They’ll Soon Make Marriage the State of Their Union

In sickness and in health, until Election Day do they part, should read the wedding vows of Maine Rep. Olympia J. Snowe and Gov. John R. McKernan Jr., who credit politics with cementing their decade-long courtship. The two Republicans will marry Friday at the Greek Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity in Lewiston and will then divide their time between Washington and the executive mansion in Augusta. “What holds our relationship together is the fact that we love politics,” said Snowe, now in her sixth term in Congress. “For some, that becomes a dividing factor, but in our case that obviously hasn’t been the situation.” Says McKernan, a former two-term congressman who was elected governor in 1986: “We understand the pressures that are on each other.” The romance blossomed while the two were in Washington, serving as Maine’s delegation in the House. Their private joke on their trips home: “Your district or mine?” Their honeymoon will be a weekend in New York, as McKernan must be in Washington next week for a meeting of the nation’s governors.

--His culinary tastes are suspicious (he prefers green eggs) and his villain (the Grinch) is as nasty a character as you’d ever hope to meet in a Brothers Grimm tale. But one can’t dispute the influence of the ubiquitous Dr. Seuss on children worldwide, says Ruth K. MacDonald, who has become an expert on the literature of Theodor Seuss Geisel. While her colleagues painstakingly pick apart Shakespeare and Chaucer, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, MacDonald, head of the English and philosophy department at Purdue University-Calumet in Indiana, pores over “The Cat in the Hat” and “Horton Hears a Who.” MacDonald lauds the playfulness of Geisel’s language, and notes that his books’ themes let children be children. “He has loud and rowdy stories. You don’t get rewarded for being good but for being outrageous,” she says.

--Speaking of storybook endings, Popeye, the pugilist who first weighed anchor as a minor character in a now-forgotten comic strip, is still going strong at 60. Popeye, who appears in 250 newspapers worldwide and speaks 25 languages, first appeared in 1929 in the “Thimble Theater” comic strip--featuring Olive Oyl and her family--when two of the characters were going on a boat trip and needed a sailor, said Carl Langrock of King Features, which syndicates the comic strip. “He was written in and out several times during 1929,” Langrock said. “But people responded so strongly to his character, because Popeye is really Everyman fighting back against bullies and tyranny.”