It May Be a Muddy Job but He Doesn’t Feel Below Par

A caddy who makes a living off golfers whose aim is bad says he has no plans to retire from his part-time job of hunting for golf balls with his bare feet in mucky fairway ponds. “I love it,” said Grover Stokes, 68, adding that he likes the flexible hours and independence that the job offers. “When I feel tired, I sit down.” Stokes, who traps muskrats in the winter, has been hunting golf balls at the bottom of golf course ponds around Pleasantville, N.J., for 40 years. He said he’ll keep his job “till the Lord calls me. I’ll do it as long as I’m able.” Seven years ago, his doctor said arthritis would eventually confine him to a wheelchair. “I’ve got the wheelchair in storage, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s where it can stay,” he said. “I enjoy what I’m doing.” At the Atlantic City Country Club in Northfield, one of the exclusive courses that Stokes considers his territory, well-dressed golfers walk past the caddy as he methodically plods through the mud in his search for lost balls. “Anybody who can afford to play golf in a club like this can afford to lose one every once in a while,” said philosopher Stokes. “You’d be surprised how many people like to donate.”

--Peter Sellers’ widow, Lynne Frederick, won an extra $475,000 from the makers of a “Pink Panther” film that she described as an insult to her husband’s memory. Last month in London, Judge Sir John S. Hobhouse awarded Frederick $1 million in damages in a breach of contract action against United Artists for the film, “Trail of the Pink Panther.” It was released in 1982, two years after Sellers died, and was crafted from discarded clips from the five previous Pink Panther movies in which Sellers played the bungling French detective Inspector Clouseau.

--If you ever forget your Social Security number--or worse, your name--take a look at your dentures, you might find them engraved there. The New York Senate gave final legislative approval in Albany to a bill requiring dentists to put identifying information on dentures, bridgework and other dental prostheses, unless the patient objects. “We’ve had complaints from institutions (nursing homes) that dentures are missing or getting mixed up, and it costs money to make more dentures,” said the chief sponsor of the bill, Assemblywoman Gerdi Lipschutz. Marking dental prostheses would assist authorities in identifying disaster victims as well, she added. The measure now goes to Gov. Mario M. Cuomo.