doctors headed by Italy's renowned surgeon, Professor Pietro Valdoni, 67, took place in an up-to-date operating theater installed last month in the Vatican. The first major surgery ever performed on a Pope "went excellently," said the Vatican, and the Pope should be up and about in two weeks.
General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower, 77, has rarely been surrounded by so much rank. At a West Point Society dinner in Manhattan, Ike's five stars were flanked by a platoon of active and retired four-star generals, including SHAPE Commander Lyman Lemnitzer, Mark Clark, Alfred Gruen-ther, Lauris Norstad, Jacob Devers, Lucius Clay and Anthony McAuliffe. For that glittering crew, the society decided that no citations, no medals could come close to being adequate. "What award could we possibly give these men?" asked a spokesman plaintively.
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