From a Lowell, Mass, admirer came prompt reaction in grave scrawl to Wendell Willkie's Lincoln Day address: "Dear Mr. Willkie, Your speech last night was very good. I heard my grandfather jump up and down. The poor cat and dog were scared stiff. In the afternoon I went out and slid with a tin pan. I am nine years old, and am in the fourth grade. Sincerely yours, Hilda Thompson."

Assembled in Tucson, Ariz, for their annual four-day powwow, 4,000 southwestern Indians held an especially big medicine council, puffed thoughtful pipes and from among 17 coal-eyed maidens picked as their presiding queen the All-American Girl--curvesome Susanne Ignacio, who not only teaches her Papago talk at the University of Arizona but can handle a horse as lithely as a Papago brave.

Scuttling along the street to visit caustic, mountain-maiming old Sculptor Gutzon Borglum in the Chicago hospital to which he had retired to treat a minor ailment, his wife slipped on the icy concrete, fractured her arm, joined her famed husband in the hospital.

In the '90s dapper little Pat Rooney took up at Tony Pastor's where his famous dad had left off, danced and sang his way to vaudeville immortality with Rosie O'Grady and a ballad about one Mr. Reilly so enchantingly delivered that everybody has wanted to live Mr. Reilly's life ever since. Last week, 51 years after his debut, and with his own son, Pat Rooney 3rd, now doing his own song-&-dance, platinum-haired Pat Rooney walked into Federal Court in Manhattan, filed petition for bankruptcy. His assets: $252, and a job entertaining at Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe. Liabilities: to touched friends George M. Cohan, $200; Ben Bernie, $200; Harry Richman, $100; Ollie Olsen, $25; Bob Hope, $25; Victor Moore, $100; et al.

Last month the British War Relief Society asked lofty Playwright Maxwell Anderson to write a poem for the program booklet for the big forthcoming "Carnival for Britain" in Manhattan. Author Anderson enthusiastically chipped in with an indignant set of quatrains on a text: "That man's face is a disgrace to Europe," reportedly spoken some years back by Benito Mussolini. Last week, having had their fun reading Poet Anderson's outburst, the sponsors decided it had to be censored as unsuitable for a charitable occasion. Sample suppression:

In the Third Reich, look where you will,

You see one vulpine physiog;

These are dog days in Germany

And Fuehrer Hitler is the dog.

Accompanied by one of his two svelte secretaries, who take down gags he thinks up at night, d.t.-totaling W. C. Fields ambled into Los Angeles court, tried to get a $20,000 refund on his 1937 Federal income tax. He found that the Government wanted $20,000 more. Badgered by revenuers about the elastic rubric he had created for deductible expenses, he had a time explaining a $20 item for milk. Puffed globular Taxpayer Fields: "I do not drink the liquid myself. I believe the writers. . . used it as a kind of a lubricant. . . . All I know about milk is that it's what Anna Held took a bath in. Ah, Anna Held. . . . There was a chickadee for you, gentlemen."

Out of his golfing, swimming Florida retirement barged paretic Scarface Al Capone, grinning grandly from behind dark cheaters, cheroot and flashy cravat, as he headed for Miami Federal Court to answer questions about a matter of $201,347 in income taxes still unpaid.

Unable to afford one or to find a friend who wore size 7 3/4, Student Donald Heimes of the University of Minnesota was at a loss for a top hat to wear to the Junior Ball. Then he read in the paper that Governor Harold E. Stassen wore size 7 3/4. He wrote the Governor. The Governor wrote back, saying come to the Capitol and pick up his. Haberdashing in his gubernatorial topper, Donald went to the dance.

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