Show of Hands Is One for Road

--He’s out every day at rush hour, waving at passers-by in the isolation of their cars. “I just enjoy seeing people,” he said, “and if people wave at you, you’ve just got to wave back.” And the people wave, hundreds of them. The regulars honk their horns or shout out their windows. Confused newcomers slowly raise their hands, unsure why a nattily dressed man is standing on the corner with his dog, smiling at them. The waver is John E. Martin, a retired railroad engineer. The dog is Choo-Choo, his faithful, almost-full-blooded collie companion. Martin, who refuses to give his age, has been taking his position at the corner in Memphis, Tenn., every day for three years, rain or shine, hot or cold. He’s there from 7:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. and from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. waving at commuters headed to or from work along a busy thoroughfare connecting midtown residential areas with the suburban office developments of east Memphis. “It just grew larger and larger, and now hundreds of people wave at me. Sometimes it takes two hands to keep up,” Martin said with a smile. “It’s always nice to see him,” said Mary Kimbley, an office worker who uses the route. “It’s not going to make a rotten day great, but it does make the day a bit nicer.”

--Agatha Christie built a better “Mousetrap” and the world has beaten a path to its door. More than 6.25 million people have seen the London production of her mystery play, “The Mousetrap,” which will celebrate its first third of a century Tuesday with a gala before the 13,868th performance. Princess Michael of Kent will address a celebrity-studded audience at the party. Christie thought the play would last about six months when it opened on Nov. 25, 1952, but now producer Sir Peter Saunders, 73, says, “I would like to be there at its last night, but I don’t think I’ll live that long.”

--”Bob Hope: A Half Century of Radio and Television,” an exhibit at the New York Museum of Broadcasting, also will feature Hope live. The comedian will conduct two seminars on comedy on April 29.

--An 80-year-old widow may inspire a lot of folks to clean under their carpets, or at least take a peek underneath. Carpet-layers working at Sarah Dauplaise’s former apartment in Danbury, Conn., discovered $7,000 in U.S. Savings Bonds. Dauplaise’s daughter, Alice Riquier, saw a story about the bonds in the Danbury News-Time and called her mother, who now lives in Benson, Ariz. She has no doubt they were put there by her late husband, Frank. “He was always doing something like that. That was his way,” she said. “We were married for 54 years. He has been dead for seven and he’s still surprising me.”