By E. Graydon Carter

He was a fugitive from the North, and his hard, lean looks, the result of a life in prison that consumed nearly 25 of his 37 years, enabled Jack Henry Abbott to mix in easily with the transient roustabouts who work the Louisiana oilfields. It was the sort of life where a man could, if he wanted to, virtually disappear. Earlier this year, Norman Mailer had led a campaign to secure parole for Abbott, largely on the basis of his writing talent. His letters from prison, collected under the title In the Belly of the Beast, were released to fair critical acclaim. But the ex-convict seemed unable to handle his lionization or his freedom. Two months ago, Abbott got into an argument with a waiter in a New York City restaurant. The two men went outside, and moments later the young waiter was lying on the ground, stabbed to death. Abbott was gone. He fled south to New Orleans, then on to the oilfields along the Gulf of Mexico. Abbott led an aimless life of twelve-hour shifts at $4 an hour and spent hot nights on tired, sheetless mattresses in lonely bunkhouses a hundred miles from nowhere. Last week he was finally run to ground outside Morgan City, La. Abbott offered no resistance and said little until told that Belly had become a literary hit. Said Morgan City Detective Bob Bazet: "When he heard that, he really picked up." "As an entertainer, I'd like to be known just as Melvin Dum-mar--without Howard Hughes," says the former gas-station owner from Cedar City, Utah. Dummar, 37, vaulted out of obscurity after he claimed that in 1967 he befriended a haggard hitchhiker in the Nevada desert, who later turned out to be the eccentric megamillionaire

Hughes. With that same cheery, golden bantam innocence, Dummar has now launched a Nevada nightclub act. Booked into a two-week stand at the Sahara in Reno, he has included two bittersweet Dummar compositions in his act, The Ail-American Dreamer and Thank You Howard.

For the crewmen aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Nassau, it was quite a workout. "You heard a little laughter in the background when some tried it for the first time," said Exercise Leader Arnold Schwarzenegger, 34, who ventured topside to stir up offshore sales of his book, Arnold's Bodybuilding for Men. His professional appraisal: "I saw a few potential Schwarzeneggers in the crowd. In fact, most of them were shipshape."

For the townsfolk of Annapolis, Md., it was a modest way of commemorating a neglected event in the nation's history. The black community raised nearly $1,000 for a simple, 75-lb. bronze plaque that read in part: "Commemorating the arrival in this harbor of Kunta Kinte, immortalized by Alex Haley in Roots, and all others who came to these shores in bondage." Two mornings after last week's installation ceremonies (attended by Haley), someone sheared the six bolts anchoring the plaque and made off with it. Left in its place was a small card with the inscription: "You have just been patronized by the Ku Klux Klan."

During the final years of World War II, Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat in his early 30s, managed to save the lives of some 100,000 Hungarian Jews bound for German death camps. One such survivor was Tom Lantos, a 16-year-old messenger for the Hungarian underground. Now 53 and a first-term Congressman from California, Lantos tried last week to repay, in part, the heroic Swede who was captured by Russian troops in 1945 and might still be alive somewhere in the vast Soviet prison system. Lantos sponsored and shepherded to passage last week a bill granting Wallenberg honorary U.S. citizenship.

Only one other non-American was ever so honored: Winston Churchill. Lantos hopes to spur an investigation of the former diplomat's whereabouts. Says Wife Annette Lantos: "It is the final irony that he should have to be paid for such courage in the horrors of the Gulag."

--By E. Gray don Carter

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