PEOPLE

The Mick has not just struck out in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded and the Yankees one run behind. He has not just wrenched his knee. No, he is sobbing, "I want my Maypo!" In a forthcoming TV campaign Johnny Unites, Wilt Chamberlain, Don Meredith, Oscar Robertson, Ray Nitschke and Willie Mays are all going to appear pleading, tears pouring down their cheeks, for Maypo breakfast cereal. The ad is said to be aimed at the kids and maybe the kids will love it, but middle-agers may feel that such carryings-on are a far cry from Wheaties' Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy.

A Hungarian newspaper has published an interview with Alexander Dubcek's mother in which she speaks of the First Secretary's love of hunting. His house was reported to have been filled with trophies, and his mother to have been most proud—ready?—of a very large bearskin rug.

Marshall McLuhan has been thinking again, and what he thinks about sports, as he says in his new book, War and Peace in the Global Village, is "Games stand in relation to new technology somewhat in the form of clothing. Radio and baseball were well matched, but television has killed baseball and advanced football and ice hockey. Baseball was quite incompatible with the television spectator's role of participation in tactile depth." Obviously anyone under the impression that he enjoyed watching the World Series was quite wrong.

New York Representative Otis G. Pike enjoys cruising off Long Island, but he sometimes gets into trouble and he feels that the Coast Guard has not been too much of a help. In Pike's first mishap, his boat struck a lobster-pot buoy which penetrated the hull. "Soon the Coast Guard arrived," Pike reports. "A guardsman came on board and, in only a few minutes, managed to pull the buoy out of the hole in the hull. He was still holding it aloft triumphantly as the water rushed in and the boat sank out from under us." In their next encounter, Pike's engine had quit and the Coast Guard came this time to tow him to the nearest port. He was stranded for two days waiting for a new engine part. Pike's latest go-round with the Guard came about when his new battery ran down. "It really wasn't the young man's fault that between us we managed to drop my new, expensive battery into 12 feet of water," Pike says resignedly, "he couldn't have been nicer." A discreet organization, the Coast Guard thus far has offered no comment on Rep. Pike's seamanship.

Some 200 people were gathered on the Eighth Street embankment along New York's East River recently, unable to figure out how to save a drowning dog. The animal's paws were bloody from his frantic attempts to climb a 20-foot seawall, and he was clearly exhausted when Attorney Roy Cohn dived from his yacht Defiance to haul the dog to safety. As we all know, a man who loves animals can't be all bad, and a man who loves them enough to brave New-York's grubby East River gets several extra points.

It was not exactly sky diving, but it was closer to it than any-other dean of St. Paul's Cathedral has ever come. For the opening of the cathedral's youth festival, England's Red Devils, members of a parachute brigade, rigged up an apparatus 40 feet above the cathedral's main entrance to simulate a parachute jump. Dean Martin Sullivan, a canon and two vergers joined the young people in stepping into space (the skirts of their cassocks considerably more modest in the circumstances than the many miniskirts) and the dean reported afterward, "I did it because the people wanted me to do it, and I thought it would be rather miserable and cowardly of me if I didn't. It is a most exhilarating feeling...the only feeling that could better this is to go upwards—without the help of a harness."

Senator Eugene McCarthy, onetime first baseman and .300 hitter back in Minnesota in the Great Soo League, covered the World Series for LIFE Magazine, but before he got down to his own work he obliged fellow reporters with the expected political comparison: "If Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey were involved in this they'd insist on their own rules," he observed. "Nixon would demand four strikes and Humphrey would insist on using his book bag for second base."

The batter's form and Jimmy Hoffa's expression make it pretty clear that ball games inside prisons are not of major league caliber. The photograph was smuggled out of the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pa. Hoffa is due out in time for the 1980 World Series.

TWO PHOTOS