And, It Might As Well Be Spring

AFTER the wrenching ordeal of the Galley affair, it was time for a moment of vernal exuberance. The sap was running in Vermont, where farmers have tapped the sugar maples and the stuff is flowing through plastic tubing directly from the trees to the sugarhouses. Detroit's Belle Isle Park and the banks of the Charles River in Boston sported colorful curtains of kites over the Easter weekend. Kent State students were playing baseball last week on the green where their fatal confrontation with the National Guard took place nearly a year ago. Reprieved from the junk heap, the Delta Queen, last of the overnight, stern-wheel Mississippi riverboats, started a new "maiden" voyage to Cincinnati last week. All around the land Americans felt a sense of freshness and renewal. Perhaps nothing has changed, but spring makes it seem as though it has.

Rain Dances. Even the elements seemed to be cooperating. Kansas City basked in an unseasonal 90DEG, Chicago in 85DEG heat. A drenching rain ended a two-month drought in Southern California, tying up Los Angeles freeways and delaying drivers as much as two hours. In the bone-dry cattle country of West Texas, winds surpassing 60 m.p.h. turned the sky dark red with dirt at midday last week, a prelude to five inches of rain that interrupted seven months of Dust Bowl drought, perhaps in answer to Cherokee rain dances. But there was no relief for Florida's parched Everglades, where at one point more than 100 men and five helicopters were battling a 50,000-acre fire.

Besides the astonishing new breezes blowing from China, there were some refreshing political stirrings in the air at home. In San Jose, Calif., Norman Mineta, a Nisei who spent two years during World War 11 in a U.S. relocation camp, was handily elected mayor. For a special election in Maryland's First Congressional District, voters between 18 and 21, enfranchised for the first time, turned out last week at twice the rate of their elders.

Gay President. Washington. D.C. was "dazzling with pink cherry and magnolia blossoms, and deluged with tourists. One morning nearly 10,000 visitors queued up to tour the White House. Along the black iron White House fence 37 women, mainly suburban housewives, chained themselves in protest against the Viet Nam War. Peace marchers are about to descend on Washington en masse (see following story), but the city seems unperturbed. On the Capitol lawn, a group of Democratic presidential hopefuls, including Senators Birch Bayh of Indiana. Henry Jackson of Washington, and Harold Hughes of Iowa, startled passers-by as they sat down to dessert al fresco. The herring are beginning to run in the polluted Potomac. Willie Mays, age 39, hit four homers for the San Francisco Giants in the first four games of the new baseball season.

The generally calm campuses offered intriguing portents. Some 800 angry students surrounded the home of University of Florida President Stephen O'Connell in Gainesville, protesting his refusal to increase black enrollment quotas for the incoming freshman class. Recently blacks were elected to head the student bodies of two predominantly white colleges in the South: Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and the University of South Carolina. Two weeks ago. Jack Baker, 29, a second-year law student and a publicly militant homosexual, was elected student-body president at the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota; he was endorsed by the student Minnesota Daily.

Of course the Aquarian mood was hardly universal. In New York, bandits held a bank manager and his family hostage overnight and then forced him to open his Brooklyn bank vaults the next morning; they escaped with $250,000. A teenage boy was slain on Washington's Potomac riverfront as he tried to protect his girl from an armed attacker. Dixieland Hall on New Orleans' Bourbon Street, one of the last bastions of unadorned Dixieland jazz in the city, closed last week after losing $10,000 last year. New York magazine, which specializes in advice on how to survive in the big city, ran a cover story last week on ways to discourage car thieves. One truckload of 70,000 copies, en route from the printer in Maryland, was hijacked in Hoboken; police had still not recovered the truck or its contents at week's end.

Running Sap. Spring remains something of a silly season. In Detroit, friends of a 27-year-old advertising man celebrated his divorce with a shower of rice and a lunch that featured a "divorce cake" topped by a lone plastic groom. In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Jane Cherry, 18, of Evansville, Ind., won a record player for possessing the most beautiful belly button on the beach.

In unexpected places, however, there were startling signs of sanity. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, long an exemplar of selfimportance, swallowed hard and voted its best actor award to George C. Scott, who had said in advance that he would not accept it (see SHOW BUSINESS). The new sentimentality in films did nothing to save Love Story, which had seven Oscar nominations and won only for best original score. Author Erich Segal was undeterred. His sap is still running: this week he is slated to be one of more than 1,000 entrants in Boston's annual 26-mile marathon.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.