People: Jan. 26, 1968

• Share

As rector of Edinburgh University, Author-Iconoclast Malcolm Muggeridge, 64, is supposed to act as intermediary between students and administration. Last week, in his annual address from the pulpit of St. Giles's Cathedral, the High Kirk of Edinburgh, the Mugger reaffirmed his sympathies with the rebellious ways of youth, "up to and including blowing up this magnificent edifice." The point at which he lost touch, however, was the demand that birth-control pills be handed out at the university's medical dispensary. That sort of request, said Muggeridge, "raised in me not so much disapproval as contempt," and he resigned his post forthwith. "How sad, how macabre and funny it is," said Muggeridge, "that all they put forward should be a demand for pot and pills, the resort of any old slobbering debauchee anywhere."

A crisis loomed as workmen at New Hampshire's Loon Mountain ski area found what they thought was steam escaping from the side of the mountain. They reported the phenomenon to the resort's general manager, Sherman Adams, 69, onetime assistant to President Dwight Eisenhower and an old hand at dealing with volcanic pressures. Adams investigated and found a hibernating bear in a cave. "I'll flush him out in the spring," said Sherm.

Evgeny Evtushenlco, 34, is dropping salt in the samovar again with yet another batch of soul-scraping poems published in the Russian journal Znamya. The poems derive from his six-week tour of the U.S. in 1966, and one in particular—Monologue of a Blue Fox on an Alaskan Animal Farm—seems an especially bold statement of the rebel's own schizoid loyalties. The fox shrills for freedom from its cage, where it is held because of the value of its fur. Then it discovers that the door to its pen has been left open, only to make a further horrible discovery:

He who is conceived in a cage yearns

for the cage.

With horror I understood that I love That cage where they hide me behind a fence,

And that animal farm, my native land.

New York City's Madison Square Garden has seen them all in its day, from roller-derby promoters to evangelists to the top-hatted cuties of the horse-show set. Now comes India's Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, sixtyish, guru to the Beatles and other show-biz folk.

The Yogi—who bills himself as "His Holiness"—opened his New York pitch with a press conference, at which devotional attention was paid to the $3 price of admission to the Garden. What if a spiritual devotee has no scratch? "I'm quite sure," meditated the Yogi, "that in New York, $3 will not be beyond the reach of any man."