Waiting for the Uh-Huh

One of the firmest tenets in Harry Truman's personal code is that the private lives of his womenfolk should remain private. Accordingly, the President had an unhappy time of it last week when a rumor curled around Washington that daughter Margaret was about to become engaged.

Keyholer Walter Winchell, claiming a "scoopee (we hope)," gave the rumor currency by a second-hand report that 34-year-old Frank Handy, son of the publisher of the Ypsilanti (Mich.) Press, "has the engagement ring in his pocket now, waiting for [Margaret's] uh-huh." Washington society began to envision a White House wedding;* some even speculated about its political usefulness.

However much it may have pained the President, some kind of statement was needed. Press Secretary Charley Ross made it. "Miss Truman," he said, "is positively not engaged." Asked a newsman: "Is she going to be?" "Not that I know of," replied Ross.

Strapping, affable Frank Handy, who now operates a printing shop in Ypsilanti, had had dates with Margaret when he worked for the State Department as an interpreter. The engagement rumor caught up with him at a newspaper convention in Chicago. Was it true? Handy said he would have to make "one or two long-distance calls" before he could comment. Later, after news of the White House denial reached Chicago, he said: "I think I'll stand on that."

An Ypsilanti jeweler and friend of the Handy family got in the last word. Said Jeweler Cyrus C. Jenks: "Can't be so. He hasn't bought a ring from me, and, as a matter of fact, hasn't even discussed it."

Last week the President also:

P: Paid his respects to the memory of Gandhi (by sitting patiently through a 65-minute service at which Novelist Pearl Buck contrasted Gandhi's principle of non-violence with that of the "stupid men" who created the atom bomb) and to the memory of Lincoln (by driving to the Lincoln Memorial, watching two aides place a wreath at the foot of the Emancipator's statue).

P: Got ready to leave this week on a five-day "goodwill visit" to the West Indies. Among the 28 U.S. newsmen accredited for the trip were two Negroes, P. Bernard Young Jr., of the Norfolk, Va. Journal Guide, and Llewellyn A. Coles of Columbus, Ohio, representing the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association. Young and Coles would be the first Negro reporters to accompany a President outside the U.S.

P: Announced that he has appealed to "certain interested governments"--presumably those of Saudi Arabia and Iraq--to exercise "restraint in dealing with the Palestine situation."

* The last White House wedding: the late Harry Hopkins and Mrs. Louise Macy on July 30, 1942. No President's daughter has been married there since 1914, when Eleanor Randolph Wilson married William Gibbs McAdoo.

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