A loan of $1,000,000 may seem a pretty hefty bundle of green to most people, but it's hardly enough to make Robert McNamara, 51, blink an eye. Not after handling all those billions in the U.S. defense budget for more than seven years. Even so, the $1,000,000 sum has a special meaning to McNamara, for it marked the first loan he signed in his new job as president of the World Bank. The money will go to Nicaragua to build new high schools.

Oh, the politicians must be grinding their teeth. To throw out the first ball of the 1968 season, the New York Yankees passed them over and gave the honor to a fan--a lady fan at that. Of course she was a special lady, Poet Marianne Moore, 80, so devoted a baseball buff that she has penned paeans to her favorite players. So there she was, winding up at Yankee Stadium to uncork a knee-high strike to Rookie Catcher Frank Fernandez. "They tell me it's best to keep pitches low," said Marianne. Right as rain, said Fernandez, who leaned over the railing to buss her on the cheek, then went out and socked a game-winning homer.

The East African Safari rally has never been a Sunday spin: four days and nights of the worst roads in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. A missed curve can mean a 4,000-ft. drop into a valley, elephants enforce their right-of-way, and even anteaters have been known to take umbrage at those noisy strangers. But it's the human element that makes it so exciting. Blasting along at 70 m.p.h. in her Renault the second night out, Pat Moss Carlsson, 33, Stirling's sister and an ace driver in her own right, topped a rise--and there, 30 feet away, some friendly natives had constructed a hub-high stone wall across the road. Pat's Renault smashed into the barrier, vaulted over and by a miracle remained upright. Neither she nor Swedish Co-Driver Liz Nystrom was hurt. Still, the girls thought it prudent to lock themselves in the car, while giggling, guitar-strumming tribesmen prowled around through the night.

Life can be lonely for a king without a crown, and without wealth it can be sadder still. Buganda's ex-King Edward ("Freddy") Mutesa II, 43, has been living in London since 1966, when a military coup forced him to flee his African province. At first, the Cambridge-educated Freddy got by on a small fund set up by fellow officers of the Grenadier Guards. That is gone now. He lives in a borrowed flat in the working-class Bermondsey district, is still looking for a job, and has placed his name on the unemployment rolls. He gets by, he says, "when a friend slips me a fiver now and then." Observed the London Sunday Telegraph: "The British government surely has a moral obligation to protect a former President of a commonwealth country from destitution."

Happily shucking her shoes to wade through the surf, Lady Bird Johnson added some splash to her duties at the opening of the U.S.'s newest national seashore--an 80-mile stretch of unspoiled beach and dunes on Texas' Padre Island, long famed as a haven for migratory birds. Promoters once dreamed of building another Miami Beach on the island, and oil wildcatters had their eye on it too. Now Mrs. Johnson has had the last word: "This treasure requires no iron strongbox," said she. "It is safe from the greedy hands of men, for it belongs to God."

People started asking those questions when Anne McDonnell Ford, Henry's exwife, started wearing a new sparkler on the ring finger of her left hand. Now the secret is out. Come November, she will marry Deane Johnson, 49, handsome, divorced senior partner in the prestigious Los Angeles law firm of O'Melveny & Myers (where Richard Nixon was a partner before he moved to New York). They met at a dinner party last year, have been seeing each other quietly ever since. "I'm terribly happy," said Anne, "and very, very proud to be marrying Deane."

After two years of drought, India's farmlands have produced a bumper crop that promises to ease the ever-present threat of famine. That news alone was enough to win a smile from Indira Gandhi, 50, who took a day off to inspect her own five-acre farm five miles south of New Delhi. The Prime Minister strolled out to reap a few sheaves of wheat, and heard some more good news: the value of her land, originally purchased by her husband in 1960 for 300 per square yard, has zoomed because of New Delhi's urban sprawl, is now worth $15 per square yard.

She has already announced her retirement twice in the past 15 years. Yet Josephine Baker, 61, keeps coming back for "one last" singing tour. She was at Paris' Olympia nightclub, wearing a lot more than the single string of bananas she sported at the Folies-Bergere in the '20s, but still knocking them in the aisles with her husky voice and dusky beauty. Josie says she has accumulated debts of $400,000 supporting her twelve adopted children at her Dordogne chateau and set out to pay the mortgage by launching into Hello, Dolly! and Yes Sir, That's My Baby! with such exuberance that she split her sheath up the seam. "Oooh," cooed Josephine in a line that brought down the house. "Where are the bananas?"

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