CARL ALBERT AND DR. JOSEPH P. ALLEN ELECTED TO HALL OF OUTSTANDING AMERICANS. 
 Two former wrestlers whose professional careers were "out of this world" have been elected to the Hall of Outstanding Americans of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. 
 Members of the Class of '98 are former Speaker of the House Carl Albert, one of the most powerful and most respected figures in the history of the U. S.  Congress, and astronaut/scientist Dr. Joseph P. Allen, who worked in Mission Control for the Apollo 15 and 17 flights and has been in space twice himself on space shuttle missions in the early 1980s. 
 Albert and Allen will be inducted at the 22nd Honors Banquet June 6 in Stillwater, as will pro football Hall of Famer and broadcast journalist Dan Dierdorf, who was elected last year but missed the ceremonies because of illness. 
 As Speaker of the House, Albert led the Congress during one of the most tumultous times in American history. Twice he was a heartbeat away from the Presidency, from October to December, 1973, after the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew, and from August to December, 1974, after the resignation of President Richard Nixon and the elevation of Vice President Gerald Ford. 
 The Speaker of the House is second in line of succession to the Presidency, and in both of these cases one of the positions above him was vacant for several months, so he became heir apparent, first to Nixon, then to Ford. 
 The "Little Giant from Little Dixie" represented the third Congressional district of Oklahoma for 30 years, beginning with the 80th Congress in 1947. He was House majority whip, House majority leader, then was elected Speaker of the House in 1971. He held numerous posts on important committees and both as majority leader and as Speaker he supervised the legislative process for many important laws, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Voting Rights Act of 1956 and the War Powers Act of 1973. 
 Upon leaving Congress in 1976, Albert returned to the family farm in Bug Tussle, Okla., although he maintained an office in nearby McAlester. In 1979, on the 100th anniversary of Will Rogers' birth, he received the first Will Rogers award as the person who best exemplified the character of the great humorist. Many other awards followed and his autobiography, Little Giant, published in 1990, was the Oklahoma Book of the Year. 
 Born in 1908, Albert attended rural school in Bug Tussle and high school in McAlester, where he won the Midwest oratorical contest on the Constitution. The prize was a trip to Europe, with a stop in Washington to meet President Coolidge. 
 He entered the University of Oklahoma in 1927, where he was a member of the wrestling team and the debate team. Upon graduation in 1931, he began studies at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, obtaining a degree in law in 1933 and another in civil law in 1934. 
 Albert joined the U. S. Army as a private in 1941 and was discharged in 1946 as a lieutenant colonel, after serving in the Pacific Theater. He practiced law before his election to Congress in 1946. 
 Dr. Allen earned his Bachelor's degree in math/physics from DePauw University and earned a Master's and a Ph.D. in physics at Yale. At present, he is chairman of Veridian (formerly Calspan SRL) Corporation. Previously, he was president and chief executive officer of Space Industries International, until it merged with Calspan in 1985. 
 He won a Fulbright Scholarship to Germany in 1959-60 and since has amassed a substantial number of awards for flying, planning space operations and scientific achievement. 
 He was a research associate in the Nuclear Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington before his selection as an astronaut in 1967. He was a staff physicist at the Nuclear Structure Laboratory at Yale and served as a guest research associate at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. He has logged more than 3,000 hours flying time in jet aircraft. 
 After serving on the astronaut support crew for Apollo 15 and 17, he boarded the first fully operational shuttle flight in November, 1982, as a mission specialist. The four-man crew launched the first two commercial communications satellites. 
 He returned to space in 1984 as a mission specialist on the second flight of the Discovery shuttle. With the completion of this flight, which both launched and recovered satellites, Dr. Allen had logged a total of 314 hours in space.