The Winners

The tall (6 ft. 6 in.), solemn, 17-year-old boy said a few polite words to the President of the U.S., then gave him the lapel pin worn by 40 finalists in the 18th annual Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Minutes later, unflustered by the company he had just kept, John Seymour Letcher Jr. sat jackknifed in a bus seat, lost in a scientific diagram he was sketching. Next day Letcher, who had won his Washington trip by building a particle accelerator, learned that he had won again. His prize: the $7,500 top award in the Westinghouse contest.

John Letcher of Lexington, Va. had no trouble deciding where to spend his scholarship money. He is headed for Caltech (three of the other four top winners also want to study there), hopes to work after graduation in nuclear physics or rocket research. He knows an impressive amount already about both subjects. At the Baylor School in Chattanooga, Tenn., where he built the accelerator, he and a research team of schoolboy scientists hope this summer to fire off a stratospheric rocket with a 20-lb. instrument payload. The first-prize winner also plays chess, wrestles on the varsity team at Baylor, talks enthusiastically about the arduous pleasures of spelunking, plans a cave-exploring trip this spring. Other top winners:

¶ Second-Prize Winner Frank Wayne Grimm, 17, of Maryland's Catonsville senior high school, won $6,000 for his study of the snail population in a part of Maryland's Susquehanna Valley, hopes to take a degree in zoology at the University of Michigan.

¶ Carl Lyngholm, 17, reads elementary Russian, plays first clarinet in the San Diego Civic Youth Orchestra, and likes most subjects at San Diego high school except something called "basic citizenship." He won third prize ($5,000) for a study of an exotic mathematical bypath, Boolean algebra.

¶ Crew-cut Robert McDonnell, a 17-year-old senior at Maine Township high school in Park Ridge, Ill., earned a $4,000 fourth prize by measuring the heat given off by several chemical reactions involving graphite. He likes astronomy, chess, classical music and stamp collecting, wants to study particle and theoretical physics.

½ Hungarian-born Joseph Peter Vajk, 16, is news editor of the Princeton (N.J.) high school paper, and has a lead role in a school play. He won $3,000 with a paper theorizing that fallout will speed up human evolution.