In 1975, as a diversion from his law studies at Boston University, David Levin hopped aboard a hot-air balloon and took a little ride. "It was fun, but I had no great aspirations as a balloonist," he told The Christian Science Monitor in 1985.That would change. In the 10 years after stepping into a balloon basket for the first time, he became the first balloonist to soar over Pikes Peak in Colorado, reaching a height of more than 14,000 feet, and won the 1985 World Hot Air Balloon Championship in Battle Creek, Michigan. The best was yet to come. In 1992, by winning the World Gas Balloon Championship in Obertraun, Austria, he became the only pilot to capture world championships in hot-air and gas balloons. Later that year, he completed ballooning's triple crown when he won the Gordon Bennett Cup in Stuttgart, Germany, a distance event in which he flew a little more than 1,550 kilometres in 44½ hours.
Pat Stewart, who has died aged 83, was a former Tiller Girl who, in later life, was revealed to be the pretty blonde in a polka dot dress in a famous and much-reproduced photograph taken in Blackpool in 1951. The photographer, Bert Hardy, had initially approached members of the public to pose for the Picture Post shoot, but turned to two Tiller Girls, the 17-year-old Pat and her friend Wendy Clarke, who were treading the boards on Blackpool's North Pier. "Bert turned up one Friday night to see the show and afterwards asked us to meet him on the beach the following day," she recalled. "We didn't get paid but it was my first show and to me it was publicity. My mother bought me that frock for about £3 to go away in." The picture, which captures the moment when Pat's skirt is caught by a blustery sea breeze as the two girls perch on the railings of the promenade, was at first deemed too risqué to publish, but after it appeared in Picture Post "Blackpool Belles" was reproduced on countless postcards and in newspapers and magazines, becoming one of the most memorable images of the postwar era.
![The Picture Post Album featuring a famous photo of Pat Stewart in her Polka dot dress at Blackpool by Bert Hardy.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170719115216im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/8/h/5/m/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gw8gdb.png/1495158887029.jpg)
Oleg Vidov, who has died aged 73, was a blond, blue-eyed Russian matinée idol described in People magazine as "the Soviet Robert Redford" when he defected to the United States in 1985. From the age of 16 when he got his first bit part – riding a motorcycle in a film about juvenile delinquents – Vidov made more than 30 films in Russia, often playing the romantic leads in adventure films. He enjoyed all the privileges accorded to the Soviet elite and had married a former ballet dancer who was friendly with a daughter of the Soviet president, Leonid Brezhnev.