Once-Private Beach Serving as a Port of Last Resort

Things just seem to like to park on socialite Mollie Wilmot’s private strip of beach in Florida. First, a Venezuelan freighter was aground there for three months and attracted hordes of media types and sightseers. Then her shoreline became the final resting place for another uninvited seagoing guest--a whale. The 2,000-pound whale beached itself and died on Wilmot’s posh estate in Palm Beach (next to the estate of Rose Kennedy, mother of President John F. Kennedy), but the Florida Marine Patrol promptly towed the dead animal away for an autopsy at Sea World in Orlando. On Thanksgiving weekend, 1984, Wilmot, heiress to a department store fortune, was chagrined to find the freighter Mercedes 1 next to her swimming pool, where it had come to rest after crashing through a sea wall in a storm. The rusting vessel was an eyesore for three months, until salvage crews towed it away and sank it for an artificial reef.

--A motorcyclist who was knocked to the pavement in a hit-and-run accident looked up through glazed eyes to see that the Lone Ranger had come to the rescue. “I didn’t know what to think,” said Robert Pat Humphries, 22, who suffered injuries to both legs. “I was still kind of out of it at the time. But there he was, in his mask and everything.” Clayton Moore, 73, who starred in the long-running television series that is still in syndication, and his wife, Connie, were on their way to a Spartanburg, S.C., motel after Moore had appeared in a fire safety program for children. “He got out and asked me how I was doing and tried to make me comfortable,” said Humphries, a volunteer firefighter. Moore, still dressed in his trademark mask and Western garb, also directed traffic around the scene and aided police and paramedics.

--Rock star Bob Geldof, whose Band Aid charity has raised more than $100 million for African famine relief, received a church blessing of his secret marriage to television pop show hostess Paula Yates last June, British television reported. Tight security ringed the 12th-Century priory and an adjacent parish church in Kent, England, where 170 show business celebrities, including rock stars Paul McCartney and David Bowie, were invited to the private ceremony, the report said. Geldof and Yates, who have lived together eight years and have a 3-year-old daughter, reportedly were married in Las Vegas in June.