"A Nourishing of Excellence"

It was former Schoolteacher Lyndon Johnson's own idea: the accolade of "presidential scholar," to be bestowed on outstanding students as they finished high school and headed for college. Announcing the program in April, the President said, "These awards are to recognize the most precious resource of the United States -- the brain power of its young people -- to encourage the pursuit of intellectual attainment among all our young people." This week the first year's scholars, 121 strong, gather in the White House for a presidential handshake and a medal designed by Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz.

Winners were chosen by a committee headed by Dr. Milton Eisenhower. The 500 finalists were screened by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation primarily from top performers on its own tests and on the "college boards" given by Educational Testing Service.

Virtually all the scholars scored in the mid 700s on the college boards and no less than 15 had perfect 800s. Half a dozen had perfect National Merit exam scores, impossible.

The first presidential winners include 64 boys and 57 girls, who will attend 73 different colleges and universities.

Surprisingly, only one winner will study medicine, but 31 plan to major in math, 13 in physics, seven in chemistry. In whatever field, the 121 honored teenagers prove that the country's "greatest resource" is a rich and varied lode.

Some standout scholars: > Jill Ramsey of Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., scored two perfect 800s and a 795 on her college boards, may major in anthropology or Spanish at Stanford. Last year as a summer project, she helped to build a clavichord.

> Elaine Leachman of Los Alamos, N. Mex., speaks French, Spanish, Swedish, Russian -- and Danish acquired while her physicist father was posted at the Nils Bohr Institute in Denmark. In Copenhagen she won second place in a French contest, represented Denmark on a trip to Paris. She helps with a class for retarded children, will train as a language teacher at Stanford.

> Jeffrey Liebman of Evanston, Ill. got a four-minute standing ovation when the President's telegram was read to a student assembly. He heard not a clap of it, having been deaf since birth. He attends Evanston's college-sized Township High, reads lips so fluently that some classmates are unaware of his deafness. Hugely versatile, Jeffrey was a state winner in the Science Talent Search for his experiment on fast evaporation, won a Carnegie Tech creative-writing prize for an essay on Salinger and Kafka, a national prize for a one-act play, and a letter for wrestling. He will major in chemistry at Oberlin.

> Paul Kenneth Hansma of Scottsdale, Ariz., "just seemed to drift into science," has built everything from a cloud chamber to a solar furnace to an electron accelerator. For a hobby he builds fountains, is now on his ninth. He studies with stereo earphones whispering light classical music to him. He will attend New College in Sarasota, Fla., move on to postgraduate research in physics. > Jacquelyn Faye Evans of Little Rock, Ark., made her achievements (straight A's) amid notably tense circumstances as one of the few Negro students to enter and stay at Little Rock's Hall High School after it was integrated by federal troops. "The identity crisis was there at first," she says, "but I got along fine." She reads 1,800 words a minute, will go to Radcliffe on a scholarship. > Dale Gieringer of Cincinnati is towering physically (6 ft. 3 in., 190 lbs.) and intellectually (he tops his class of 289). "A youngster with a brain like this is awesome," says one teacher at Walnut Hills High. In free time, Dale programs computers at the University of Cincinnati's Kettering Laboratory ("It's just a job, really"). Dale took up astronomy at six, and his prime interest is "where physics, math and astronomy meet--cosmology, deep space distribution of matter." He hopes after Harvard to join NASA or become a research astronomer at an observatory in Australia or South Africa.

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