679     March 20, 1967 (Taped February 27)
Betsy, Bill, Bess, Henry

Captain Ralph Barnaby from Philadelphia, Jerry Brinkman from Dayton, Ohio, Robert Meuser from Oakland and Fred Hooven from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan: "We just won the first international competition…for making paper airplanes”                 
The 74-year-old Barnaby is a Navy veteran and onetime friend of Orville Wright, and won in the aeronautics division.  Hooven, a consultant for Ford Motors, and Brinkman, a sales manager with Globe Industries, won for duration aloft.  Meuser, a mechanical engineer at Berkley, won for distance.  The event was sponsored by Scientific American magazine as a way to make science more relatable to the layman.   

Kay Abel from Washington, DC is on stage with a broken leg: “My twin sister broke her leg the same way on the same day”                 
Kay and her sister Fay suffered identical broken right fibulas while skiing in Pennsylvania.  Both are secretaries in Washington.  Kay is a congressional secretary and Fay works for vice-president Humphrey’s office.   

Special guest Jim Backus has the panel stare at a focused laser beam and note the movements of the red dots it produces: “The panel doesn’t know it, but they just took an eye test” 
The laser is an experimental device developed by Bausch and Lomb for vision screenings to groups such as school classes.  It’s hoped that eventually, eye doctors will be able to use an advanced version of this device to write an exact prescription.  As anyone who’s had an eye exam in the 21st century knows, optometrists today routinely use lasers for testing.  Backus, a veteran comic actor, is currently appearing in what would arguably become his best-known role, that of millionaire Thurston Howell III, one of the seven castaways on Gilligan’s Island (1964-67).