It Bags Hunters Like Clockwork

--Timex stood her timely watch in the woods, near a roadway, bravely taking her shelling. Hunters’ shotgun and rifle blasts in Macon County, Tenn., failed to knock her down. But as those hunters soon found out, Timex is a stuffed deer authorities are using across the state to curb illegal roadside hunting, which officials say endangers residents and livestock. “Timex works like a dream,” said Darren Rider, wildlife officer in the county. “People just drive right up and pop shots off at her again and again. You’d think they’d wonder after a shot or two why she isn’t falling down, but they keep shooting. You’ve got to laugh at these people sometimes.” Already, 40 hunters in the state have been convicted on charges of shooting at the decoys--bucks, fawns and does--from a public road.

--Billy Frank dreamed of one day leaving his father’s dairy farm and becoming a professional baseball player. His coach, Clinton Eudy, once said that he had “a predominant measure of saint” in “a mixture of saint and devil.” Sixteen-year-old Billy Frank, as he was known to family and friends, instead came forward for Christ in 1934, after listening to itinerant preacher Mordecai Ham at a sermon in Charlotte, N.C. In time, the nickname disappeared, and Billy Graham, the crusading evangelist, would rise to national prominence after a Bible-thumping sermon in Los Angeles in 1949. Well, Graham, 68, traveled to his land of dreams, Charlotte, for his 50th high school reunion Sunday, and one classmate remembers something other than baseball and religion about him. “I think when he’d see a beautiful girl he was in love right then, if you could call it that,” said Winston Covington, a 1936 graduate of Sharon High School. “We double-dated a whole lot, and he really did like to do a little smooching. Maybe his wife wouldn’t appreciate that, but I know he did. He liked pretty girls, pretty cars and pretty clothes.” In reply, Graham said: “I had my share of romantic interests, but I never touched a girl in the wrong way.”

--Edward L. Bernays has helped sell everything from soap to bacon, but he once refused an offer by Adolf Hitler to help propagate Nazism. Bernays, called the father of modern public relations, celebrated his 95th birthday in Cambridge, Mass. The nephew of Sigmund Freud still works 12-hour days and is not pleased with today’s PR practitioners. “I’m very sad about public relations,” he said. “It seems anyone can use the term to try to make money; any nitwit or crook or anti-social person can use the name.” He urges the teaching of “sound, democratic action” to help people recognize the demagogues among us.