Filed for probate in Virginia City, Nev., the will of Author Lucius Beebe left the bulk of his $2,000,000 estate to Old Friend Charles Clegg, with whom he shared ownership of mansions in Virginia City and Hillsborough, Calif. But, true to his fashion, Beebe also set aside $15,000 in trust for a favorite companion: T-Bone Towser II, his five-year-old St. Bernard. The funds may come in handy for Towser, who picked up some pretty fancy habits from his master. He pads around the mansions wearing a brandy and a creme de menthe keg (in case anyone wants to stir up a stinger), and, explained Clegg, "he does love pate de foie gras and caviar. He drools terribly if you serve either one."

They said goodbye to the grand old lady of 39th Street with a gala wake. The farewell performance at Manhattan's old Metropolitan Opera House (1883-1966) drew 3,900 guests and three generations of conductors to reminisce through hits and bits from 25 operas. The hello to the new house had actually started with a bang a few days earlier. KER-BLAM! went the sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun fired for a sound test. "O say! can you see . . ." roared the 3,200 New York City schoolchildren in the Met's new, $45,700,000 house in Manhattan's Lincoln Center. General Manager Rudolf Bing, 64, cocked an expert ear at all the noise and reported: "We're in great shape." Then the kids settled down for a performance of Puccini's La Fanciulla del West, the first show in the new quarters, which open officially in September.

The first drive sailed into a water hazard. The sportsman then proceeded to tee up a new ball, whack it onto the green, and three-putt the par-three hole. Next he shot a seven in a par-four situation and a six on another par-four hole, winding up with a very inefficient seven-over-par. Too bad for General Francisco Franco, 73, who commands quite a few things in Spain, but not the golf courses. As he left the new links at Sotogrande near Gibraltar, Franco asserted himself. The two-hole course on his estate outside Madrid obviously wasn't rough enough, so he sent word to his gardener to find out how the Sotogrande club has come up with such difficult fairways and greens.

He had to settle for a mere polo pony, but that didn't seem to trouble John-John Kennedy, 5. He had a grand time taking his first all-by-himself ride across the pampas on the Cordoba, Argentina, ranch of Miguel Angel Carcano, who is an old friend of Grandpa Joe Kennedy's. Jack Kennedy himself had come to Cordoba 25 years before, and now Jackie was saying: "I want my children to learn to love Latin America as their father did. This seemed to me a good beginning." Indeed it was. Flying back to Manhattan after the nine-day vacation, Caroline and John-John told Mom: "We'd like to go there every week."

She's never posed in the nude. The gossip on her is no more exciting than what they write about the Queen Mother. She has made only three films, as yet unreleased--things called Swinging Summer, Fantastic Journey and One Million B.C. Nonetheless Actress Raquel Welch, 23, a San Diego lass making the London scene, is upstaging every sexpot in Europe, being treated to covers on picture magazines and about as much Fleet Street play as Meg would get if she left Lord Snowdon. It's all quite unaccountable, although Raquel herself explains it this way: "I'm told it is due to my vitality and sensuality." Maybe so.

Before the big home-town parade through the crowded streets of Wapakoneta, Ohio, somebody asked the local hero, Astronaut Neil Armstrong, 35, just how nervous he really was when Gemini 8 began its wild yawing and rolling last month during the Agena rendezvous. Replied Armstrong, with rueful pertinence: "It wasn't any worse than some of the scares I've had driving an automobile."

REMEMBER US? TO KNOW YOU WOULD BE TO LOVE YOU! read the placards as the crowd of students milled around at the Tompkins County Airport in Ithaca, N.Y. "Well," said Cornell President James Perkins, 54, "I love you too." He had just returned from a professional conference in Italy, and the students were fuming more than usual that the president spends too much of his time on such extracurricular responsibilities and not enough on running his own school. The kids handed him a petition asking what he planned to do about off-campus housing shortages and why the grades were so low last term. Perkins smiled: "This is a wonderful welcome."

April being the cruelest month, Actor Hal Holbrook, 41, rummaged through the collected wit of Samuel Clemens and inserted an apt crack into his one-man virtuoso performance, Mark Twain Tonight!, at Manhattan's Longacre Theater. "What's the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector?" mused Holbrook-Twain. "The taxidermist takes only your skin."

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