Reagan Takes the Fall When First Lady’s Out of Step

The concert by pianist Vladimir Horowitz at the White House East Room went off without a hitch, but when President Reagan took the stage, something awful nearly happened. First Lady Nancy Reagan’s chair tumbled into a flower box, and she fell from the stage to the floor after she apparently nudged the chair too close to the edge of the stage while smoothing her skirt. After a loud chorus of groans and ooohs from the gathering, the First Lady stood up and said: “I’m all right.” But it didn’t take long for the President to seize the moment. “Honey,” he said, “I told you to do that only if I didn’t get any applause.”

--When the 821 graduates of the Class of 1947 left the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., who could have foretold the mighty achievements of these one-time plebes? Listed among the special achievers are former President Jimmy Carter; Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; five four-star admirals; two Medal of Honor winners; former CIA director Stansfield Turner; Alabama Republican Sen. Jeremiah Denton; several millionaire business executives; doctors, lawyers and an Arkansas banker with the nickname “Indian Chief.” The much-praised class gathered for its 40th reunion over the weekend under a big striped tent near the academy stadium. It was also Homecoming Day, with a football game between Navy and Dartmouth, and the Middies obligingly bombarded the Ivy Leaguers, 45-0. But to the graduates, it was a day of remembrances of things past. Carter, the classmate who attained the highest office, was not present for the reunion. “We knew him as Jim Carter. He wasn’t Jimmy yet,” said Bob Howe, “class basketball star” and now a La Mesa, Calif., dentist. “He was Mr. Average Joe Midshipman.”

--Doc McConnell, seated in his medicine-show cart, told of the day a seven-foot mountain man offered him a Mason jar of white lightning moonshine. When he refused, the mountain man put a gun to his head. “So, I took me a good old snort of that liquid fire, and my eyes rolled back, and when I finally got conscious I said: ‘Wooo-eee! man, how in the world can you drink that stuff?’ The mountaineer said: ‘I can’t hardly. Now here’s the gun. Make me drink it.’ ” So goes the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tenn., which lured nearly 5,000 people to hear yarn-spinners ranging from ghost-story teller Jackie Torrence of North Carolina to “Roots” author Alex Haley. Started in 1973, the festival is living happily ever after.