Prince Chaps

"Prince" Mike Romanoff, Prohibition's most famed impostor, now a successful Hollywood restaurateur, was a pseudo-princely visitor in a 39th-floor suite of Manhattan's swank Hotel Pierre. East on an optimistic liquor-buying trip, the Prince discussed a 33-acre hotel he plans to build in Beverly Hills. Speaking of his former attitude toward the press, he remarked: "The morgue is the god of the Fourth Estate; there, sufficient multiplication of error is its verification as fact. The freedom of the press is the same as poetic license; it allows them to say anything. ... I assure you that I was born --where or when is supremely unimportant."*

Archduke Felix, third-string heir to nonexistent Austria-Hungary's nonexistent Habsburg throne, was royally feted by U.S. diplomats in Uruguay, less royally received by Uruguay's powerful, liberal Austro-Hungarian colony, /-

Ghosts

Amelia Earhart, lost in the Pacific in July, 1937, rose dubiously in the words of a Marshall Islands native: "A Jap trader named Ajima told me that an American woman flyer came down between Jaluit and Ailinglapalap Atolls. She was picked up by a Jap fishing boat [and] taken back to Japan."

"Iron Major" Frank W. Cavanaugh ("Old Cav"), late famed football coach of Boston College and Fordham, stalked across the columns of a Cassino casualty list: "Staff Sergeant David F. Cavanaugh, next of kin, Mrs. Florence E. Cavanaugh. ..." The sergeant (he is now recovering from face wounds) was "Dear Dave" of the Major's immortal letter home from the France of World War I. Wrote the Major to his son: ". . . You must always remember that your father came into this great war for the sake of all little children, and I know that you will, while I am gone, take good care of Mother and all the children. I can see you growing up . . . with shoulders back and head up, because that's what old Cav wants. . . ."

Abraham Lincoln stood gravely in Manhattan's U.S. District Court, Naturalization Division, as Raymond Massey raised his right hand. The Canadian-born actor later explained: "My home is here. My future is here. This country has been good to me, and I am proud and happy to assume the obligations as well as the privileges of citizenship."

Noisemakers

Martin Dies, redheaded, brassbound Congressman from Texas, vexed by Walter Winchell's sour comments on the "unAmerican activities" of Dies's Committee on Un-American Activities, took to the air to call the columnist a "tool [of the] smearbund," proceeded to do some smearing himself. Under Blue Network rules. Winchell could make no fresh charges until Dies answered his old ones. Dies didn't. They met in the studio after the smearcast, grinned like happy pseudo-warriors. Winchell: "Let's get together and tell some more lies about each other." Dies: "I'd have to go some to get even." Prime Minister Churchill, General Eisenhower and Lieut. General Omar Bradley took part in a shooting match during a two-day inspection of invasion troops. They whanged away with a Tommy gun and a .45-caliber pistol (the Prime Minister also tried out a rocket gun), settled down to a match with a rifle. Their average score: 56%.

In Demand

Sally Rand put an ad in the Lost & Found columns of the Tampa Tribune: "Will the person who took my fan from the Jewel Box please return the same to Max Plattner or me at the Tampa Terrace Hotel. Because of war conditions impossible to purchase more for the duration. Other fans broken beyond repair. These are my tools and I cannot work without same. It is of no value to you as a souvenir. It is irreplaceable to me. Please."

First Lieut. Jere Knight, from Pleasant Valley, Pa., widow of British-born Author Major Eric Knight and considered the handsomest WAC in London, averaged at least two dinner invitations an evening.

*"Supremely unimportant" probabilities: born Harry F. Gerguson in 1890 in 1) Vilna, Russia, or 2) Hillsboro, Ill., or 3) Manhattan's lower East Side. /- Other New World Habsburgs: Archduke Otto and youngest brother, Archduke Rodolphe in Washington; Mother Empress Zita and Archduchess Elizabeth Charlotte in Quebec; Archduchesses Adelaide and Charlotte in New York City.

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