Response

A Montreal concert audience began applauding before the orchestra had quite finished a chorus. Famed Conductor Sir Thomas Beecham whipped around, shouted: "Silence! We don't applaud before the orchestra has finished playing." When the orchestra had properly finished, the audience then responded with a chorus of its own: "Booo!"

Mom

Soldiers at California's Camp Callan whose mothers were to be absent on Mother's Day chose a "proxy mother" to visit them. The proxy: Rita Hayworth.

The Law

Said the Crusader White Shirts' George W. Christians, indicted for sedition and held in Chattanooga under $10,000 bond for trial next week, "I consider myself a political prisoner rather than a criminal and should get better treatment."

Cinemogul Joseph M. Schenck was bundled off to prison to serve a year and a day for perjury instead of three years for income-tax evasion. The three-year sentence given him a year ago was suspended as a reward for his testimony help in sending Laboracketeers Willie Bioff and George E. Browne to the pen for extortion.

The judge in the Elizabeth (Red Network) Dilling divorce case cited Mrs. Billing for contempt for the sixth time, fined her $50, promised her jail if it happened again.

Farewell

In the big stone church, on the streets of Chicago's Negro section, on the rooftops, hanging out the windows to see the funeral of black Jack Blackburn, trainer of Joe Louis, some 30,000 citizens hung on the ropes. The crowd on the streets shouted and sang hymns. Women were knocked over, children screamed. When the services were over and the casket came out, borne by pallbearers that included Soldier Joe Louis, Swingster Cab Calloway, Tapster Bill Robinson, the mob broke through the police lines to touch the casket for good luck. When the hearse finally moved off everybody was still shouting, and the fallen were picking themselves up.

Uniformity

Four German raiders northeast of England, by an R.A.F. squadron led by Lord Beaverbrook's son, Wing-Commander Max Aitken.

Drafted: Victor Mature.

Appointed: Polo's famed Major Tommy Hitchcock, as assistant military attache for air, in London.

Enlisted: Gloria Vanderbilt's Pasquale di Cicco, at Fort Riley, Kans. Heiress Gloria took a stucco house at nearby Manhattan, after getting bids from four hungry Chambers of Commerce.

Wherewithal

From Sir Charles Vyner Brooke, exiled Raja of Jap-invaded Sarawak, the Ranee got a letter, from Australia. Excerpt: "I limit myself to one drink a day. I have it with two pals who are also dead broke owing to the Japs. We have all our meals in a hamburger shop around the corner. We get a hamburger, bread and butter and a cup of tea --all for one and six."

For the cinema rights to The Moon Is Down (concerning an invaded village), 20th Century-Fox paid Author John Steinbeck the biggest outright story-price on record: $300,000.

Mrs. Henry Ford told the Atlantic City Convention of the Women's National Farm & Garden Association how she had made good on a promise to send a barrelful of dried apples to England. Said she: "We don't have hot kitchens like they did fifty years ago, so I called my husband's electrician and asked him to make me an oven.

"Don't make anything fine, or expensive, I said, just take any material you have left over; He did have to buy four wire mesh trays, but the rest was just a big tin box on four legs. . . .

"I skirmished around and found a little old-fashioned apple parer, the kind you fasten to a table. It has some kind of a knife, and you just turn a crank. That's no work at all. But then I had to quarter the fruit and get the cores out. I dried the apples myself. I peeled them and quartered them, and worked on up until near Christmas. It took bushels and bushels and bushels of apples to make one barrel of dried fruit."

Past Masters

Thrice mayor of Chicago and eleven years out of office, hulking William Hale ("Big Bill") Thompson, once-famed Anglophobe, was reported ready for another comeback try in his 73rd year. His 20-year-old platform-5-c- streetcar fare.

Sergeant Alvin C. York considered the Army's literacy requirements, the squirrel-and-neighbor-shooting talents of the mountaineers of Kentucky and Tennessee, decided to ask the War Department to let him command a battalion of dead-eye illiterates.

Back at his old stand was 54-year-old Irving Berlin, whipping up a sequel to Yip, Yip Yaphank (1917), at Yaphank's nearby Camp Upton. Moved in for his use: the special piano that makes it possible for him to play in any key without knowing all the mysteries of a keyboard.

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