The dingy Baptist church near the Kremlin, one of the few churches still open in Moscow, was jammed with some 1,500 Russians, most of them of the same generation as the big, intense man who stood in the pulpit. The preacher: touring Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, a high apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. With an interpreter at his side, Mormon Benson spoke with great emotion, poured out his thoughts with eloquent simplicity. Said he: "Be not afraid. Keep his Commandments. Love one another. Love all mankind. Strive for peace, and all will be well. Truth will endure. Time is on the side of truth." Many in the congregation wept, and when Benson finished speaking, his listeners broke out a fluttering sea of white handkerchiefs, sang a farewell hymn to Benson and his entourage: God Be With You Till We Meet Again.
Alone and afoot on Hollywood Boulevard in the small hours, TV's volatile Producer-Actor Desi (I Love Lucy) Arnaz, 42, was collared last month by roving plain-clothes vice squadmen, booked on a "plain drunk" rap. Protesting his sobriety and threatening to call his friend, G-Man J. Edgar Hoover, into the case, Arnaz finally coughed up $21 bail, was driven home by his chauffeur. Last week when the case came up in court, Arnaz did not. Bail forfeited. Case closed.
After 53 years on the concert stage since his childhood debut as a violin virtuoso, Jascha Heifetz, 58, will soon expand his previous teaching activities, be a full professor of music at the University of California at Los Angeles. He will teach pupils who will get no grades, credits or medals for their showings. Why this new vocational tangent? "Violin playing is a perishable art," explained Heifetz. "It must be passed on as a personal skill; otherwise it is lost." Then Heifetz fondly recalled his old violin professor in czarist Russia: "He said that some day I would be good enough to teach."
For the third time since early last year, Actress Sarah Churchill, 44, was hauled in by the law for public drunkenness. This time, in London, she got off with a $5.60 fine, after a constable testified that Sir Winston's daughter "appeared to be trying to hold a sort of political meeting" all by herself in a local snack bar.
Having made out well on the English already at her command, blonde Bride Anne-Marie ("Mia") Rockefeller, Norwegian daughter-in-law of New York's
Governor, decided to put a high gloss on her second tongue. At Manhattan's Columbia University School of General Studies, Mia plunged into an intermediate English course for foreign students, four one-hour classes a week.
From Waltham, Mass, came news that Brandeis University has taken on Eleanor Roosevelt, 75 next week, as a visiting lecturer. Brandeis Trustee Roosevelt will conduct a small seminar about once a month through the current school year, concentrate on the United Nations in a course called Politics 175-L-, International Organization and Law.
Nobel Peace Prizewinning Missionary-Physician Albert Schweitzer, 84, went to Copenhagen to accept a Sonning Prize (the Danish equivalent of a Nobel award and worth about $14,250), plus some $35,625 in other windfall gifts that will be applied to his famed jungle hospital in Gabon, central Africa. That evening, at a state banquet in Copenhagen's Christian-borg Castle, Dr. Schweitzer met another Nobelman, Denmark's aging (74) Atomic Physicist Niels Bohr, for the first time. Seated together, the two talked seriously, reportedly found themselves in complete agreement that nuclear test explosions should be stopped.
Rhode Island's grandest old man. Democratic Senator Theodore Francis Green, rose as usual at 7 a.m., breakfasted on an apple, an orange, wheat flakes, toast, and a glass of milk. Then, in his ancestral mansion in Providence, he turned his attention to all sorts of packages, greeting cards, phone calls. It was his 92nd birthday. Bachelor Green, an infantry officer in the Spanish-American War, was pleasantly bored with his celebrity as the oldest man ever to serve in the U.S. Congress. But he bridled at an interviewer's query as to whether he plans to run for re-election next year. Gazing at his questioner piercingly, Senator Green showed a flash of indignation, gave a tart reply: "If you don't mind my saying so, it is a foolish question."
It was near midnight in the sleeping Bavarian city of Bamberg (pop. 76,800) when some oddball, armed with a bucket of white oil paint and bursting with perverse zeal, got to working on a great carved door of Bamberg's 700-year-old cathedral. In the morning, there for all Bambergers to see, stood a legend in German, sloshed in letters a foot and a half high: "Elvis Presley--My God." Dreamboat Groaner Presley was on U.S. Army duty some 100 miles from the scene of his deification.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.