Warriors

Major General James Doolittle's wife got a letter from him asking for 1) some summer clothes, 2) some calling cards, for distribution in Germany.

General Henri Honore Giraud recalled happily in Washington how he renewed an old German acquaintance. A year after he had slipped out of Germany's Koenigstein prison, he encountered a bunch of prisoners in North Africa, discovered among them his old jailer.

Private Melvyn Douglas was abruptly upped five grades to a captaincy, after seven months in the Army. The cinemactor-proetge of Eleanor Roosevelt had enlisted at 41, ten months after Congress had raked his appointment as an OCD consultant. He will plug war bonds.

Ramblers

Mme. Chiang Kai-shek told newsmen in Chungking she had nearly wound up on a Jap airfield on her way home. Her pilot, confused by radio signals from the field, had headed for it, then pulled away on a hunch. "I was feeling so sick at that moment," said Madame, "that I did not care where we landed. . . . I belong to the land and not to the sea or air." Reporting on the wartime U. S., she mentioned the hairpin and elastic shortage, but could give no word on girdles because, unlike the late John Barrymore, "I don't wear any."

Eleanor Roosevelt bobbed up in Reno for an unusual reason--just a restful visit with friends.

Henry L. Stimson arrived quietly in England by air the day after he had taken an official peek at U. S. troops in Iceland. The trip was the 75-year-old Secretary of War's first to an operational theater since the U.S. entered the war.

Bob Hope, in his native England on a USO tour, dropped into the town of Hitchin for a cozy dish of tea with grandfather James, planned to help him celebrate his 100th birthday next month.

The Misses Chandralehka & Nayantara Pandit, raven-eyed nieces, 19 and 16, of imprisoned India Congress Leader Jawaharlal Nehru, arrived in Manhattan to enter Wellesley College. Chandralehka had been jailed by the British for seven months. She said she left jail with her political convictions stronger than when she entered. The sisters traveled on a troopship whose passengers included some wounded Marines from Guadalcanal. "We had a grand time with them," said Chandralehka. "We discussed Indian affairs all the time. . . ."

Gunder Haegg, the Swedish track flash, set a world's record for the twomile: 8 min. 53.9 sec. He had already been making time in Hollywood--for a traveling companion around one movie lot he had green-eyed Greer Garson.

Politicos

Postmaster General Frank Comerford Walker, portly, pink Democratic national chairman, once had a horrid experience with some dice--so said the National Police Gazette's publisher. Applying for restoration of the Gazette's mailing privilege (revoked for lewdness), the publisher testified that Walker had objected to the magazine's dice advertisements because he once bought a pair to entertain friends at home, took all the money with an innocent twist of the wrist, and later discovered that one of the dice was loaded. From an assistant to Postmaster General Walker, the press got the pained retort that this was ridiculous--the only dice he had ever owned had come with parchesi and backgammon sets.

Harold LeClair Ickes lost one of his six Nisei farm hands (TIME, April 26) who decided he would rather teach judo at the University of Maryland. Said Maryland's President H. C. Byrd: "I had been trying to get a judo instructor for a year."

Litterateurs

W. Somerset Maugham acts a part in the coming Hollywood version of his The Hour Before the Dawn. His impersonation: himself, writing the book.

William Rose Benet, Pulitzer Prize poet, having written a Saturday Review of Literature piece damning too-free enterprise for running the U. S. into a hole, and having suggested that the rich were getting richer on the war, promptly heard from:

Thomas W. Lamont, chairman of the board of J. P. Morgan & Co., who answered (in the Saturday Review) that wars, not the rich, create economic chaos, that manufacturers are paying practically all their profits to the Government in taxes. The banker invited the poet over for a drink, invited any little plan he might have to prevent wars. Replied the poet: the rich control U. S. life; he would like a drink; he doubted his ability to plan war out of existence.

Patients

Carmen Miranda, taken ill on a train eastbound from California, abandoned it for a St. Louis hospital, submitted her famed Brazilian midriff to the knife. Except to report that she was in good condition, the hospital was mum about her trouble.

Xavier Cugat, who makes the sort of music Miranda snouts, had a kidney operation the same day in Hollywood.

Young Royalty

Peter, Yugoslavia's 19-year-old King in Exile, at last won his Cabinet's approval of his year-old plan to marry Princess Alexandra of Greece (TIME, June 29, 1942). The Cabinet put its blessing in writing.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.