" 'You really must slow down'--this is becoming the repeated refrain of my children and friends," noted Reluctant Dowager Eleanor Roosevelt. She was obviously not listening as she sailed into her 78th year ( she has decided to celebrate only every fifth birthday ) with a convocation appearance at Memorial University in St John's. Nfld. and a call on the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s palaver in Manhattan. "How can I slow down." she wondered, "when the world is so challenging? I think I must have a good deal of my Uncle Theodore Roosevelt in m, because I enjoy a good fight, and I could not at my age really be contented to take my place in a warm corner by the fireside and simply look on."

Mediating between militants who itched to wage a raiding rumble on Teamster turf and a growing number of appeasers ready to welcome Jimmy Hoffa back into the fold, A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany offered readmission without "head busting" to Hoffa dissidents who have seen the light. As for Jimmy himself, Meany charged that the Teamster hierarchy was "more than ever under the influence of corrupt elements," would continue excommunicated until Hoffa "does as Saul of Tarsus done--go off into the wilderness for a year and repent."

"Somebody got stuck." snorted Milton Glaser, president of the American Institute of Interior Designers, when he heard that $12,500 had been donated to scrape up for the White House some antique wallpaper--still available new in France--for which salvage rights had cost only $50. "Some people like old broken things because they are old and broken down; maybe Mrs. Kennedy is one of them." The supposition produced the first crack in the pale porcelain exterior of Pamela Turnure, 23, the First Lady's decorative press secretary. The remarks, said she, are "undignified and highly inappropriate." Retreated Glaser under the ire of the White House's youngest staffer: "Hours of painstaking care must be taken to remove antique paper from old plaster walls...Anyone willing to contribute this amount of time and expense is to be commended."

Drummed out of his command of the 24th Infantry Division on charges of playing partisan politics, Major General Edwin A. Walker, 51, wallowed for five months in a colonel's billet at U.S. European Army headquarters in Heidelberg. But last week came word of his release from Pentagon purgatory and reassignment to Hawaii, where he will become assistant chief of staff for training and operations in the Pacific--a prestigious post indicating that the combat-proved Texan still had a shot at a third star.

From the estate of former Massachusetts Governor Alvan Tufts Fuller--which last spring left a Turner, a Gainsborough and a Reynolds to Washington's National Gallery of Art--came nine paintings worth $500,000 to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, including two Renoirs, a Monet, two Romneys and Van Dyck's portrait of Charles I's daughter, Princess Mary (just prior to her 1641 marriage to Prince William of Orange at age nine ).

After wrapping up next month's top-level Tokyo meeting of the U.S.-Japan Economic Council, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Detail, 41, has scheduled a summit session of his own: with 12,388 ft. Mount Fuji. Japan's highest. A sometime conqueror of the Santa Rita Mountains of his native Arizona, the hell-for-leather ex-basketball player has pledged to pick his way to the top of Old Fuji, all covered with snow, despite the below-freezing cold and treacherous winds of November. Keeping a taut tether on the supercharged Cabinet minister just in case: the brother-in-law of U.S. Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer, Shigeru Matsukata, a slope-savvy ex-president of the Japan Alpine Society.

Already commemorated in the heavens for the radiation belt he discovered, the U.S.'s foremost space scientist, James Van Allen ( TIME cover, May 4, 1959), received a reward on earth--the first annual $2,500 American Rocket Society Research Award. Van Allen, 47, used the Manhattan presentation luncheon to launch a trial rockoon. Deploring the lack of rapport between the Canaverals and the Caltechs in the comparatively earth-bound U.S. astro-explorations, the State University of Iowa physicist pleaded for a little federal pump priming on the campus "to put a fine cutting edge on the massive and relatively blunt intellectual tools we are using." Without more attention to simon-pure science, warned he, "our national ambitions will greatly outrun our national competence. In another ten years we'll just be muddling along."'

Busy last week at one of his favorite pastimes--making friends--Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson found himself beholden to both Allah and the Pope. While Protestant Johnson ceremonially received the Grand Cross of Merit of the Roman Catholic Knights of Malta "in recognition of his significant humanitarian contributions." a self-proclaimed friend of Allah's winged his way to the U.S. to lend further substance to the citation.

"I thought my enemies had influenced the American deputy king against me, but Allah is great and my prayers bore fruit." said Pakistani Camel Driver Bashir Ahmed, who, after a casual invitation from the touring Johnson last spring, was prodded by a Karachi newspaper and a subsidy from the U.S. People-to-People Program to make the journey. As Washington roughed out a tentative L.B.J. Ranch-to-White House itinerary, and friends wondered how even Lyndon Johnson would go about entertaining a camel driver, the jinnah-topped Pakistani achingly donned the first shoes of his 40 years, breathlessly enplaned for his oft-postponed reunion. Bashir's major preflight preliminary: an oath to fretful kin on a stack of Korans that he would return to the mud and gunnysack shack with caps and shoes for his four children, but marry a mem-sahib (white wife).

For study of labor-management relations, Harvard University received a $100,000 endowment in the name of the late Meyer Kestnbaum (B.S. '18, M.B.A. '21), a longtime president of Hart Schaffner & Marx and 1955-60 White House Special Assistant. Key contributors to the fund: the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and Hart Schaffner & Marx, which--to the wonderment of their tumultuous, tooth-and-claw industry--this year glided into a second half-century of strike-free concord.

Social Mannerist Amy Vanderbilt, who as the U.S.'s leading lecturer on etiquette has gamely smiled at many a photographer's bidding, returned from her latest tour to report a minor sociological phenomenon: regional differences among photographers in the word they ask their subjects to say in order to produce an animated expression. In Hollywood, reports Miss Vanderbilt, the favorite word is ''sex." In the Midwest, it is "cheese." In the South, "honey" or "really." In Manhattan, "money."

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