GOP’s Landon Finds Reaching 100 a Walk in the Park

Alfred M. Landon carried only Maine and Vermont when he ran against Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 presidential election. But if there were a ballot for favorite son in Kansas today, Alf Landon would win by a landslide. The GOP’s elder statesman, who served as Kansas’ governor from 1933 to 1937, celebrates his 100th birthday Wednesday and his doctors report he is surprisingly fit. “I’ve felt better,” he said in a recent interview, “but I can’t complain.” He still exercises, walking a quarter of a mile each day in front of his gracious old home in Topeka with the help of a cane and a housekeeper. “Sometimes he tries to sneak in a second walk,” reports his wife, Theo Landon, who is 11 years younger and would accompany him herself except that she is nursing a bad hip. Landon’s daughter, Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.), gave him an amplifier so he can follow the TV newscasts--and St. Louis Cardinals baseball games--but he has difficulty satisfying his insatiable curiosity. “Ordinarily I would have an opinion on everything,” he said, “but I can’t get enough information anymore.” A sample opinion: Who were the great Americans of the 20th Century? “Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Woodrow Wilson might have been if he had been willing to make some concessions. So might have John F. Kennedy if he had lived. I think you would also have to include John L. Lewis and Samuel Gompers.”

--Volunteers and townspeople began pouring concrete foundations in Saragosa, Tex., on Saturday morning and by evening they were standing on the rooftops of 21 new homes. Since the tornado that killed 30 townspeople and destroyed more than 100 dwellings in May, survivors have lived in mobile homes supplied by the government or with friends or relatives in nearby communities. “We had 560 volunteers at breakfast, and they got after it,” said John LaNoue, associate director of the Texas Baptist Men, the group coordinating the rebuilding. He said the homes would be almost complete by the end of the weekend. “So far we’ve got a beige, a yellow, a blue and a green (house),” he said. “It looks like no two of the houses are going to be the same color.”

--”Miami Vice” star Don Johnson found another way to spend the Labor Day weekend, behind the wheel of a 43-foot powerboat on a thousand-mile race up the Mississippi River. His craft roared off with 12 others from New Orleans and planned to finish at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Johnson said experts taught him to drive powerboats at high speed for the popular weekly series, in which he has piloted a 38-foot craft in numerous chase scenes.