The 65 girls in the graduating class of the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pa., listened with solemn commencement faces as Dwight Eisenhower, 76, spoke to them of the glories of education and the unwisdom of picking a political leader "by his beauty or by his shock of hair." All of a sudden the girls began giggling and looking nervously at their knee-length skirts. The former President, basing his remarks on the fact that "I have been looking at good-looking girls since I was six," sounded off with some unexpected and decidedly unpolitical opinions about ladies' fashions. "Ankles are nearly always neat and good-looking," said Ike, whose 18-year-old granddaughter Anne was among the graduates, "but knees are always knobby." Then he calmed the miniskirt generation by adding with a smile: "I know you don't agree with me. Neither do the women in my family."

As Eisenhower was pausing to study the knee, Britain's dashing Prince Philip, 46, was scouting the higher ground. On a visit to the fashion-design department at Salford Technical College, Lancashire, the duke's eye fastened disapprovingly upon a miniskirt worn by 18-year-old Lorraine Hillier. "You are not being generous enough," he chided. "Compared with others, you are not showing enough leg." Since her hem was already three inches above the knee, Lorraine could but blush and tee-hee, but later she went solemnly to the heart of the matter: "My boy friend would like them shorter too. He's like the duke. All men are the same."

Wisconsin's Democratic Senator William Proxmire, 51, is a man of such nut-brown energy that he begins the day with assorted situps, nip-ups, bends, lifts, kicks, flutters, isometrics and 300 pushups. Neither these nor his labors in the Senate give him quite the exercise he craves. Last week a startled photographer caught the Senator in sweatshirt and tennis shorts midway through a brisk jog from home to work --a lung-flaying distance of 4.7 paved miles between Cleveland Park and Capitol Hill that Proxmire traces every morning, retraces every night. He covers the route in 35 minutes, beating the bus by 15 minutes, and estimates that he saves "about $1,000 a year by not having an extra car. The regimen agrees with me beautifully," says Proxmire, admitting to only one hardship: "When it gets near zero, my hands get awfully cold."

When it comes to exciting the citizenry, Flag Day usually ranks somewhere between Arbor Day and groundhog day, but Denver managed to come up with a bit of the old whoop and whistle last week. Some 20,000 people lined the streets as Lieut. General Lew Walt, 54, just back from his two-year stint as commanding officer of the Marines in Viet Nam, perched on the rear seat of a 1912 International Autowagon and led a parade of school bands, color guards, flag-waving children and the 70-man Marine Recruit Depot Band. Rousing as it all was, the real kick for Walt was his return visit to Colorado State University at Fort Collins, where the toughest general in the Corps posed beamishly in a football helmet, much like the one he'd worn as an all-conference guard and team captain in 1935.

Stealing 104 bases in the course of a season is certainly an achievement, but is it a religious, charitable, scientific, educational, artistic, literary or civic achievement? None of these, decided the U.S. Tax Court, ruling that cunning Pittsburgh Pirate Infielder Maury Wills cannot claim the federal tax exemption for meritorious prizes on the jeweled, $6,000 S. Rae Hickok belt that he won as Professional Athlete of the Year in 1962.

"Unequaled among the great gifts received by the Museum of Modern Art," exulted Director of Collections Alfred H. Barr Jr. After months of negotiations, the museum landed 100 works by 54 20th century painters and sculptors from the private collection of New York Dealer Sidney Janis, 70, a Buffalo-born former shirt manufacturer who began collecting contemporary art in the late '20s, opened his quick-stepping, publicity-prone Manhattan gallery in 1948. The collection, valued at upwards of $2,000,000, has everything from Picasso and a $50,000 Mondrian, which Janis bought from the artist in the '30s for $70, to sculptures of Janis himself by Pop Dollmaker Marisol and Plaster-Caster George Segal.

Ireland managed no less than the national equivalent of a heat wave, with temperatures soaring to nearly 70DEG as Jacqueline Kennedy, 37, arrived at Shannon Airport with Caroline, 9, and John-John, 6, for a six-week vacation in "this land my husband loved so much." First came an 80-mile ride by chartered bus past waving onlookers in Clare, Limerick and Tipperary, before the Kennedys settled in at Woodstown House, a 40-room Regency mansion on the southeast coast overlooking a huge, secluded beach. To keep the holiday private, there is a roving band of 200 policemen, 30 armed detectives and two tag-along FBI agents. Most Irish newspapers echoed the Irish Independent's warning against "keyhole-peeping and shoreline-prowling." All the same, grumbled the Cork Examiner, noting that many public roads around Woodstown House have been set off limits: "Local holiday makers, too, are entitled to enjoy themselves without hindrance."

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