Toscanini said that a voice like hers comes but once in a century. Now Contralto Marian Anderson, 61, has decided that it will soon be time to retire. The first Negro to sing at the Metropolitan Opera (in 1955), possessor of a score of honorary degrees and countless other kudos, she will undertake one last world tour running from next October to the following June, with a final U.S. appearance on Easter Sunday, 1965, in Carnegie Hall. Carnegie's box office is already getting ticket requests.

When he fled to Rio de Janeiro in 1958, leaving behind a string of bank frauds totaling upwards of $800,000, Financial "Boy Wizard" Earl Belle, then 26, announced that he would "never" return to the U.S. Trouble is, Tinkerer Belle got himself into an international check-swindling operation in Brazil. When local cops tumbled to the game, Belle had a choice of going on trial there or back home. Home was where the clink is cleaner, and Belle was hustled aboard a New York-bound jet by a gent from Interpol. Two FBI men showed up at Idlewild to greet him, and after health authorities officially welcomed him with an on-the-spot smallpox shot, he was taken off to face 79 federal counts of financial transgression.

The rocket engine in the tail boomed the experimental NF-104A jet Starfighter up to 90,000 ft. and the edge of space. Then disaster. The craft went into a flat spin and plummeted out of control. In the cockpit, Air Force Colonel Charles (Chuck) Yeager, 40, first man to fly faster than sound and currently C.O. of the Edwards test-pilot school, stayed with the violently whirling plane, trying to bring it out of the spin. Only at 6,000 ft. did he give up and eject, parachuting minutes later onto the Mojave Desert with burns on the left side of his face and neck, probably caused by ignition of the oxygen in his mask. The scheduled later assault on the Russian-held world altitude record from ground take-off (113,890 ft.) was scrubbed--and a colleague added an understated postscript to the incident: "The colonel stayed with the plane a little longer than personal safety would have dictated."

"I just read a news item that said you had obtained a non-commissioned jet airplane for Crossville High School because their football team is called the Jets," began a letter from Ray Daiton, 15, a young Tennessee constituent of Democratic Senator Albert Gore, 55. "Well, Norris High School's basketball team is called the Senators, and I was wondering if you knew where we could find an old Senator just lying around not doing anyone any good. We would like to place him in front of our school. Since Norris is primarily a TVA town, you better send a Democrat. But on second thought, since he will be out where the birds can get at him, you better send a Republican." Coughed Gore: "A refreshing sense of humor--or so I hope."

Many notables from many countries have said much, most of it hackneyed, on first seeing the Berlin Wall. Author John Steinbeck, 61, ending a two-month tour behind the Iron Curtain, chose his words carefully: "One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect itself with thick armor is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the species is on the road to extinction."

The living is easy these days for Argentina's ex-Dictator Juan Peron, 68. A few political cronies slip into Madrid for a little political plotting, but mostly he just walks his poodle and sits around with his third wife, Isabel. The Argentines seemed content to have him where he is, and Spain's Strongman Francisco Franco has no objection to him. So it surprised everybody when Argentina filed for his extradition on technical charges of "rape or ravishment" for seducing a minor under 16. The girl in question is one he left behind: Nelly Rivas, now 24, married and the mother of two. The case has been kicking around since Peron was deposed in 1955, but now a zealous Buenos Aires judge has suddenly pushed it through. Peron seemed undisturbed. "Such stupidities," he said.

This Haarlem is in The Netherlands, and from there came Catharine Ladders, 21, last year's Miss World, who will become the bride next year of Hip Swinger Chubby Checker, 22. The future Mrs. Ernest Evans (Chubby's real name; the stage handle was chosen in frank imitation of Fats Domino) met her husband-to-be while he was doing a show in the Philippines last January. "He's different," she says. "He's the quiet type, and I like the way he hums around." Now that was a twist, and it brought a response in kind from Chubby's mom. The lovely Miss Lodders, said she, "is very warm, very nice. Chubby dated quite a few girls, but this is the first time he got serious."

Only six days after he was released from Dallas' Parkland Hospital, Texas Governor John Connolly, 46, was back in, this time at Austin's St. David's Community Hospital, with an inflammation of the vein in his right leg through which he had been fed intravenously while recovering from wounds suffered during the President's assassination. Nevertheless, said he, doctors had given him the "real good news" that he would probably regain full use of his right wrist, shattered by the assassin's bullet.

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