Most of them would not have placed in a baby contest, but there they were, looking surprisingly like their grown-up selves. From Baby Adolf Hitler to Altar Boy Richard Daley, the passel of snapshots and more formal portraits had been assembled somewhat irreverently in a paperback album, As They Were, by Sylvia Topp and Tuli Kupferberg. Little Walter Cronkite sported short pants and big ears; Sammy Davis Jr. at three looked like a refugee from Our Gang; Marlene Dietrich was demurely Victorian, with a tiny heart-shaped locket and crossed ankles. As a baby, Baby Dr. Benjamin Spock wore a wide-brimmed hat, a Gerber smile, and a handsome diminutive pair of buckled Mary Jane shoes.

Forty mules and Georgia's Lieutenant Governor Lester Maddox turned up for "Mule Day" at Gold Hills amusement park in Dahlonega, Ga. Maddox headed up a panel of four judges to pick the prettiest, ugliest and orneriest mules --with Ida, Bullwinkle, and a six-week-old youngster named Tom respectively getting the nod. While Maddox declined invitations to enter the hog-calling contest and greased-pig chase, he did accept a challenge to mount a mule. His first effort ended in a disastrous sprawl on the ground, and on the second try Maddox somehow wound up mounted backward on the beast. But then Lester even likes to ride his bicycle backward if he is in view of a TV camera.

What a life Singer Edith Piaf had! Born in the gutter, lived awhile in a cousin's whorehouse, discovered on a street corner. What a role to play! Brigitte Ariel, 19, a little-known French actress who has played mainly with provincial companies, was chosen for the film version of the bestselling biography by Simone Berteaut, the "Little Sparrow's" half sister. Brigitte, who was nine when Piaf died in 1963, has little in common with the megaphone-voiced singer except her height (4 ft. 11 in.). The songs will be dubbed in. About the part, Brigitte says: "It's an overwhelming role that has upset my whole life."

Only last month Olga Korbut, 18, threatened to quit gymnastics if the International Gymnastic Federation curbed her risky, highly personal style. She won her battle, at least temporarily. Last week she copped five gold medals at the World University Games in Moscow. The crowd went wild with adulation, but there were some off-notes in other events. Russian Jews who cheered Israeli athletes were taunted as "kikes" and roughed up by other Russians, and the American basketball team got caught in a melee started by their Cuban opponents. The spectators, who had been rooting for the Cubans, responded with sportsmanly chants of "Cuba no, Yankees si.'"

In the district court in Nantucket, Mass., the average punishment for driving an auto in a manner to endanger the lives and safety of the public is a $50 to $100 fine. The late Senator Robert Kennedy's son Joseph, 20, who was so charged (TIME, Aug. 27) and convicted, received a $100 fine, a suspended license and an admonition from Justice C. George Anastos: "I would hope you would use your illustrious name as an example that could be an asset to the young people of your age, instead of becoming involved in cases that bring you into court." Joe's mother Ethel, along with his uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy, had flown to Nantucket by charter plane from the family compound in Hyannis Port. After the three-hour trial, the Senator walked up to the prosecutor and said: "You have been very fair." Meanwhile, in the Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Pamela Kelly, 18, who was critically injured in the car driven by Joe, showed some signs of partial recovery from her waist-down paralysis.

The author of the new bestseller Marilyn seemed a startling choice as this year's recipient of the staid MacDowell Colony's 14th annual award for "outstanding service to the arts." But there in Peterborough, N.H., clearly enjoying the admiration and an alfresco lunch, was Norman Mailer. Thinned down from prepublication fasting, Mailer looked a bit like a quizzical coyote as he listened to a speech about his favorite writer by John Leonard, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Warming to his subject, Leonard variously described Mailer as a "libidinal compost heap," "a cyclotron run amuck," and a writer who wears his books "like a string of grenades." Then he got round to comparing Mailer (favorably) to Dickens, D.H. Lawrence and Don Quixote. The author thanked Leonard for his mellifluous praise but genially observed that, however gratifying, it was all "too little and too late."

-Dyan Cannon, 35, the zaftig star of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and The Last of Sheila, has decided that she can do as well in Las Vegas as in Hollywood. To tune up for her nightclub debut, she has been working out at home in Malibu Beach on bongo drums, conga drums, a guitar and a piano. Dyan was also belting out a few screams as part of her program of primal therapy. "I've spent the last three or four years worried more about what I feel than my career," she said. The screams also loosen her up for her own rhythm and blues songs, which she is recording on an album to be called Come Sip My Wine.

Proudly trying out his new 60-ft. yacht Toh-Be-Kin at the entrance to the harbor at Newport Beach, Calif., Senator Barry Goldwater, 64, heard a woman's screams from the water. Maneuvering his boat toward a couple who had been thrown from their small speedboat, the Senator tried to reach them by tossing them a rope. Failing, he dived into the water fully clothed and rescued Mr. and Mrs. Glen Machlitt of North Hollywood. Goldwater pulled the Machlitts into his boat, in shock but still conscious, and turned them over to the harbor police, departing without waiting for praise.

"It's lucky blue is your best color," G. Gordon Liddy's wife told him the first time she saw him in denim work clothes behind the bars of the District of Columbia Jail. In the Ladies' Home Journal, Frances Liddy explained that her husband "feels he is serving his country by sitting in jail and saying nothing." She and their five children, ages 9 to 14, agree: "We would have felt he was a coward if he had acted any less resolutely than he has." Mrs. Liddy, who now supports her family by teaching school, scoffed at the rumor that her husband has been paid to keep silent. When Liddy writes the children, all of whom swim in country-club competitions, "on the outside of their envelopes he always prints the same message: 'Win!' " The bumper of the family Jeep bears a sticker, Mrs. Liddy went on, that reads WELCOME HOME P.O.W.S. "I intend to leave it there until we welcome home our own P.O.W.!"

Colonel Harland Sanders, 82, the Kentucky Fried Chicken magnate, has also become a benefactor of sorts. Sanders and his wife gave half a million dollars to erect a library at Lincoln Memorial University, an academic storehouse of Abraham Lincoln memorabilia founded on Feb. 12, 1897, at Cumberland Gap, Tenn. Sanders then proceeded to Norman Rockwell's Stockbridge, Mass., home for a fast portrait sitting, presenting the painter, 79, with an honorary commission as a Kentucky colonel. Said Rockwell in a slightly awed voice: "He showed up all dressed in white with that white hair and white beard. He's the most handsome and picturesque man I've ever seen."

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