Family Affairs In Paris, Garry Davis, 26, solemn-minded son of bouncy Bandleader Meyer, had had time to think things over. It had been three months since he renounced his U.S. citizenship to underline his enthusiasm for world government (TIME, June 7). After a talk with his sister last week he explained why he might come back to the U.S. (the State Department will probably not be too tough about it): "It is not my purpose to create doubt and confusion."

In Southampton, N.Y., Constance Murray, 19, blonde debutante granddaughter of the late millionaire Inventor Thomas E. Murray (she is also a sister of Mrs. Alfred G. Vanderbilt and a cousin of Mrs. Henry Ford II),* had thought things out and come to a major decision. Renouncing worldly goods (her grandfather left $10,000,000) and worldly pleasures (a Manhattan debut last winter and a two-month tour of Europe this summer), she announced that on Sept. 15 she would enter the Convent of the Holy Child, Sharon Hill, Pa., to become a nun.

In Los Angeles, Curtis Boettiger, 18, famed during the '30s as White House grandchild Buzzie Dall, now an assistant radio producer, came down with polio, an affliction not unfamiliar to his mother, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger. He was still hopeful that he would be able to act as secretary to his grandmother when the U.N. meets in Paris later this month. His doctors described the attack as definitely "a mild case."

In Los Angeles, Charlie Chaplin, who will be 60 in April, and fourth wife Oona, 23, were expecting their third child this spring, according to Gossipist Louella Parsons. That would make Charlie's fifth (not counting Joan Berry's daughter, whom he supports but denies).

The Working Class

Sergeant Alvin C. York, most celebrated U.S. hero of World War I and chairman of his local draft board during World War II, prepared to go back to work as chairman of his local board for the new draft.

Winthrop Aldrich, who is more accustomed to the starchy formality of banking (he is chairman of the board of Chase National), did fine at a short job in a new setting. When his estate at Darkharbor, Me. was threatened by a forest fire, Winthrop joined 200 other summer people and natives, sweated manfully through more than three hours of broom-and-shovel work with the mercury at 94DEG.

After an eleven-year interruption, Helen Keller was back at an old job in Tokyo. She wound up a five months' tour of institutions for the deaf & blind in New Zealand and Australia, flew into Japan, at General MacArthur's request, to raise a fund for blind Japanese.

His job in Japan completed (TIME, Aug. 16), retiring Lieut. General Robert Eichelberger debarked at San Francisco, acknowledged a salute with an expression that suggested thoughts of the somber past (see cut). His wife, with a happy gasp as she spotted a friend on the dock, seemed more concerned with the pleasant present.

His job on his 1,088-page historical novel, Remembrance Rock, completed, Author-Farmer Carl Sandburg took some time off for his other big interest. A photographer spotted him on his Flat Rock, N.C. farm exchanging appraising glances with Alison, a champion milk-producing goat.

Writing had come hard to Ralph Waldo Emerson. "The sun has not yet illuminated the arch of heaven nor begun to display his brilliant beams," he wrote to an aunt in 1816, in a letter just found tucked away in the floor of an old Concord, Mass. house. "This I suppose is the time to feel inspired and this the time I shall improve to write to you." He finally had to wind it up, because "night with sable wings approaches and compels me to bid adieu." He was 13 at the time.

Another litterateur, Mae West, was sued for $100,000 by two writers who claimed that she swiped their stuff for her play, Catherine Was Great. Unruffled, Mae was putting on a good act in court, with the prosecution lawyers as her straight men. What was her first literary effort? "Sex," she said, deadpan. Why couldn't she remember the sequence of Catherine's 300 lovers? "I can't remember the order. No woman could." Well, why didn't she put all the lovers in the play? "Look," she replied, "I did the best I could in a couple of hours' entertainment. That many men would just clutter up the stage." The judge had to warn the audience not to laugh or applaud. Mae gave the rest of the cast an approving eye, told them: "You're doin' all right. The first readin' was terrific."

Plus & Minus

An oft-expressed wish of William Butler Yeats will be fulfilled, now that the war is over. His body, buried these nine years in the south of France where he died, will be taken home (in an Eire destroyer) and reburied in a grave in Drumcliffe Cemetery, County Sligo.

Because he had barged into another driver's right of way, causing a collision a month ago, Supreme Court Justice Wiley B. Rutledge was fined $10 and costs in Denver.

After a heart-to-heart talk, his legislature formally quit suggesting abdication to the sporting Gaekwar of Baroda (TIME, Aug. 23), who, it said, had managed to run up an estimated $10 million tab on a six-week spree. The chastened gem collector agreed to grant "complete, responsible government" to his 3,000,000 people, and to pay back whatever the state's ministry decided he had spent.

Trying to regain the Gold Cup he won in 1946, Bandleader-Motorboater Guy Lombardo wound up in the choppy Detroit River just after the start of the first heat. He swung sharply to avoid a rival, flipped over, sailed 15 feet through the air, escaped with a broken arm and bruises. His $100,000 speedboat, Tempo VI, was almost a total loss; experts thought they might be able to salvage the engine.

Conductor Artur Rodzinski, haggard and unshaven, arrived in Salzburg three days late on his concert rehearsal schedule. Explaining his delay, he told friends that he and Moral Re-Armer Frank Buchman, attending an Oxford Group conference in Caux-sur-Montreux, Switzerland, had had a furious, long-drawn-out quarrel (Rodzinski did not say what about). Off to Rome on the next leg of his concert tour, the conductor asked a TIME correspondent to "spare me the doubtful honor of ever again calling me 'ardent Buchmanite.'"

The late Novelist Thomas Wolfe was more popular than ever in Asheville, N.C., the town he described as "Altamont" in Look Homeward, Angel. A group of the townspeople, calling themselves the Wolfe Memorial Association, set out to raise money for the restoration and preservation of "that bloody barn," the old Wolfe boardinghouse.

Adolf Hitler was still popular in Germany. His face made its first postwar magazine cover appearance on the U.S.-managed picture weekly, Weekend (to boom an article titled Is Hitler Still Alive?). The 20,000 copies allotted to Germans were snapped up like unrationed chocolate (some newsstands were begging for more after 20 minutes), sold out the first day.

William Shakespeare was still popular in Russia. The U.S.S.R. is the only place where he is universally appreciated, explained a poem in the Russian weekly, Ogonek: "Shakespeare's spiritual home is in Russia."

* Among prominent Roman Catholic families in the U.S., the Murray clan (four large related Murray families and one McDonnell family) ranks in importance with the Raskobs of New York and the Kennedys of Boston.

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