Fortunes of War

U.S. Army Air Forces Captain Clark Gable, who started aiming for action when he joined up last August, was close to action at last, newly arrived at a bomber base in England.

Anticlimactically ended was the well-publicized case of balding, bespectacled Bandsman Kay Kyser v. the draft. Turned down on his 1-A appeal, despite OWI-backing for his efforts as a war-bond hawker, the 36-year-old swingster was turned down by Army physicians (hernia and arthritis).

Lantern-jawed Army Air Forces 2nd Lieut. Thomas Dudley Harmon, 23, reported missing on duty "in the South American Area," was nine days later found safe in a Brazilian jungle. In Ann Arbor, where the onetime Michigan halfback had hula-hipped himself to All-America fame, his parents offered special masses, got many a wire from Tommy's worried admirers. Anxiety ended, his anxious mother promptly cabled her son ". . . just so he'd know that we knew he was safe and weren't worried any more."

Max Schmeling, wounded as a Nazi paratrooper in Crete, was reported a Russian war prisoner, again wounded.

Conversation Piece

"I've tried all my life to drink," Helen Hayes told a Manhattan interviewer, "and I don't like it. I consort with nobody but drinkers. I married a good two-fisted drinker. Once I felt I had found something I could drink--vodka. But it was the same as with every other drink. I just got sleepy and had to be taken home."

Luscious Columnist Lucius Beebe looked at wartime Manhattan, discovered that "society . . . has vanished in the face of a curious order called second lieutenants on whom gentle birth is bestowed by act of Congress."

Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, making her first formal talk to her Connecticut constituents since election, charged that Washington was still fighting a "lazy war," plumped for a near-confisca-tory war tax on "the well-to-do & the rich," said she was for drafting "all capital, profits & plants" if labor was to be drafted, and ticked off the war manpower commission as a "small but apparently indissolvable group of waltzing mice & pretzel benders."

Ickes' Nisei

After three months of angling and investigating (through FBI, Army Intelligence, etc.) the Harold L. Ickeses finally got some hired hands for their Maryland farm: American-born Japanese from an Arizona relocation camp. The young wife of the curmudgeon Secretary (see p. 102) had taken care to ask the neighbors how they felt about having Nisei in their midst, got two reactions: 1) approval, 2) inquiries about the chances of getting the same sort of help.

Allied Advance

U.S. Army Photographer Sergeant Worden F. Lovell of Maiden, Mass., jockeying his jeep in the wake of a British Eighth Army advance unit in Tunisia, briskly demanded directions. Asked by one of the limeys why he wanted to know, Camera man Lovell made it pretty clear that he had no time for conversation, gave and got a few personal remarks anyway. Said Lovell to a bystander, when his questioner had walked away: "That fellow must be a sergeant, the way he talked to me." Bystander: "That's Montgomery."

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