Meeting over the hardware at a Milwaukee banquet honoring them as the Associated Press's athletes of the year were Wilma Rudolph Ward, 21, the world's speediest woman, and Roger Moris, 27, HR 61. Roger was reportedly busy haggling for a 100% pay boost; Wilma, just married to a Tennessee State schoolmate, seemed intent on homemaking ("Most of the Russian women runners in the last Olympics had two or three children, and that didn't bother them").

Amidst the brocade and crystal furnishings of Manhattan's St. Regis Hotel, Pioneer Modern Architect Walter Gropius, 78, stood up to receive the second Kaufmann International Design Award, a tax-free $20,000, for his "achievement in design education" while founder and director of Germany's austerely functional Bauhaus. Gropius cast a wry glance at most modern buildings, said, "It seems completely futile to inject quality into buildings and goods which are created only for their short entertainment value." What was needed in the U.S., said Gropius, was a movement like Britain's "Anti-Uglies," irate architecture buffs who recently forced withdrawal of plans for an offending office building on London's Piccadilly Circus.

With a curtsy to the newly garment-conscious District of Columbia, the New York Couture Group again crowned Jacqueline Kennedy as the best-dressed woman in the world, and for the first time welcomed into its top twelve her sister. Princess Stanislas Radziwill, and her Palm Beach-Manhattan shopping consort, Mrs. Charles Wrightsman. Among repeaters from last year was Thailand's Queen Sirikit, who moved a lovely leg up a rung toward the poll's Fashion Hall of Fame--the Olympus of three-time win ners entered last week by boyishly elegant Actress Audrey Hepburn and Mrs. Norman Winston, the part Cherokee Indian, Paris-based wife of the international real estate dealer.

His restlessness worsening along with his press notices (latest from London's Sunday Express: "Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon leave for a holiday in the West Indies to recover from the strain of their almost workless year"), ex-Photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones signed on with London's Sunday Times as "artistic adviser" and occasional cameraman--at an undisclosed salary. Insisted his new editor: "It is a real job of work."

At the Soviet's annual New Year's bash in the Kremlin, convivial Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, 27, buttonholed the ornament of the U.S. embassy, vivacious Jane Thompson, 41, and proposed, "How would you like to go into orbit with me?" Responded the lissome wife of Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson: "Why, I'd be frightened to death. Besides," she added smoothly, "I'm not in training."

Seeing in his 86th birthday with a flute of champagne, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer received a baroque stone bench from the man perennially most likely to succeed him. Toasted Vice Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, eliciting a faint smile and a wag of der Alte's steady old finger: "In order to forestall any bad jokes, I should say that this gift is not for use in retirement but for your relaxation."

Scandalously deserting Britain's hallowed Hastings international congress at mid-tournament, the U.S.'s dogged, dazzling women's chess champion. Lisa Lane, 24, alibied, "I felt homesick, and besides that, I am in love." With whom? Mooned she mysteriously: "I am not engaged. I am just in love." But next day the once-divorced Lisa admitted that her white knight was American Weekly Reporter Neil Hickey (who had written a smitten profile of her two years ago), added, "I am discussing only my own feelings and cannot speak for him." Hickey's feelings: "The story is ridiculous."

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