Pastimes' Past

> The U. S. game of craps was named after a French rake, Count Bernard Mandeville Marigny, who introduced the parent European game of hazard to New Orleans a century ago. He was so disliked by the natives that he was nicknamed "Johnny Crapaud'' (French for toad). The pastime became known as "Crapaud's Game," then "Crap's Game," finally--after it spread up the Mississippi and trickled throughout the country--craps.

> An Irish sportsman, Sir St. George Gore, arriving in the U. S. in 1854 on a hunting expedition, started the annihilation of the American buffalo. In 1904 hunters took their last shot at a wild buffalo in the U. S.

>Mary, Queen of Scots, was the first woman to play golf.

> The modern deck of playing cards dates back to Queen Elizabeth's day--the four kings pictured are David, Alexander, Caesar and Charlemagne.

> Walking heel-&-toe, British style, one can move twice as fast (a mile in 6 min., 30 sec.) as with an ordinary gait and two-thirds as fast as the best mile runners.

> The odds are 400,000-to-1 against a ticketholder in the Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes winning first prize, 2,000-to-1 against winning any prize.

>Athletes, as a group, are at their best between the ages of 27 and 29.

> Basketball drew more spectators (90,000,000) last year than any other U. S. sport; softball attracted 72,000,000, baseball 60,000,000, football 45,000,000.

These and thousands of other neatly packed facts appear in a little red book, The Encyclopedia of Sports,* published last week by Cleveland-born, 53-year-old Frank G. Menke. longtime Hearst sportswriter. To investigate the present and past of the world's pastimes, Sportswriter Menke devoted 20 years, poked his nose into 2,000 books, spent $8,000. The result is a 320-page history of recreation (covering almost 100 sports from roller polo to aviation), small enough to be carried in a tipster's hip pocket, informative enough to make a sports columnist out of a convent girl.

Historian Menke, who got his start in journalism at the turn of the Century because he could define the word "mollycoddle''/- better than anyone else in Cleveland, has ghostwritten for 175 U. S. celebrities, including Josephus Daniels, Samuel Gompers, Cardinal Gibbons, Jack Dempsey. Bob ("Believe It or Not") Ripley says Frank Menke can answer 4,000,000 questions. One bit of information baseball officials wish Historian Menke had not dug up: there is no proof that Cooperstown, N. Y. was the birthplace of baseball, nor that Abner Doubleday, its accredited founder, ever played the game.

*$2 a copy. /- His definition: A fellow who wears pointed

yellow shoes and a hat at a jaunty angle.

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