He was a sea captain's son, aground in a teaching job at Worcester Academy in 1908, when Robert E. Peary asked if he would like to join an Arctic expedition. Donald MacMillan not only went north that time--on the first successful journey to the Pole--but returned to the Arctic 35 times as leader of his own expeditions, mostly at the helm of his 80-ft. schooner Bowdoin, before he and his boat retired together in 1959. Author of several books, including the first Eskimo-English dictionary, MacMillan was a botanist and zoologist as well as the last of the dogsled explorers, remained spry enough in his 70s to earn a rear admiral's stripes locating airfield sites for the Navy in Greenland. Now 92 and living in peppery retirement in Provincetown, Mass., Old Mac bestirred himself to Boston last week, where he accepted the $5,000 Washburn Award from the Museum of Science as "the last and gallant survivor of America's most thrilling era of terrestrial geographic discovery."

It's all that Huntington Hartford, 56, can do to tear himself away from the phone these days. On one line, he has been calling several of the nation's loftier cultural institutions, trying to get them to accept as a gift his $5,000,000 Gallery of Modern Arton Manhattan's Columbus Circle. The star-crossed A. & P. heir first sought to benefact Columbia and Fordham universities, which hastened to decline when they got a load of the museum's $3,800,000 mortgage and $500,000 yearly upkeep; now he hopes that some philanthropic soul like Uncle Sam will enable the Organization of American States to accept his charity. On the other phone, meanwhile, Hartford has been vainly paging his third wife, Diane, 25, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Monte Carlo--these being the cities that she has been touring in company with freshly divorced Singer Bobby Darin, 31. "She's a friend of mine," explained Darin. Everywhere he went? "I'd say," he said, "that you have a pile of coincidences on your hands."

The Greek consulate described it as a brief, unofficial visit to New York "without fanfare or publicity" by King Constantine, 27, and Queen Anne-Marie, 21, prior to more formal stops in Toronto, Ottawa, Quebec, Montreal and finally Washington to confer with President Johnson. But nothing ever happens without fanfare or publicity when Actress Melina Mercouri gets involved. The Greek star, relieved of her citizenship and property because of her criticism of Greece's military junta, learned that the royal couple planned to lunch with Secretary-General U Thant. Planting herself like an avenging Athena in front of the TV cameras outside the U.N. entrance, Melina began reading a long list of rhetorical questions calling for democratic elections in Greece, etc., etc. Constantine and Anne-Marie made it inside to their luncheon without hav ing Melina's open letter thrust upon them, so the actress dropped it off at their hotel to await their return.

Why not roll them bones for really big stakes and cash in on her famous name with a brand line of dresses?

One reason is that the line might bomb out, which is just what happened to Twiggy, 17, last season in her first entrepreneurial invasion of the U.S. Now the Twig, accompanied as ever by the alter ego with the nom de guru of Justin de Villeneuve, has scurried back to the U.S. on a personal troubleshoot. The young executive is having a bit of trouble establishing her new image. As she disembarked at Kennedy Airport wearing a fringed, antelope-skin mini-haha, a baggage handler sounded the alarm: "It's a skinny Indian!" Said Twiggy: "I was going to wear a feather, but it seemed a bit much."

Hard to say which was Conductor Erich Leinsdorf s greatest triumph during his fifth summer as director of the Berkshire Music Festival. The maestro, 55, was naturally pleased that attendance at 24 concerts reached 170,000, second highest in festival history, despite more or less constant rain. But his keen, analytic mind was delighted most at finding a solution to the bug problem. "The humidity made the bugs wilder than usual," he recalled gravely. "The female soloists with low-cut dresses would have had to swat them selves while performing, which is not easy to do. As a result, they had to be sprayed before going onstage. As far as I know, it was a concert debut for the spray, and it was effective."

Listening to all those chirping birds roosting in the trees around the mansion in Jefferson City, Missouri's Governor Warren E. Hearnes, 44, remarked that "something ought to be done" about the racket. Yessirreebob! That very night three state employees and two friends pointed shotguns at the trees and slaughtered 2,000 migrating purple martins--gorgeous glossy blue swallows that not only are protected by state, federal, Canadian and Mexican law but are such efficient insect killers that people can throw away the bug repellent if they are lucky enough to have martins living near by. Hearnes's office explained morosely that everyone had mistaken the martins for bother some, unlovely, unprotected starlings, but the shotgunners will still probably have to stand trial. Possible penalty: a $500 fine and three months in jail.

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