For years, he liked to spend the off season at home, playing for Havana in the Cuban Winter League. Then, in 1962, former Brooklyn Dodger Outfielder Sandy Amoros, who saved the 1955 World Series for the Bums with his spectacular centerfield snag off Yogi Berra, took a very mean curve from Fidel Castro. The Beard decided that Sandy should stay in the bush league, kept him in Cuba for five years. Finally Sandy, 37, succeeded in getting passage for himself, his wife Migdalia and 13-year-old daughter Eloisa aboard one of the twice-daily Varadero-to-Miami freedom shuttles that have ferried almost 64,000 refugees from Cuba in the past 17 months. As usual, Castro confiscated all his property and money. "I no have anything except my family and my freedom," said he, "but that is good now." It got better when the Los Angeles Dodgers announced that they were signing Sandy on for five days to let him qualify for a major-league pension.

Casting about for a paisan whose image and reputation were untouchable, the year-old American-Italian Anti-Defamation League reached into the pack and pulled out Frank Sinatra, 51, to be its national chairman in a campaign to convince the nation that not everyone of Italian descent is a capo mafioso. "It is an honor," said Frank in Miami Beach, where he is shooting a gangster flick called Tony Rome. "To me, any type of discrimination is anti-American."

Having lost six campaigns for the House of Commons, Randolph Churchill, 55, is understandably grouchy about the British system of electioneering. "It's degrading," grumbled Winnie's son in a London television interview, bemoaning the blood, sweat and tears involved in being selected by party officials to stand for the House. "They look at your wife, if you've got one," explained Randolph, who has two ex-wives, "and you lose votes if you don't. If you do have a wife, they look at her hat, they look at her legs, they look at how she's turned out. They might be judging fat cattle or something. It's all very depressing."

After his epic bust-up with Jerry Lewis in 1956, Crooner Dean Martin seemed to have little more to offer than any boozily pattering straight man with a boyish twinkle and a set of imitation Crosby-Como tonsils. Indeed, a lot of his enemies and some of his friends thought that Dino would likely end his career croaking in cocktail lounges from Far Rockaway to Skokie. But there seems to be quite a market for patter and twinkle these days. Variety reported last week that Martin, 49, from his TV variety series, record royalties, club dates and movie lucre, earns nearly $5,000,000 per annum.

"I hope," said the guest of honor, "that you all will have marriages as successful as mine and you all will live as long as I have." The 450 guests at the reception in Columbia, S.C., would all have to be pretty optimistic to hope for both. Former Secretary of State James F. Byrnes had a double holiday with his wife, Maude, celebrating his 88th birthday and their 61st wedding anniversary.

With the corporation's 80 hostelries dotting the earth from Nicosia to Vancouver, Barren Hilton, 39, Conrad's son and head of the Hilton operation in the U.S., figures it's time to start thinking of farther-out sites for another inn. In a speech before the American Astronautical Society in Dallas, Barren launched into a description of his plans for the Lunar Hilton, an underground 100-room hotel to be built just below the moon's crust. "In almost every respect it will be physically like an earth Hilton," he explained, calculating that construction can start as soon as mass space travel gets off the ground. There will be wall-to-wall TV sets, a cocktail lounge and a nuclear-reactor kitchen to serve up tasty reconstituted meats and vegetables. And for dessert, naturally, green cheese.

Back in Washington after two days of arduous picture taking during the funeral of Konrad Adenauer, Lyndon Johnson's White House photographer, Yiochi Okamoto, 51, was visibly jumpy when reporters asked him about his boss's meeting with Charles de Gaulle. Okie was the only other American present when the President got together with De Gaulle in a private room in the West German Bundestag for the first time after 31 troubled years. Well, persisted the newsmen, how would Okie describe the momentous event? "It was," he replied succinctly, "f/2 at 1/30 sec."

He looks nothing like a dame, and the U.S.O. thought so little of the idea that he had to pay his own way. Even so, Metropolitan Opera Tenor Richard Tucker, 52, insists that he made almost as big a hit as a lot of the Hollywood starlets who have gone to Viet Nam to entertain the troops. Back in Manhattan after a two-week singing tour that took him from Saigon to Danang and included presiding over a couple of Passover Seders, Tucker said the boys thoroughly enjoyed the arias from Pagliacci and Tosca. "They're a very, very intelligent caliber of boys," he said--and very, very early risers too. Aboard the aircraft carrier Bon Homme Richard, he wailed, "they told me my first show would be at 8 a.m. Eight in the morning! A singer like me doesn't even spit before midday."

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