Pretty, 18-year-old Patricia Prochnik,

Washington's No. 1 debutante of last season and daughter of Edgar L. G. Prochnik, last Austrian Minister to the U. S., turned professional songstress, hoped "to get my family on its feet" by swinging with Bandsman Meyer Davis at private social functions. Said she: "I do not intend to fall in love until I am 23. I believe love is something you can ward off if you wish, and I wish to. When I do fall in love I will prefer a European man, an Englishman or an Austrian. They usually are more powerful, strong, gallant and charming than American men." In Los Angeles Mrs. Josephine Dillon Gable, greying, fiftyish, dramatic coach and onetime (1923-30) wife of Clark Gable, petitioned for the right to drop her last name. Said she: "I have been hounded to death by promoters who want to sell me schemes for exploiting Clark's name. . . . Just so that I have enough to live quietly and simply and feed myself and my cats I'll be satisfied."

While Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford, aristocratic friend of Adolf Hitler, still lay so deathly ill somewhere in England that physicians dared not extract from her neck the bullet she mysteriously acquired in Munich last year, her father, Lord Redesdale, turned over his 30-room town house to London's County Council for the use of slum dwellers made homeless by Nazi bombs.

Psychiatrists missed a fat chance years ago, when a neurotic little house painter held customers in Vienna's cheap restaurants spellbound as he harangued against the Jews. Last week psychiatrists at Manhattan's teeming Bellevue Hospital had what looked like a ghost of that earlier chance. Jew-baiting, Hitler-aping Naziphile Joseph ("Joe McNazi") McWilliams (TIME, Sept. 23) leader of the American Destiny Party, was 1) rolled flatter than a pfennig in last week's Congressional primaries in Yorkville (Germanic), 2) convicted of disorderly conduct for stirring up an anti-Semitic fracas, 3) committed by a judge to Bellevue's psychiatric ward for ten days' observation.

The University of Pennsylvania is peacock-proud of its brain collection (at the University-sponsored Wistar Institute), picks its pickled prizes with discrimination. Last week it blundered. The University of Pennsylvania Today announced the addition of famed British Biochemist J. B. S. Haldane's brain, meant that of his late father, Biologist John Scott Haldane. When last heard from, hulking, shaggy, tweedy John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was very much alive, hard at work in his University of London chair, editing the London Daily Worker.

In Chicago an 8 Ib. 5 1/4 oz. daughter (Caesarean) was born to famed infantile paralysis victim Frederick Bernard ("Boiler Kid") Snite Jr. and Teresa Larkin Snite. Shortly before, Snite came out of the iron lung that has kept him alive for four years, was photographed outside his tank for the first time since his illness (see cut). A chest respirator, concealed under his coat and connected to bellows by a tube, kept him going.

From a cell in Chicago's Bridewell stepped sulky, flabby-jowled William ("Sweet Willie") Bioff, self-made tsar of Hollywood no-collar labor. He had just finished a six-month sentence for pandering which he had blandly sidestepped in 1922 but failed to avoid last spring after Westbrook Pegler's acid pen had uncovered the dodge. He dashed to a waiting car, snapped at inquisitive newshawks, flung them typewritten copies of a statement addressed to the prison superintendent. Excerpts: "I am thankful to you . . . for treating me the same as any other inmate here. That is more than can be said about your courts. ... I have paid my pound of flesh to society and I want everyone responsible ... to know I have no malice or ill-feeling. . . ." From Los Angeles came reports that Sweet Willie's friends planned a torchlight parade to celebrate his return.

In New York Supreme Court Justice Aron Steuer upheld an order awarding Soprano Marion Nevada Talley, onetime Metropolitan diva, custody of her daughter nine months of the year. Thereupon blonde, blue-eyed, five-year-old Susan (Betty Ruth to her father) Eckstrom broke into a wail. Said smiling Singer Talley: "Naturally, I am happy to have my child back." Wept Voice Teacher Eckstrom: "She deserted that child when the baby was the two weeks old. Now justice gives her the baby."

Ernst Franz Sedgwick ("Putzi") Hanfstaengl is a hulking big (6 ft. 2 in.) Harvardman who once pleased classmates and Adolf Hitler by pounding a piano. No longer a Nazi bigwig, Putzi was interned in England last year as he lay in self-imposed exile. To Harvard Sophomore Egon Hanfstaengl last week came a welcome message from his father: Putzi had been moved to Canada. Said Egon: he had feared for his father's life should the Nazis invade Britain successfully.

When R. A. F. bombs ticketed for nearby military objectives threatened the Palace of Laeken near Brussels, his Nazi captors moved King Leopold, with his three children and mother, Dowager Queen Elisabeth, to the royal Chateau de Ciergnon in the Ardennes.

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