In 43 years, the presidential yacht has ferried a panoply of kings, emperors, ambassadors and other important personages along the Potomac--but rarely a crowd like this. Two dozen youngsters, most of them from poor families around Washington, followed wide-eyed behind Pat Nixon on a tour of the 104-ft.-long vessel, now named Sequoia, as a Navy crew piloted them downstream on a two-hour voyage. It was the first of a series of 14 cruises the First Lady plans for children this summer. "I thought it could be put to better use," said she, dishing out soda pop and other goodies while a Marine Corps combo and a folk singer provided music. The only sour note came from a National Park Service director who remarked at one point that it would take 20 years to clean up the pollution they were gliding over.

It was only a question of time. Carlo Ponti Jr., long-awaited son of the Italian producer and Actress Sophia Loren, will become a contributor to the family cinematic combine at the tender age of six months. In I Girasoli (The Sunflowers), a Ponti production now filming in Moscow, Carlo Jr. will portray Sophia's infant son. "I managed to convince Carlo Sr. to allow our son to work in the movie so I could have my baby with me all the time," she said. "I don't want to be away from him for a moment." The script offers an arresting contrast to the Pontis' fireside felicity. An Italian woman, traveling on her earnings as a prostitute, tracks down her war-prisoner husband in Russia only to find him married to another woman.

"All the inadequacies and weaknesses just blare out at you," complained the young artist as he viewed his own one-man show at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Me. Jamie Wyeth, 23, Andrew's talented and modest son, had hitched a ride with a lobsterman from his home on Monhegan Island, and almost wished he hadn't come. Even his 1967 portrait of the late John F. Kennedy was disappointing in retrospect. "I'm terribly unsatisfied with it," said Jamie, who never saw J.F.K. in the flesh and completed the portrait from photographs and extensive sketches of the President's two brothers. "It's purely interpretive. I have nothing to equate it with. I don't know whether it is like him or unlike him." Still, the young artist must be doing something right: he has been commissioned by NASA authorities to join Robert Rauschenberg, John Meigs and William Thon at Cape Kennedy to sketch his impressions of this week's scheduled Apollo 11 blastoff to the moon.

"Show me an actress who isn't a personality," the lady once said, "and I'll show you a woman who isn't a star." Now, at 58, Katharine Hepburn is still very much a star, but she has wearied of Hollywood's personality fetish; she grants few interviews, is rarely seen outside her private circle of friends, has even hired an agency to keep her out of the public eye. There was nothing she could do, though, about the exhibit opening last week at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, which paid her the honor of exhibiting 65 photos of Hepburn in many of her greatest roles. There she was, the stage-struck young beauty in 1933's Morning Glory, the prim but game Rosie in 1951's African Queen, the indomitable Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1968's The Lion in Winter. Yet nothing could capture the essential Hepburn better than her pose in the 1939 Broadway production of The Philadelphia Story, as cool and serenely regal in slacks and blouse as Botticelli's Venus.

Johnson State Park along the Pedernales in Texas boasts an impressive heed of 40 white-tailed deer, plus quite a few rabbits, ground squirrels and other rodents. But it has been woefully short in the buffalo department, with only one bull and four cows. That situation has just been corrected by Budweiser Beer Baron August Busch, a longtime friend of L.B.J., who sent the ex-President four of the shaggy ungulates--two bulls and two cows--from his private preserve at Grant's Farm outside St. Louis. Busch will hardly miss the beasts; he still has 37 of them roaming free on his 300-acre farm.

Some supplies had been tossed overboard, and heavy waves were breaking over the low-lying stern. The reports from Ra, the 45-by 15-ft. reed boat with which Thor Heyerdahl hopes to prove that ancient Egyptians may have planted their culture in the New World, sounded a good deal less optimistic than they did during the first stages of his two-month voyage. The Norwegian adventurer and his six-man crew reported their position in the Atlantic as 1,000 miles east of Martinique and still on schedule, which calls for a landfall somewhere along the coast of Central America late next month. Heyerdahl said that everyone was "working desperately." As an escort vessel put out from Martinique, he radioed: "It's a question of how long we can keep going. We're having a rough time--we're not in good shape any more."

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