Those who felt funny about black cats, spilled salt and hooting owls would have departed in a hurry. To honor John Glenn, who sailed through space in Mercury capsule No. 13, thirteen U.S. Senators gathered at 10:13 a.m. on Capitol Hill to give the ebullient astronaut a gold watch, all of whose numerals read 13 o'clock. Smashing a mirror to open the meeting, Illinois' Republican Everett Dirksen tried to hex Glenn: "If you'll talk 13 seconds, we'll love you. If you talk 13 minutes, we'll wonder how you ever got in orbit. If you talk 13 hours, we'll be in orbit." Replied Glenn, with a double whammy: "I thought you were going to say that if I talked 13 hours I'd be in good company."

. . .

Has success spoiled Caroline Kennedy? Not at all, her grandmother thinks. "I don't think she's spoiled," said Rose Kennedy. "She's too young to realize all these luxuries. She probably thinks it's natural for children to go off in their own airplanes. But she is with her cousins, and some of them dance and swim better than she. They do not allow her to take special precedence. Little children accept things.''

. . .

Radiant and wiggly in a silk dress and smiling sweetly at 700 howling fans, Sophia Loren, in that most hallowed of Hollywood rites, pressed her palms into the gooey cement before Grauman's Chinese Theater. She followed up with her footprints, pressed in with a twist, and then as a fillip below her signature, scrawled an Italian motto: Solo per sempre -only forever.

. . .

Freewheeling through Europe for a month, Automaker Henry Ford II's pert post-deb daughters Charlotte, 21, and Anne, 19, got to London in time for a coming-out party, then went on to the French Riviera to sail, sun and waterski. Was their first solo trip abroad fun? Everything except those photographers who insisted on snapping the girls getting into a Renault, of all things. "They told us to do it," said Anne, but then she added happily: "We've had a fabulous, wonderful, exciting time. We've been doing just what we wanted to do." Pressed to elaborate, Anne thought and thought some more. "Stop hitting me, Charlotte," she said.

. . .

Who were the best American Presidents? Emeritus Harvard Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., 74, asks the question in the New York Times Magazine and answers it with a poll of 75 men described as "students of American history." Among them: James B. Conant, Denis Brogan, Henry Steele Commager, Felix Frankfurter, and Schlesinger's own historian son, Arthur Jr., who now tinkers around the White House for a President who was not included in the rating. On a scale ranging from Great to Failure, five were called Great. F.D.R. finished third, after Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, but ahead of Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Jefferson. Harry Truman, in the historians' view, belongs among the Near Greats, in ninth place, not quite up to James Polk but more highly regarded than John Adams or Grover Cleveland. Next to the last among twelve Average Presidents was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who ranks 22nd, and comes in ahead only of the impeached Andrew Johnson. The two complete failures on the list: postwar Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding. The criterion was achievement, said Schlesinger: whether a President's statecraft was creative, his work affected the nation's destiny. And if it made anyone feel better, Greats and Near Greats occupied the White House for nearly half the 172-year lifetime of the Republic.

. . .

Flanked by his wife and two grandchildren, Dwight Eisenhower, 71, was on a six-week sentimental journey to Europe, his first trip abroad as a private citizen. Cornered by a group of Danish newsmen in Copenhagen, he said he did not intend to be drawn into a discussion of U.S. politics, but when he was asked if he regretted any of his decisions during his two terms in office, Ike answered: "The worst mistake I made was in not working harder to elect the man I thought should be my successor."

. . .

Iranian embassies around the world firmly denied the press reports that Queen Farah, 24, was expecting a second child--until someone thought to check with the lady herself. "Yes," said the young Queen, "some time in March." Two years ago, when Farah presented the Shah with his first male heir in three marriages, he cut income taxes by 20%, and his subjects went wild with joy. But with Iran's Peacock Throne already promised to the tiny crown prince, Teheran took the news of a second blessed event in stride. The Queen says she hopes for a girl this time and wants three children all told.

. . .

Down to the bowling alleys in his London constituency of Streathan to meet the mums and local blokes went Tory Stalwart Duncan Sandys, 54, once the husband of Winston Churchill's daughter Diana, but now showing off his French-born bride of three months, Marie-Claire, 33. His silk-sheathed wife knocked down eight at a blow. Then she looked on with pride as Prime Minister Macmillan's Commonwealth Secretary doffed his coat and on his very first roll bowled a tenpin strike.

. . .

The passing French photographer did a double take. There, dressed in checkered sport coat and dark slacks, and looking unfamiliar out of his Air Force blue, sat NATO's retiring Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Lauris Norstad, 55, taking his ease at a small cafe in tiny Marnes-la-Coquette near his French headquarters for twelve years. The youthful-looking general, who is quitting as of Nov. 1 due partly to a heart condition, has been a military nomad so long that he has no home of his own. He has not decided what to do--after the first rush of fishing and golf--or even where to live.

. . .

The new boy, back home at the palace, awaits his official report card from his first term at his father's old school in Scotland, spartan Gordonstoun, where cold showers and sprints before breakfast are the rule. His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, 13, "was near the top in a class of 28," said Headmaster F.R.G. Chew. "Good average is the phrase--and he has settled in jolly well." The headmaster cleared up another point: the other kids call him Charles.

. . .

The first flyer to break the sound barrier in level flight, back in 1947 in the old Bell X-1, Air Force Colonel Charles ("Chuck") Yeager, 39, assumed command of a new U.S.A.F. school to teach latter-day rocket jockeys "everything they need to know about being astronauts." As first boss of the Aerospace Research Pilot School at California's Edwards Air Force Base, Yeager expects to help outdate himself: "By next year we'll be running 32 students through in a single class."

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