Royalty Ras Imru, Haile Selassie's first cousin and Ethiopia's hardest-fighting chieftain until the Italians captured him in 1936, headed home after nearly seven years' detention in Calabria. With him went his retinue of 16 (including a woman whose neck was tattooed blue).

Carol of Rumania, now of Mexico, who with Mistress Magda has been trying off & on for two years to get into the U.S., hired a U.S. pressagent to give him a build-up as a democrat. The builder-upper: Manhattan's supersmart Russell Birdwell. Said a Birdwell associate: "The campaign hasn't been laid out yet." But to U.S. newspapers went the best photo of Magda in a publicitycoon's age.

Wives

Lieut. General George S. Patton Jr.'s novel-writing wife Beatrice (Blood of The Shark) disclosed that she had been getting poems from her hell-roaring husband, read a couple at Boston's annual Authors Club dinner. In the Woman's Home Companion appeared a Patton so-called poem, God of Battles. Opening quatrain:

From pride and foolish confidence,

From every weakening creed,

From the dread fear of fearing,

Protect us, Lord, and lead.

Sergeant Joe Louis' curvilinear wife Marva decided to go on the stage, prepared herself with Manhattan singing lessons, declared: "I feel if a woman has talent she ought to make the most of it." She further explained that the Louises have a number of properties and relatives to keep.

Jack Dempsey's newly divorced Hannah Williams made a singing comeback on Broadway after 13 years' absence and several days on a soup diet. Her latterday debut a thwacking nightclub success, the hungry redhead looked forward to a steak as soon as her nerves lay down again.

Ruth Mitchell, the late General "Billy's" sister, and by her own account an energetic dagger-bearer with the Chetniks (TIME, April 14, 1941), settled in Reno for a divorce. She has been separated for eleven years from her second husband, Stanley Knowles, a British schoolmaster.

Musicians

Pietro Mascagni, 79, Italy's famed one-hit composer (Cavalleria Rusticana), was reported bundled into the safety of Vatican City. He saw Cavalleria first produced 53 years ago; his last production was a 1935 flopera about Nero.

Frankie Trumbauer, famed hot-saxophoning crony of the late great cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, was a new test pilot at a Kansas City plane plant--putting B-25s through their first aerial paces.

Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, as interpreted by Artur Rodzinski and the New York Philharmonic, gladdened Herald Tribune Critic Virgil Thomson, who observed: "I suspect there may be some protests from adolescents about the removal of all traces of imminent sexuality from the work of a man who has been for so long their especial comfort. But I am sure that many musicians of my age will be glad to welcome [the composer] back to the adult fold "

Richard Wagner was finally readmitted to the repertory of the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra by the City Council, which decided to lift its four-year-old ban.

Politicos

Senator Hattie Caraway of Arkansas, dressed as usual in black, made a little history at 65, became the first woman to sit as president of the U.S. Senate. Henry Wallace had appointed her that for a day. She found it "quite a thrill."

Jacob S. Coxey, 89, leader of the famed "Coxey's Army" march of the unemployed on Washington in 1894, tireless political candidate ever since, started campaigning for mayor of Massillon, Ohio. He favored kindly treatment of drunks and stray dogs.

Sons & Daughters

Harry Leon Wilson Jr., son of the late novelist (Bunker Bean, Ruggles of Red Gap), got a two-year prison sentence in San Francisco for refusing to report for induction. He had said that his "humanitarian beliefs" forbade him to bear arms, but lost an appeal to the President for classification as a c.o.

Hope Davis Kehrig went from Maine to Manhattan to collaborate on a cine-biography of her late parents: Richard Harding Davis, the Great Profile of Journalism, and Musicomedienne Bessie McCoy, "the Yama Yama Girl." Young, bright-eyed Mrs. Kehrig and her husband, a French shipper, who left their home near Biarritz when the Nazis invaded France, live on a farm in Lincolnville (pop. 892).

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