Judgments

Earl Browder, onetime boss of the U.S. Communist Party, was arrested for spitting in a Bronx subway, pleaded guilty, paid a $2 fine.

Gael Sullivan, dashing 42-year-old executive director of the Democratic National Committee, dashed around a curve in Rhode Island, tangled fenders with an oncoming car. Booked for drunken driving, he pleaded not guilty.

From retirement, Admiral William F. ("Bull") Halsey had his say about the responsibility for the Pearl Harbor disaster. "In all my experience," he wrote in the Satevepost, "I have never known a Commander in Chief of any United States Fleet who worked harder, and under more adverse circumstances. ... I know of no officer . . . who could have done more than [Admiral Husband E.] Kimmel did."

The Working Class

Lady Iris Mountbatten, 27, pretty great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, cousin to George VI and Admiral Viscount Mountbatten, was back to shirtsleeves. Since arriving in the U.S. last October, her blonde ladyship has lent her name to a line of Indian textiles, to a dancing school, to a chewing-gum ad ("[Gum] is the height of good taste"). Now, she announced, she had a job, as plain Miss Mountbatten, in the Manhattan publicity offices of Columbia Pictures Corp., and liked the U.S. so much that she had decided to stay.

"I am an expensive speaker," warned New York City's ex-Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in a letter to Milwaukee's Town Hall. He sounded pretty chipper for a man who had just had a serious operation for chronic pancreatitis (in Manhattan's Mount Sinai Hospital). "I want $1,000. For that money you can get a lot of better speakers. If you still want me, sign here." Milwaukee signed.

The leader of Britain's House of Commons, Herbert Morrison, with his wife and 400 of his East Lewisham, London constituents, took a paddleboat down the Thames to Southend for a picnic, during which Politician Morrison played prestidigitator and performed a minor political hat trick (see cut).

Foreign Entanglements

About an hour before sailing time, Lord Inverchapel, Britain's Ambassador to the U.S., buttonholed a Queen Elizabeth steward. Hadn't his case of butter come aboard yet? His Excellency dashed back onto the dock, scurried three blocks to a grocery, came back lugging ten pounds of butter and eight of bacon--for friends at home, he explained.

Dorothy Kirsten, Met soprano, was left on the dock. She had come down, bag & handsome baggage, hoping to pick up a canceled reservation, but couldn't. "I feel . . . jilted," she pouted, adjusting her mink stole. Her pressagent said a pitiless reporter pried open one of her fortnighters to see if there was really something inside. There really was, the pressagent reported.

"I did it," snarled Lucky Luciano, exiled ex-superpimp of New York's vice rackets, to reporters in Rome. "Sure I had Bugsy Siegel rubbed out. ... If American papers say it's true, it's true. . . . Anything more?" he added bitterly. "No baby killings?" Later in the week, while sunning on the Isle of Capri, Lucky had additional cause for bitterness: some "Capri crooks" made off with his expensive camera. Muttered Luciano: "I'm terribly humiliated. . . ."

Domestic Issues

Joe Louis and his five-week-old heavyweight (15 1/2 Ibs.) son, Joe Jr., met for the first time. Joe said, "He's sure big." Joe Jr. put his thumb in his mouth.

Andrei Vishinsky, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, considered the woman question. A Canadian official reported that when Vishinsky refused to allow him to take his Russian wife home to Canada (a decision later reversed by Stalin), he said: "The duty of Russian women is to produce Soviet children. . . . Most women who marry foreigners are of the wrong type. . . . Women talk too much, and thus they give the wrong impression of the Soviet Union."

Margaret Sanger Slee, 63, who has borne the brunt of the American battle for birth control (and three children), advised Europe and Asia to stop having babies for ten years. Hungry countries should not "bring any more children into the world to starve," she proclaimed. Did that include England? "Definitely," she said, and took a plane to tell that country all about it.

The Specialist's Eye

Pierre Monteux, French-born conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, was seeing through a beefsteak, darkly. While watching his first baseball game in Hancock, Me. he was bopped in the eye by a foul ball. But along with the shiner he acquired wisdom: "Now I understand why baseball is so popular. Even when you only watch it, you are part of the game."

British-born Poet W. H. Auden, in a little prose flourish for Town & Country, admonished U.S. poets "to take topophilia [love of places] seriously. . . . Had I the talent . . . what lovely poems would I be writing now about Schrafft's Blue Plate Special, Stouffer's tea shop, the Brighton Beach line, the General Theological Seminary on Ninth Avenue at 21st Street. . . ."

In New Delhi, India, a 21-year-old U.S. merchant seaman named Pat Wellington walked right up to Mohandas K. Gandhi and asked: "Mr. Gandhi, what's all this trouble about over here?" Replied Gandhi: "It's the same disease that is affecting the whole world. I call it poison." Pat: "It seems to be worse in India." Gandhi: "Is it? I don't think [so]. . . . Perhaps life is now more secure in India than in the rest of the world." The Mississippi sailor came away impressed. Said he: "Bilbo always sent word that he was too busy."

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