Mind Over Matter

From the White House in Washington, Harry Truman, still playing host to Iran's Premier Mossadegh and trying to mediate the British-Iranian oil squabble, remembered to send "felicitations and sincere good wishes" to the Shah of Iran on his 32nd birthday.

In Manhattan, after a period of long and careful study, a panel of judges including Dr. Ralph Bunche selected a model for what will become the first "anthropologically correct Negro doll." Behind the project, wrote Eleanor Roosevelt, a hearty supporter of the plan, was "the idea that a really beautiful Negro doll would give joy to the Negro children and add to their self-respect. The white child in finding herself unconsciously choosing a doll without any regard to color will forget discrimination."

Washington Columnist Evelyn Peyton Gordon, who keeps her readers up to date on the smaller issues of the capital, published a paragraph of unclassified intelligence. Announced was the fact that Representative Frances Bol+on of Ohio, whose hair used to be brown, then white, then blue, now wears it brown again.

The New York Times's Book Columnist David Dempsey duly noted and reported that Poet T. S. Eliot at the age of 63 has optimistically ordered a 25-year subscription to the London publication, Adam International Review.

In Houston last December, when his second daughter Glennalee, 17, eloped with her young highschool sweetheart George Pontikes, the son of an immigrant Greek cobbler, Millionaire Glenn McCarthy flew into the classic fatherly rage. By last week, however, time and normal events had softened the blow, and photographers caught the terrible-tempered oilman in the classic pose of a new grandfather. Glennalee had presented him with his first granddaughter. Her name: Glennalee McCarthy Pontikes.

The Wagging Tongue

Talk turned to politics when Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois and Wisconsin's Governor Walter Kohler Jr. sat down to lunch in. Chicago. "Will you find it difficult to support Mr. Truman if he is a candidate?" the Governor asked. "If Taft is your candidate, then I'll go all out for Truman," Douglas answered. "And if Eisenhower is the Republican candidate against Truman?" Said the Senator, after a pause: "In that event, I think I'll probably go up to Canada and finish my book."

Invited to be guest of honor at a luncheon of the Cliff Dwellers, a Chicago men's club, Architect Frank Lloyd Wright was asked if he wanted to invite some of his old friends as fellow guests. "No," said Wright, "the last time I was there, I saw all my old friends, and they all looked feeble and tired. They made me so depressed I went to bed for a month when I got home."

Music Czar James Petrillo announced that he was enjoying his vacation in Honolulu, and particularly the comforts of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Said he: "I slept in basements most of my life, and I don't intend to do it again if I can help it."

In Chicago, Abbe Lane, featured singer with the Xavier Cugat band, and the cause of a separate maintenance suit filed by Mrs. Cugat, told the court her side of the story. Mrs. Cugat had charged that detectives found the singer "naked as a jay bird" in a hotel room with her rumba-loving husband. Not so, said Abbe. She had used the room simply to make a quick change for a midnight movie with the boss. When the detectives burst in, she said, "I had panties on and slippers." but "no brassiere, not with that gown." And how was Mr. Cugat dressed? "Well, he wasn't doing calisthenics in my room, so he was perfectly dressed."

Kudos & Yoohoos

A St. Louis shoe factory welcomed a new mail-order customer: Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie, who sent along an outline of his feet and ordered a pair of brown "cowboy-type strollers with a silver-toned buckle" and a pair of black winged-tip dress shoes (size 7^ C) which he had seen advertised in a U.S. magazine.

Visiting one of the factories in the Buffalo, N.Y. area, Prince Sultan Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia found just what he wanted on a jukebox assembly line. He picked out six of the biggest mechanical marvels and had them shipped home to his palace.

Results of the annual diplomatic pheasant shoot on the summer estate of French President Vincent Auriol were posted again in Rambouillet. Winner: U.S. Ambassador David K. Bruce, with 70 birds. The host's bag: 41 birds.

Andrews Field, Md. was the scene of a happy father & son reunion between General Mark Clark and his son William, 26, who had flown home from Korea for convalescence in Walter Reed hospital after being wounded for the third time. After a smile for the cameras, there was a round of congratulations: to the general for being nominated U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, to William for wearing the new gold leaves of a major, a battlefront promotion after his action on Heartbreak Ridge.

Author William Faulkner, winner of the 1949 Nobel prize for literature, was summoned to New Orleans, where the French Consul General presented him with the Order of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

Local Communists in the village of Vallauris, France, opened their purses to pay for a 70th birthday party honoring Fellow Member Pablo Picasso. From Paris, France's No. 2 Communist, Jacques Duclos, sent greetings and added that the party "is proud to count in its ranks the great artist that you are."

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