Honeymooners Have Just the Ticket for a Happy Life

--The honeymoon was interrupted for Britt and Pam Spangler, but never mind--$3.25 million made it worthwhile. The former high school sweethearts, who were married Saturday at the United Methodist Church in Carlinville, Ill., and were honeymooning nearby, received an Illinois Lottery ticket as part of a wedding present from Pam’s aunt and uncle, Denise and Charles Cadmus. “Britt laid it on the coffee table,” Spangler’s mother, Judy, recalled, “and Pam’s mother, Wilma Rhodes, said she’d take it and check it against the numbers in the paper. She did, and we had to call them home from the motel to tell them the news.” The young newlyweds, both 20, do not have any special plans for the money yet, Judy Spangler said, but they did decide to buy a new car. The ticket will pay the couple $162,500 annually for the next 20 years.

--Prince Philip, who turned 65, criticized people who want the British royal family to turn itself into something akin to a television soap opera. “People only want to know about the splashy things, or the scandalous things. They’re not interested in anything else,” said Queen Elizabeth’s husband of 38 years in an interview with Woman’s Own magazine. “What you want is a ‘Dynasty’ production where everybody can see what we do privately,” said the prince. And now that he is 65, Philip, who has paid his social security contributions since leaving the Navy just after World War II, is entitled to a $57-a-week old-age pension. He has turned it down.

--Ron Reagan, the President’s son, says his dad isn’t naturally equipped to be a perfect father but makes up for it by being kind, understanding and a good friend. President Reagan’s father suffered from alcoholism and was often absent, providing no role model for fathering, the younger Reagan says in Fathers, a new Washington-based magazine beginning publication this month. “So he’s (President Reagan) not the most naturally equipped to be everybody’s idea of a perfect father. He makes up for it by being a genuinely kind and nice person,” Ron Reagan says in an interview in the magazine. But in addition to being warm and kind, the senior Reagan is difficult to get to know well, young Reagan says. “I know him as well as anybody, outside my mother.” Reagan, at 28 the youngest of the President’s four children, reports that his father can be a “soft touch” at times and rarely loses his temper. “He’s got a real long, long fuse. I’ve rarely seen him very mad,” Ron Reagan says.