Refusing his half of the $25,000 offered by Count Marc de Tristan for the return of his three-year-old son, broad-shouldered Cecil Wetzel (who has three children) did a turn at a Los Angeles theatre instead, giving an account of the rescue (TIME, Sept. 30). He remarked: "I've got kids of my own." He netted $2,000. Winding up in San Diego (with business terrible): "I'll never go on the stage again."

When a Messerschmitt plane fell out of a dogfight, missed his country home by inches, "most-bombed" U. S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's Joseph Patrick Kennedy, father of nine children, declared: "Bombing ... as far as it interrupts the night's rest ... is nothing new to married men who, like myself, have many children."

Seven years ago, in his The Shape of Things to Come, Britain's Herbert George Wells forecast a world war flaring out of Poland in 1940. Last week, arriving in Manhattan for a lecture tour, Prognosticator Wells guessed that Germany was at the "end of her tether," probably would lose the war. "Whether we will win," he added, "is another matter."

Harry K. Thaw, eccentric 69-year-old murderer of Stanford White, who recently bought an old house in downtown Philadelphia, decided to warm it with a party, advertised in newspapers for guests, limited their visit "to ten minutes for men over 18--ladies over 16." He drew about 1,000 people, who received a pamphlet written by Thaw on the Belgian food crisis, listened to a five-piece orchestra play Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, gulped free soda pop, watched Thaw eat dinner in the kitchen, were ushered out soon after 9 p.m. by city detectives.

The Evening Standard "Diary' mouthpiece of its publisher, Britain's Aircraft Production Minister, sounded a note of self-pity: "As surely as the calendar itself, asthma marches on its appointed course. Better than the barometer, asthma foretells the end of sunshiny days and the onset of fog and mist and damp. An example of what I mean is Lord Beaverbrook. Until a few days ago, he was still a free man. Today asthma has laid its harsh hand as firmly on him as a gaoler receiving an old prisoner back after a brief release."

In Manhattan at a "Funds for France" dinner which she sponsored to feed children in Free France, best-dressed, frail Mrs. Harrison ("Mona") Williams was baited by a reporter who implied that to feed France was to help Germany. Said she tearfully: "I have nothing to hide. Is it a sin to be a Christian?" Said Guest Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr.: "Mona, it's all so silly--everyone knows you are no more of a Nazi than I am."

Amid a burst of flash bulbs at Hollywood's airport, hard-polished blonde Cinemactress Constance Bennett embarked on a plane for Reno to divorce Henri, Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye, Gloria Swanson's and her third husband. She gave a farewell kiss to a squinting young man--her eleven-year-old adopted son Peter (see cut).

"You do solemnly swear that you absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign . . . State ... of which you have . . . been a citizen. ... So help you, God?" In a Trenton, N. J. courtroom halo-haired German Jewish Physicist Albert Einstein solemnly did, became a U. S. citizen.

In Republican Westchester County, N. Y., where he has been defeated for Congress in 1934-36-37-38, Democrat Homer Adolph ("Never Say Die") Stebbins last week campaigned again. The issue: "If war is not declared by the time I am elected to Congress, I will vote for war when I get there."

Convicted of stealing funds from the building service employes' union which he headed, George Scalise shuffled up before Judge Gould Schurman Jr. in a New York court this week to get his reward. Judge Schurman, who had just read an 18-page report which traced the labor leader's history from petty racketeer to an association with Al Capone, Frankie Uale, other figures of the underworld, gave him 10 to 20 years.

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