People: Apr. 18, 1969

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Though blind and deaf from the age of two, one of the late Helen Keller's favorite pastimes was writing and receiving letters, which she would "read" by having a companion either spell them manually into the palm of her hand or recite them aloud while Miss Keller touched her lips and throat and interpreted the vibrations. Recently it was announced that some 50,000 pieces of her correspondence have been bequeathed to the American Foundation for the Blind. "Are you really 70 years old?" she wrote to Mark Twain on his birthday in 1905. "Or is the report exaggerated like that of your death?" "You know, I think you and I will be better friends if we don't meet," Will Rogers once wrote to her. "They tell me you can feel one's face and tell how they look." Wrote Miss Keller to Alexander Graham Bell in 1900: "I was perfectly delighted to receive your letter in braille. It seemed almost as if you clasped my hand in yours and spoke to me in the old, dear way." And in 1922, after hearing her lecture, Carl Sandburg wrote of "the surprise to find you something of a dancer, shifting in easy postures like a good blooded race horse."

First he sailed 4,300 miles across the Pacific from Peru to French Polynesia aboard Kon-Tiki, a primitive raft made of balsa logs. Now Author-Explorer Thor Heyerdahl, 54, plans to navigate the Atlantic in a 45-ft. by 15-ft. craft made of papyrus, to prove his theory that people from ancient Mediterranean civilizations could have made the journey. Heyerdahl and a crew of six will shove off from Safi, Morocco, next month, charting a course through the Canary Islands to Central America, where traces of what seems to be primitive Old World cultures have been found. Until now Heyerdahl kept very quiet about it. "Otherwise," he says, "I would have drowned in letters from adventurers wanting to join the crew."

On a rare trip from Hickory Hill, Ethel Kennedy flew to Nassau for a few days of sun. And since she was about to celebrate her 41st birthday, her sister-in-law, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, put her husband's yacht Christina at Ethel's disposal for a Bahamian cruise. Close Friends Blanche and lim Whittaker signed on for the voyage too, and when Ethel arrived down south, a surprise present awaited her: a gold charm bracelet appropriately adorned with a jet plane, bus, typewriter, camera and microphone from the 50 newsmen who covered R.F.K.'s primary campaign.

A reporter had just asked Arkansas Governor Winthrop Rockefeller about a rumor that he would soon join arch-conservative Multimillionaire H. L. Hunt in a real estate venture. Aghast at the very idea, Rockefeller recalled an incident at the inauguration last January. As the Governor tells it, when he arrived at the box reserved for the Arkansas delegation, he discovered Hunt had appropriated one of the seats. "I told him I didn't appreciate his sitting there," said Rockefeller. When Hunt refused to move, Rockefeller grasped him by the arm and escorted him out of the box. Said Hunt: "I don't think Rockefeller likes me."