Turning up at ground-turning ceremonies for a new, $50,000 library in the Manhattan exurb of South Salem, N.Y. (pop. 500) was ex-Vice President, ex-Progressive Party Presidential Candidate and now Gentleman Farmer Henry A. Wallace, 73, a well satisfied borrower from the old library. While furrowing away on his 115-acre farm (chickens, gladioli, hybrid corn) nearby, Wallace had asked the little, 9,500-book library to find him a rare edition of a 400-page treatise published in 1766 called Histoire Naturelle du Fraisier (Natural History of the Strawberry Plant). Sure enough, after shelling out $500 for a surety bond, the library got it from the New York Botanical Gardens. Wallace hopes to incorporate some of the book's sketches into a last-word tome he himself is writing on the history of the plant. "It will be a nice colorplate job," he said, "that will be sure to lose money."

Ill lay: former Ambassador to Russia Llewellyn E. Thompson, 58, stricken with a kidney-stone attack while golfing on the Air Force Academy course near Colorado Springs; and former President Herbert Hoover, 88, still recuperating in a Manhattan hospital after the removal two weeks ago of a tumor in his upper colon that doctors announced last week was cancerous, but of a type that seldom recurs or spreads.

Her summer circuit of the golf links a double-eagle success. National Women's Amateur Golf Champion JoAnne Gunderson, 23, was resting up in Providence, R.I., calmly planning to open a new nursery school. Behind her, the 19th hole crowd was still buzzing over the bold gamble that clinched her championship.

When a tee shot sank in a sand trap during the final round at Rochester, N.Y., fortnight ago, the bold blonde pulled a real surprise out of her bag. As a stunned gallery watched, and a SPORTS ILLUSTRATED photographer snapped away, JoAnne blasted her way out of the trap with--for heaven's sake--a No. 5 wood, instead of the normal wedge. The ball plunked down just a few feet from the edge of the green, and she made her par 4, went on to win the tournament. "I always go for broke," said JoAnne. "It's a shot most women golfers don't know how to play, but it's a shot all golfers should learn--all the men use it."

Undone at having grounded one of the highest flyers in the international set, German Playboy Gunter Sachs, 29, could not keep from babbling the news to everyone he knew. Iran's former Queen Soraya, 30, had consented to be his. But as news of the betrothal spread, the Iranian earthquakes struck. The ex-queen, feeling she "could make no step in her private life when thousands of people in her homeland had fallen victims to such a horrible catastrophe," postponed it all.

"A lot of people call us little old ladies in witches' hats," said Mrs. Fred J. Tooze, 60, president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, "but we've stuck to our guns for years." Mrs. Tooze then predicted that Prohibition would make a comeback in ten years or so, and confidently informed 565 fellow teetotalers at the group's annual convention in 86-proof Miami that "the liquor industry is worried about us." "She has the most fantastic figure since Venus de Milo -- absolutely perfect," recalled one disarmed Hollywood gent who retains fond memories of French Actress Agnes Laurent, 26, although she once bopped him. Not so for Cinema Scion Arthur Loew Jr., 35, who was rushed to the emergency room of the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital to have nine stitches taken in his profile after the quick-firing actress slung a snifter of brandy at him during a similar tantrum at a Hollywood restaurant "because Arthur kept needling me." After filing a criminal assault report, which he later declined to press, Loew maintained that Miss Laurent's charms escaped him. "She has reddish hair," he said, "and I don't remember the color of her eyes. I'd like to forget her com pletely." "If you ask me if I have had a happy life, I must say no. I have had an extremely unhappy life." Withal, the unkind years have merely honed the battle-ax wit of England's oddball poetess Dame Edith Sitwell, who, upon turning 75, looked ahead to her official birthday celebration at London's Festival Hall next month. There, she insists, she will appear baroquely bedecked in a red velvet gown, black-and-gold turban and massive gold necklace. She then manned the ramparts to defend her medieval eccentricities. "I think it is a mistake to dress like a mouse," she said. "Except when it comes to bravery, we are a nation of mice. We dress and behave with timid circumspection. Good taste is the worst vice ever invented." The name is the same, and "obviously it is going to help," said Attorney General Robert Kennedy, 36, of brother Teddy's run for a Massachusetts senate nomination. But lest his 30-year-old little brother count too much on family connections, Bobby managed to raise the homely political platitude to new frontiers of obvious ness: "If he doesn't have the stuff him self, if he won't go out and work, if he doesn't know the issues, if he doesn't know what he's talking about, if he makes a fool of himself, if he can't answer questions, if he gets in a debate and can't stand up -- then he's going to lose."

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