Into a San Francisco barbershop marched Herbert Hoover's friend & aide Ben Shannon Allen, cried: "Have to have a haircut before noon. I'm in a hurry." Said The Customer Ahead of him: "You can have my place." "Do you know who that was?" asked the cashier as Allen paid his bill. "He looks familiar," said Allen. Said the cashier: "He is Harold Ickes."

Cleveland's Russian-born Telephone Diplomat Abraham ("Abe") Pickus, maker of expensive long-distance calls to foreign statesmen on behalf of peace, cabled to Joseph Stalin: "GET WISE TO YOURSELF. TELL THE WORLD THAT RUSSIA WAS AND IS WILLING TO DISARM AND SETTLE ALL DISPUTES BY ARBITRATION. CALL A WORLD CONFERENCE. HITLER, MUSSOLINI, CHAMBERLAIN, DALADIER ARE SAVAGES. TRY TO BRING THEM TO THE TABLE WITH THE HELP OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT. A. PICKUS."

With Pekingese and parrot, Mrs. Jennie Miller of Seattle prepared to sail for India to visit her daughter, Nancy Ann Miller, who since 1928 has been apple-of-the-eye and wife No. 3 of rich Tukoji Rao III, ex-Maharaja of Indore.

In Washington, Horace Dwight Taft, 14-year-old son of Senator Robert Alphonso Taft, got something out of the U. S. Treasury: an autograph from Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.

Riding to hounds near Charlottesville, Va., Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., once Ethel du Pont, tried to take a picket fence, fell with her horse on top of her, broke her pelvis. Wrote Mother-in-Law Eleanor Roosevelt in her column, My Day: "We must be grateful that she was not killed. I suppose one cannot blame the horse. . . . When I was a child we had an old nurse who used to say . . . 'Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.' "

Britisher Byron Charles Tate, a member of the Griswold-Harkness Expedition (1934-35) to the East Indies, sued Explorer Lawrence Tarleton Knutsford Griswold for $100,000 for defamation of character because of an incident in Griswold's book, Tombs, Travel and Trouble. Grounds: Tate never attempted to seduce the wife of a headhunter.

Professor Elmer E. Nyberg, who teaches public speaking at New York University, revised and enlarged his ratings for public speakers as of 1940: grade C--Cordell Hull, Paul V. McNutt ("an orator, not a public speaker"), Robert A. Taft; Grade B plus--Arthur H. Vandenberg (too harsh) and Thomas E. Dewey; Grade A minus--Franklin D. Roosevelt (A plus until he "started to scold"); Grade A plus --Herbert Hoover (Grade D in 1928).

Asked to express himself on the closed shop at the annual Bosses' Dinner of the Chicago Junior Association of Commerce, C. I. O. Organizer Van A. Bittner quipped: "I thought all that was settled between 1861 and 1865. Some of the States wanted to withdraw from the Union and a lot of Northerners got killed keeping them in the Union."

Upon learning that the Royal Air Force had bombed Sylt, the Marquess of Lothian, British Ambassador to the U. S., exclaimed: "Fine work. We've been doing too much talking. Now we're socking them in the nose."

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