Scorecard

FRIENDSHIP

You can now go into any one of 3,000 supermarkets around the country and order a photograph showing you and your favorite baseball player together, the whole thing autographed by the ballplayer "To My Pal." You can, that is, if your favorite player is one of 209 signed up last winter by Frank Scott, who has made a career of managing the affairs of athletes. For this memento, your pal charges you a friendly dollar.

A portable background, simulating a ballplayer's clubhouse cubicle, was hauled around to spring training camps and the chosen players were photographed against it in such a way that space was left at the right for the overprinting of your picture, when you send it in with that dollar. What you get back is an 8-by-10 glossy print clearly proving that you and Sandy Koufax, say, or Marv Throneberry, even, are buddies.

QUAIL COUNTRY DANGER

On the hunting plantations of northern Florida and southern Georgia there are kennels that cost as much as $60,000 each and bird dogs that, in the aggregate, are worth more than $ 1 million. Now the dogs are endangered by an epidemic of rabies among raccoons. A rabid raccoon loses all fear of dogs—and, for that matter, of humans. The stricken raccoon becomes playful, almost docile, then bites without warning.

Rabies had raged among foxes throughout the area since World War II, but just as health department officials were congratulating themselves on victory over this menace the raccoon outbreak occurred. Three years ago 22 cases of rabid raccoons were reported in Florida. Next year there were 44 and in 1962, with a much wider geographical spread, there were 31. This year, in the midst of Georgia quail-hunting territory, where the most valuable dogs are kept, five cases have occurred.

It is quite a simple matter to inoculate all dogs and cats in the affected area but, the health department officials point out, one cannot inoculate every raccoon. Until the ways of nature straighten matters out, one would be wise not to pet friendly raccoons.

HOLD 'ER, NEWT!

In some suburban areas of the Southwest, where Easterners have moved into romantic retirement on "full-acre ranches" and wouldn't be caught dead in anything but a ten-gallon hat and pointy-toed boots, it is as socially important to own a saddle horse as a power mower or backyard barbecue equipment. Around suburban Albuquerque, for instance, fancy appaloosas, majestic Arabians and pretty palominos are common.

So, when officials of the New Mexico Horse Association were planning a benefit show, they decided, with a certain logic, that handsome horses alone just would not be enough to draw an audience for their parade. They invited an antique automobile club to participate, and 10 members of the Veteran Motor Car Club of America agreed to drive their horseless carriages at the show.