People: Jan. 28, 1966

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Smiled Ted Williams angelically: "I want to thank the writers for making all this possible." That was about the only nice thing Ted has ever had to say about the press, but of course, the newsmen deserved it—since the Baseball Writers' Association of America had just elected him to the Baseball Hall of Fame by a record vote of 282 out of 302. There was no question he deserved it either. The last of the .400 sluggers (.406 in 1941), Ted hit 521 homers in 19 seasons with the Boston Red Sox, emerged with a career batting average of .344. In fact, the Sox looked over the record again and were so impressed they hired Ted back—as a vice president of the club.

Could it be that Charles de Gaulle had ever been young? At a Books and Authors luncheon in Manhattan, former CBS Paris Correspondent David Schoenbrun was talking about his new biography, The Three Lives of Charles de Gaulle, and told one anecdote that didn't get into the book. The general, said he, had a reputation as a ladies' man once, even used to pursue the same demoiselles as his former comrade-in-arms Marshal Henri Pétain. Well, a friend asked the general in later years if the story was true. "Ah, oui," De Gaulle answered. "Pétain and I were sometimes on the same terrain. But not on the same night."

Another series. Round-tripper Duke

at bat, "Four hundred feet from home-plate";

more like that. A neat bunt, please; a cloud-breaker,

a drive like Jim Gilliam's great big one.

Hope's alive.

So sang Poetess Marianne Moore in her 1955 encomium to the Brooklyn

Dodgers, Hometown Piece for Messrs. Alston and Reese. Alas, even with a rooting muse like that, the team packed up for Los Angeles, leaving its poet in residence behind in Brooklyn, where she went on celebrating the borough, her "city of trees." But in the following season, she found that not all the bums had gone West. Drunks rang her doorbell at 3 a.m., and "one of my neighbors was robbed three times," she complained. So, at 78, after 35 years, Miss Moore moved to Greenwich Village, where a baseball diamond is very square.

Mrs. William Howard, 51, better known as Dorothy Lamour, hit the road once again, this time to exotic Chicago, where she slinked into the Drake Hotel's Camellia House to try out an act sans Crosby and Hope. Far from Singapore, Zanzibar and Bali, Dottie wore shoes and a sequined gown, made it clear she's said so long to sarongs. "No more flitting around the jungle," she announced after leading a sing-along of Moonlight Bay and kissing a few pates around ringside.

Perhaps it started in her girlhood when "some interfering person" decided that little Loelia Ponsonby mustn't be taken to cowboy films any more because the flickers were bad for her eyes. Last week Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, 63, turned up in San Francisco to pursue her old fascination. Her Grace announced that she wants to buy one authentic stagecoach, a covered wagon that had survived an Indian attack, a saloon door (swinging) and other fond wild West relics to install for English schoolchildren at a museum of Americana at Bath.