An Unblemished Career--Except for the Soreheads

--John C. Stennis, 87, Senate president pro tem and third in line for the presidency, received a fond farewell from 250 Mississippians who gathered in the Senate Caucus Room. Stennis, after 41 years in the Senate, is retiring to De Kalb, his hometown, where, his staff members said, he will spend much of his time persuading young people to enter public service. “John Stennis has served longer and better than any man in the history of this country,” Rep. Jamie L. Whitten (D-Miss.) told the gathering. “There’s never been a blemish on his record, and that is very unusual in Washington, D.C.,” said Rep. G. V. (Sonny) Montgomery, also of Mississippi. And Stennis closed the evening by reading a letter he said he had received after his first election to the Senate in 1947. The letter, from a county constable, said: “I’m sorry you did not get all of the votes in my home county. You did get them all except for a few old soreheads and some nutty ones.” Stennis observed: “Can you sum up an expression of loyalty any better than that?”

--A young biomedical engineer, Norman Roth, in the late 1950s worked with a St. Paul, Minn., heart surgeon at St. Joseph’s Hospital to develop the first heart pacemaker. And last week, Roth returned to the same hospital suffering from second-degree heart block, a potentially fatal disruption of the heart’s electrical system. Cardiologists implanted into his chest the latest model of pacemaker, which stimulates both of the heart’s pumping chambers. “It was just the sort of thing that all the work we did a good number of years ago was all about,” Roth, 57, said in his room at the hospital. “All of a sudden, you’re on the other side of the fence.”

--Who are the most romantic people of 1988? According to a list released by Korbel Champagne, the top winners are: Jessica Rabbit, the animated femme fatale from Disney’s “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” because she “risks all to help her man”; the Ronald Reagans, who “helped set the tone for the return of romance in America during the ‘80s,” and Roseanne Barr and John Goodman, stars of the TV series “Roseanne,” for reminding viewers “that beauty really is in the eye of the beholder and that love and romance can flourish even in non-urban, non-yuppie and non-upscale settings.”