Comings & Goings

Sunday-School Teacher Barbara Jo Walker, Miss America of 1947, left New York by plane for Johannesburg, where she will help pick a Miss South Africa.

Milton Reynolds, Chicago's high-flying penmaker, and globe-circling Bill Odom took off from Honolulu. The only purpose of their trip, they said, was to Look for a hitherto undiscovered world's tallest mountain, somewhere near the headwaters of the Yangtze. For the benefit of Chinese Communists, they added firmly that they were not looking for uranium.

Gregory Peck and Whodunit Writer Leslie (The Saint) Charteris, with their wives, were safe & sound in Miami after weathering a mild (46 m.p.h.) blow. Battling through rough water in their cruiser Tonga they had to anchor offshore and radio the Coast Guard to come and get them.

Eamon de Valera, no longer Prime Minister of Eire but still a popular Irishman in the U.S., arrived in New York with a full schedule before him. He had accepted with pleasure an invitation to the celebrations of both San Francisco and Los Angeles on St. Patrick's Day, would also attend the annual St. Patrick's Day banquet of Chicago's Irish Fellowship Club, postponed until March 20 so that he would be able to make it.

Slim, blonde Conchita Cintron, 25, girl bullfighter, paused at LaGuardia Airport on her way from Lisbon to ring engagements in Peru. Born of U.S. parents in Chile, 121-lb. Conchita, who claims 828 bulls in her eight-year career, told reporters that she would not get married just yet because she "still enjoys' fighting too much."

Thoughts & Afterthoughts

Gilda Gray on the 2,000 fan letters, many of them proposals of marriage, which she has received by mail in the past two weeks:* "I'm. interested in all of them. You never can tell. Hell, I'm too feminine to be alone."

Bernard Shaw on schoolkids' homework: "If they required such overtime, day in and day out all the year round, from the Prime Minister, the Lord Chief Justice or the Astronomer Royal, they would be certified for a mental hospital. It would kill me in a week."

Henry Ford II, speaking in Stockholm on the U.S.S.R.: "We do not want to do business with Russian-dominated countries." He later admitted that the Ford Motor Co. still owns a plant in one of the countries behind the curtain, and intends to liquidate it. He added vaguely: "I forget which country."

Lana Turner on romance: "I have dinner with a fellow a couple of times and I'm a home-breaker."

Claire Chennault--en route to the U.S. (with his Chinese bride of eleven weeks) --on aid to China: "I am going to urge military aid to China at once, and in sufficient volume to stop the Communists. I don't care how much it takes. ... It should be enough to stop the Communists."

Arts & Crafts

Stripper Georgia Sothern, who had been warned by the cops to slow down (TIME, March 8), ground to a halt at Manhattan's Club Samoa. Police who came back to catch her act revoked her cafe working permit. Georgia amplified her own interpretation of her art: "[The cops] claimed I did grinds--grinds is when a girl stands still and rolls her hips all around. I didn't do grinds. . . . What I do is a takeoff on the old-style bumps. ... A burlesque on burlesque, see? Strictly for the laughs and no panting."

Mrs. Fred Astaire took a look at sister-in-law Adele's new mink coat and commiserated: "Too bad it isn't female." A little research on mink sex convinced Adele (Mrs. Kingman Douglass) that the skins of female minks really are more delicate and finer looking. "My sister-in-law wasn't unfriendly," she explained. "Her coat is more beautiful than mine, and . . . hers is female, mine. male. Now I hate mine and I'm going to have it cut up for lining a cloth coat so's I can sit on it."

Six tapestry chair seats, stitched up by Queen Mary and donated to a British dollar-raising drive called Women's Home Industries Ltd., brought $10,000 at auction in Manhattan.

As associate editor of Harper's, Best-selling Novelist Merle Miller (That Winter) waxed indignant at a rival, Bestseller Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms). At a Manhattan forum on publishers' methods, Miller took pained exception to a ripely precious publicity photograph (TIME, Jan. 26) of a pensive, reclining Capote peering up through artfully disarranged bangs. If the idea of printing that particular photograph was Capote's, Miller fumed, it was "deplorable"; if his publisher's, "disgraceful."

Tennist Bill Tilden turned dramatist with a play about a mental-case mother, a kidnaped child and a brother-sister love affair. Called New Shoes, it opened in Los Angeles. The Times pronounced it "malodorous, but. . . delicate enough and . . . well written."

The life & times of Radio Songbird Jane Froman, 30, continued to read like a story with happy chapter endings. "I'll never forget him," she had said in 1943 of Copilot John Curtis Burn when he kept her from drowning in the Tagus River after the Lisbon Clipper crash that broke his back and left her crippled (TIME, March 8, 1943). Last week, 25 leg operations and a divorce (from ex-Radio Singer Don Ross) later, she announced that she would marry rugged, 33-year-old Flyer Burn. She would have to be on crutches for the ceremony, but Jane hoped that after another operation this summer she could throw them away.

The Laurels

The Ulster-Irish Society of New York awarded Eleanor Roosevelt its medal-- restricted to Orangemen and their descendants* --"for notable service to the American nation."

For his promotion of racial and religious amity, Columnist Billy Rose got B'nai B'rith's award for outstanding journalism.

Ex-Postmaster General Frank C. Walker was named the outstanding Roman Catholic layman of 1948 by Notre Dame University, which pinned its Laetare Medal on him.

Airman Jimmy Doolittle, wartime commander of the Eighth Air Force, got the American Legion's General William E. Mitchell Award and a plaque for his "outstanding individual contribution to military aviation progress."

Marcel Pagnol, French playwright (Topaze) and moviemaker (The Baker's Wife, The Well-Digger's Daughter), who joined the immortals of the French Academy last year, was appointed Portuguese Consul in Monaco. His new duties would not-be too demanding; he promptly announced plans to visit the U.S.

-Prompted by mention of her in A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER, TIME, Feb. 23.

*Mrs. Roosevelt's maternal great-grandfather, Valentine G. Hall, was born in Ulster.

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