Setting off on a tour of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia to visit installations of the Pious Society of St. James the Apostle (which he founded in 1958), Boston's Richard Cardinal Gushing, 68, felt the twinges of age and chronic asthma. "I don't want to go," he confessed, "but just as St. Paul stung his flesh, and just as President Kennedy stung his flesh, so I must sting mine to fight the enemies of morality."

For his 74th happy return, the gifts included: 1) a cigarette box made from the newly dismantled Polo Grounds' foul pole; 2) four Polo Grounds seats, the same row in which he and his wife sat when they met in 1923; 3) a portable TV; 4) a color TV; and 5) a traveling case. There was a sextet of visiting Dodgers who rendered a birthday stanza more or less to the tune of The Band Played On. What more could a guy want? Since it was New York Mets Manager Casey Stengel, and he is, even at his age, still a dreamer, he thought maybe the Mets could win a game. Ha! It was 5-3, favor of Los Angeles, but season's attendance did pass the million mark. With that kind of gross, maybe next year they could give ol' Case Sandy Koufax.

"We love Libby!" read the signs, welcoming the V.I.P. to the New York World's Fair just like it was a political convention. Libby who? Well, she is Libby Miller, 20, pretty brunette daughter of the G.O.P. vice-presidential nominee, fresh from San Francisco. After an impromptu confetti parade and roses presented by fellow employees, it was back to work for the Newton (Mass.) College of the Sacred Heart senior, who has a job as an a-week summer guide at the New York State Pavilion. There her pitch begins, "Governor Nelson Rockefeller welcomes you, and invites you to enjoy other scenic areas of the state."

His granddaddy was a Texan, but Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon, 54, is an Eastern dude. Nonetheless, he knows that out West, it ain't spurs that go jingle, jangle, jingle, it's those silver dollars the mountain folk use as a status symbol to stun the visitors. Caving in to Western mining-state demands, Congress approved funds to mint 45 million new cart wheels, as recommended by neatly lassoed Dillon, who called them "a traditional medium of exchange in many Western states." So they are, in one vital area of commerce: there's no earthly way a greenback will mediate with a Las Vegas one-armed bandit.

Los Angeles' trial lawyer Gladys Towles Root, 58, is a one-woman courtroom spectacular. Fuchsia, fire engine and living lava are her favorite colors. Feathers and furbelows rise to Alpine proportions above her peroxide French twist. Her earrings would make a Ubangi wince, and her defense of the Sinatra kidnaping last February was equally gaudy. "The evidence," said she, "is that Frank Sinatra Jr. was running the show. How, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, do you like that?" Not much they didn't, and a Los Angeles grand jury last week decided they thought Gladys a bit much. She was indicted for inducing her client, convicted Kidnaper John William Irwin, to testify falsely in an effort to prove that Sinatra phonied up the kidnaping as a publicity stunt. The charge carries a maximum penalty of 15 years, $20,000 fine.

At a 4-H Club show in West Barnstable, Mass., astride her pony Macaroni, Caroline Kennedy, 6, stuck a feather in her cap by winning a sixth-place ribbon in a class of twelve, most of them teenagers. Then her mother, Jacqueline Kennedy, went to town--Manhattan, where she celebrated her 35th birthday by buying a dandy 15-room, $200,000 co-op at the corner of 85th Street and Fifth Avenue, overlooking the Central Park Reservoir. City officials promise tourist buses will mind the music and step lively when they drive past Jackie's new home; and the whole arrangement couldn't be handier for the family, since Peter and Pat Kennedy Lawford live on Fifth at 80th Street, Princess Radziwill (Jackie's sister, Lee) at 78th, Steve and Jean Kennedy Smith at 76th. Some Republicans have a toehold farther down, where the Nixons, Nelson Rockefellers, and Nelson's ex-wife Mary live in the same building at 62nd Street, but the Massachusetts delegation comes back strong with Papa Joe and Rose at 24 Central Park South.

Baal was a sun god, Baalbek his temple in Lebanon, and currently the site of a summer festival where Ballet Stars Margot Fonteyn, 45, and Rudolf Nureyev, 25, were dancing. Betweentimes, they had themselves a ball sunbathing at Beirut's Saint Simon Beach, she in a bikini that was utterly tutu, he in a monokini that was, as they say in London, utterly twee.

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