Home of Lincoln Logs a Big Jam

--A fresh coat of paint helped to breathe new life into the old place in Springfield, Ill. So much so that from June through September, 419,000 people walked through it--85% more than in the same period of 1986. But then, this is not just any old house. It is the house Abraham Lincoln bought in 1844, which was opened to the public last June, after a $2.2-million renovation. The problem is that because of the increased interest, visitors are now being turned away, and Rep. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) are seeking to raise $67,000 so that more tour guides can be added. “We’ve had a terrible situation where we’ve actually had to turn away school kids who came to see the Lincoln home,” Durbin said. Because of the overcrowding, about 1,600 visitors were turned away between Sept. 4 and Oct. 8, according to the National Park Service.

--For Soviet human rights activist Andrei D. Sakharov, the next stop is Paris. Sakharov, 67, who is staying in Boston with family members on his first trip outside the Soviet Union in 30 years, has accepted an invitation from French President Francois Mitterrand to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of the U.N. declaration of human rights on Saturday, said Efrem Yankelevich, whose wife, Tatiana, is Sakharov’s stepdaughter. Yankelevich said that Sakharov’s wife, Yelena Bonner, who did not accompany her husband to the United States because of her ill health, will join him in Paris. Sakharov, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, spent more than seven years in internal exile, in Gorky, after he criticized Soviet policies. He is in the United States as a member of the Moscow-based International Foundation for Survival and Development of Humanity.

--A proponent of the theater of the absurd, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee thinks very little of formal education. In a talk before 300 students at the Kingswood-Oxford School in West Hartford, Conn., Albee described his irreverent thoughts about education, explaining that he was thrown out of a number of East Coast private schools before his graduation from Choate, in Connecticut. “The real function of a formal education,” he said, “is to teach you how to educate yourself when you’re done with your formal education.” Albee, whose plays include “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and “Seascape,” said: “At the age of 14, for all my sins, I found myself in Valley Forge Military Academy (in Pennsylvania). I have to be very careful what I say about this joint. It is my memory . . . that they only offered two courses--sadism and masochism, and these were not electives.”