Monday, Jun. 08, 1931

"Names make news." Last week the following names made the following news:

After entertaining Freeman F. Gosden and Charles J. Correll (Amos & Andy) at his Catoctin, Md. fishing camp. Lawrence Richey, secretary to President Hoover, vigorously denied that he had arranged for the radio comedians to campaign next year for his employer.

A car in which Senator Kenneth Douglas McKellar of Tennessee was riding turned over near Covington, Tenn. Senator McKellar fractured four ribs, suffered cuts and bruises. It was his second serious accident in seven months.

Word came from London that Sir James Matthew Barrie (Peter Pan), whose right hand has been crippled by illness, had issued 20 private copies of a 60,000-word biography called The Greenwood Hat. Those of his friends to whom he sent copies of the book, including his particularly close friend and fellow Scotsman, Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald, are pledged to secrecy as to the volume's contents. Title of the book comes from a well-known Barrie legend. When he first went to London he decided to visit the late Editor Frederick Greenwood of St. James's Gazette, bought a new hat for the meeting. To his chagrin, an office boy relieved Author Barrie of his cherished hat before he came into the editor's presence.

When a Berlin telephone girl was asked her name by Premier Benito Mussolini in Rome she refused to tell. He, pleased by her super-service on a long distance call to the Italian Embassy in Berlin, demanded her name. Still she refused. Last week the Embassy discovered but did not betray her secret. Il Duce invited her to spend her vacation in Rome "as the guest of the Italian Government."

Vasile Murgulescu, 32, onetime secretary of the Rumanian Senate, was sentenced in Manhattan to serve from three to ten years in Sing Sing. He was convicted of forging signatures on travelers' checks stolen from a U. S. citizen in Paris. Vasile Murgulescu is also wanted in San Francisco on a Federal charge, has been convicted of forgery in Paris, Rome, was once deported from Vienna.

Alicia Patterson, enterprising daughter of Publisher Joseph Medill Patterson of the Chicago Tribune, returned from a six-month flying tour and big-game hunting junket in the Far East. She was proud to have killed a sladang, fierce Indo-Chinese water buffalo.

Senator Frederick Hale of Maine and Assistant U. S. Attorney General Seth Whitley Richardson returned from an Alaskan hunting trip. Each had killed two brown bears. Senator Hale brought back three cubs for the Washington zoo.

Going the rounds at Oxford University was a story about Professor Albert Einstein, a recent visitor there.

"Are you convinced that your theory of relativity is true?" a lady asked.

Dr. Einstein: "Yes, I believe it to be true, but it will only be proved for certain in the year 1981 when I am dead."

"What will happen then?" asked the lady.

"Well, if I am right the Germans will say I was a German and the French will say I was a Jew. If I am wrong, the Germans will say I was a Jew and the French will say I was a German."

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill Jr., son & namesake of the playwright (Emperor Jones, Strange Interlude), won a $200 prize for "the most thorough acquaintance with the Greek and Latin poets" at Yale, where he is a junior.*

Late one evening on Boston Common a group of loafers were heckling a sailor and his girl. A car drove up. A man jumped out. The sailor saluted. "Who the hell are you?" one of the loafers asked the stranger.

"My name is Byrd. I'm from the Navy too."

To a policeman who hurried up, Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd explained: "I stepped in to see the Navy didn't take a licking."

Admiral Byrd last week ordered an epitaph for his terrier Igloo, with whom he flew over both poles and who is now buried at Dedham, Mass.: "Igloo--He Was More Than A Friend."

Edward of Wales played first as an admiral, then as a general in the British Army & Navy golf matches at Camberley Heath. As an admiral he lost to a general,-5 & 4. Playing with a partner for the Army, he beat a pair of admirals by the same score. The Army won.

*Last month Yale dropped Greek and Latin as prerequisites for an A.B. degree.

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