People: Jul. 24, 1964

Batters better swing high, wide and fan some when Fidel Castro, 37, steps up to the mound to give a demonstration of his celebrated pitching prowess. Since he won the revolution, he has not lost a game. But now it appears that Fidel's new soothing syrup is for domestic consumption as well as export. Radio Havana breathlessly reported that a recent beisbol game ended 3-0 after five innings with el máxima lider the losing hurler, though naturally he was "in magnificent form." Why five innings? Well, when Castro walks off the field, it seems that everybody else quits too.

There was space, lots of space, in the starry skies above, but Astronaut Scott Carpenter, 39, discovered that the dawn comes up with a thundering herd in Bermuda. Buzzing along on one of those mid-ocean motor bikes at 5:30 a.m. to the U.S. Navy base where he was temporarily stationed for some underwater training, Carpenter met two cars passing on a narrow road, and when he sheered aside to avoid them, bounced into a doral wall just the way the tourists do. Toll: a compound fracture of the left arm that may take surgery for a proper set, a fractured toe on his left foot, and a rapidly ballooning left knee, all of which will keep him well above the water line at least ten weeks.

With his 90th birthday only four months away, Sir Winston Churchill doesn't do much stepping out any more, but prefers to sit in the garden of his London home, 28 Hyde Park Gate. Thus, when his 23-year-old journalist grandson and namesake married Minnie d'Erlanger, 24, in a London registry office last week (he is an Anglican, she a Roman Catholic), Sir Winston sent Lady Clem to the ceremony alone. But the bridal party dropped round afterward to raise a toast with the grand old man, whom they found in the company of his plump cat, Jock.

Mount Morris Park in Harlem is ugly, steep and dangerous, but it lies in a part of the city that Composer Richard Rodgers, 62, knows well. He grew up there when it was still a middle-class neighborhood, went sledding in the park, near it met Lyricist Larry Hart. Now, doing his bit to turn Manhattan once again into an isle of joy, he plans to build and give to the city a 2,000-seat amphitheater for musicals, dancing, skating and concerts. It will be built in Mount Morris Park, explains Rodgers, because "I got a lot out of that park, and I want to put something back into it."

For want of a male, the show was lost. Italian Producer Dino de Laurentiis announced that he was canceling a movie in which he had planned to star Princess Soraya, 32, because he was unable to "modernize" a Henry James novel, The American, sufficiently to suit her talents. But the whisper along Rome's Via Veneto had it that Soraya was the one who had refused to modernize: as Iran's ex-Queen, she had imperiously insisted on top billing, and no star De Laurentlis approached would play second fiddle to an amateur. In private, Soraya's escort crisis was not so acute. She took off from Capri on a week-long yacht cruise with her real-life leading man, German Cinemactor Maximilian Schell.