People, may 7, 1956

Names make news. Last week these names made this news:

In Manhattan, the battle of Central Park was joined when outraged mothers, with toddlers and perambulated infants in tow, formed a human barricade to stymie a bulldozer sent to flatten the flora on a half-acre dear to the kiddies but now slated to become a parking lot for patrons of the park’s fancy-menued Tavern-on-the-Green. The man behind the man who manned the ‘dozer: New York City’s fireballing, thin-skinned Park Commissioner Robert Moses. He lost no time putting down the citizens’ rebellion, had a storm fence thrown up around the disputed territory between one midnight and dawn, glowed next day in victory as the trees began to fall. At week’s end, however, able, despotic City Planner Moses had a setback; acting on a citizens’ petition, a Manhattan judge ordered a four-day cease-fire to give the combatants time to file their briefs.

Temporarily sprung from the Lewisburg, Pa. federal pen to testify before the Senate’s Internal Security subcommittee, Atom Spies Harry Gold (doing a 30-year stretch) and David Greenglass (15 years) provided some intriguing marginal notes to the history of U.S. treason. Admitting that the Russians had done “a superb psychological job” on him, onetime Philadelphia Chemist Gold, 45, drew snickers in the Washington hearing room when he debunked the “trash” written to explain why he turned traitor. Said he of one theory: “I haven’t been uniformly successful in love, but I didn’t get into espionage for that reason.” Nor was it because of an inferiority complex or a desire for acclaim that he devoted eleven years to passing atomic secrets to the Russians. “Somewhere in me, through the years, I got a basic disrespect—it got so I thought I could ignore authority if I thought I was right. I was cocksure.” With what seemed genuine remorse, Harry Gold summed up how the spy ring manipulated him: “Like a virtuoso would play a violin.”

Onetime Army Sergeant Greenglass, 34, had also had time in stir to think and find regrets. Of domestic Communism’s most glorified modern-day martyrs, electrocuted Spies Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel (Greenglass’ sister), David Greenglass, whose testimony had convicted them, spoke with mixed emotions. “It is a hard thing to be called a murderer,” said he of himself. “These people were my flesh and blood. I felt affection for them, and still do, but if they had not wanted to be martyrs, they could have just put up their hands and said ‘Stop!’ and told the truth.”

As guest of honor at a church charity ball in a London hotel, Britain’s petite (5 ft.) Princess Margaret showed a few flashes of her old gaiety, seemed especially amused when she danced with towering—and crouching—Major Raymond Seymour.

Although Princeton University was rigged for trouble, the campus appearance of Alger Hiss, convicted perjurer and disbarred lawyer, in his first public speech since his release from the Lewisburg federal pen in 1954, turned out to be tame and dull. Protesters that morning had tried to warm Hiss’s reception by decking the campus with some 100 papier-mâché pumpkins containing photographs of a Woodstocktypewriter and microfilm, reminiscent of the pumpkin papers and other evidence that convicted him. Dawn also unveiled three signs protesting “Traitor” in foot-high red letters. But ex-State Department Employee Hiss, 51, appearing before about 200 students and 50 newsmen, spoke with dry pedantry on “The Meaning of Geneva,” dulled his 25-minute discourse further with many a soporific quotation. His main, unoriginal point: the suicidal nature of modern nuclear warfare makes the success of summit talks more vital now than it used to be. So saying, Alger Hiss, whisked out a back door, vanished into the night.

West Germany’s Supreme Court ruled that the nation’s onetime spy boss, jittery Otto John, 47, whose confused East-West loyalties led him to use the Iron Curtain as a revolving door, must stay in prison and there await trial for treason.

During a cloak-and-dagger TV play in Britain, a solemn voice announced to televiewers: “Should you be threatened, ring the secret number Whitehall 5422, give the code number 1785, then the code word ‘curtain raiser,’ and you will be put straight through to the Prime Minister!” Delighted to hear such hush-hush information, hundreds rushed to their telephones to pass the time of day with Sir Anthony Eden, succeeded only in clogging the Cabinet Office’s tie line to 10 Downing Street.

Word leaked out that German Munitions Magnate Alfred Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, barred from the U.S. as a convicted Nazi war criminal, nonetheless visited New York City last month. It was not his fault. Flying from London to the Bahamas for a vacation, Krupp was plunked down by surprise in the U.S. when his plane developed engine trouble. To ease its passengers’ eight-hour delay, British Overseas Airways Corp. arranged a Manhattan sightseeing tour, dragged visaless Krupp along despite his spirited protests. After a gander at the United Nations headquarters, the Statue of Liberty, the TIME & LIFE Building and Wall Street, reluctant Sightseer Krupp winged on to the Bahamas.

From the Atomic Energy Commission to Hungarian-born Mathematician John Von Neumann, 52, pioneer developer of electronic brains and an AECommissioner, went a tax-free $50,000 for aiding the U.S. atomic energy program—second such award ever given (the first: to the late Nuclear Physicist Enrico Fermi in 1954).

Seldom had an author played one of his own characters so to the hilt as Fisherman Ernest Hemingway off the coast of Peru last week. To fill out the cast for the movie version of his novelette, The Old Man and the Sea, Nobelman Hemingway was angling, day after day, for a near-world-record black marlin (TIME, April 23) in one of that fish’s favorite haunts, the famed Cabo Blanco deep-sea hunting ground. Ashore in the port of Talara, after a wearying day’s cruise, “Papa” Hemingway not only looked like a stout version of his own Old Man; he also had a dejected air, as if sharks had robbed him of his prize marlin. Actually, his party had bagged only one fish, half the size of the giant he was after.

Fresh out of appeals on his five-year prison sentence (plus a $20,000 fine) for evading $28,532 in 1948-49 income taxes, Manhattan’s frog-voiced Gambler Frank Costello, 64, took a legal gamble, croaked an offer to lam for his native Italy, if the federals would take the heat off him. The Government’s answer: quit stalling and get off to the penitentiary.