Retired with farewell salutes this week after 36 years of service: the Navy’s most decorated (Medal of Honor, D.S.C., five . Silver Stars, three Purple Hearts, etc.) medic, Rear Admiral Joel Thompson Boone, 61, medical adviser to Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. Retired after 40 years: Lieut. General Clarence R. Huebner, 62, blunt commander of the 1st Division, former commanding general, U.S. Army in Europe, who started his Army career as a private. The Air Force granted a retirement request from Major General Orvil A. Anderson, 55, relieved as commandant of the Air War College, after an interview in which he proposed a strike-first policy to “break up Russia’s five A-bomb nests in a week.”
After two months of relaxing at private and public parties, it was back to work again for Madam Minister Perle Mesta, who sailed off to Luxembourg with 1,500 pairs of woolen mittens and other Christmas gifts for orphans.
The Secret Service in Washington let it be known that Vice President Alben Berkley no longer travels about alone. He has agreed to have four bodyguards “if they keep out of sight.” Another new Secret Service customer: Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
For his first visit out of his country since its founding, Israel’s Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who is also a Greek scholar, bought plane tickets for a short rest in Greece and a look at some archeological diggings.
Getting an early start, U.N.’s Dr. Ralph J. Bunche boarded a plane for Stockholm, where he will pick up his Nobel Peace Prize next week.
Photographer Edward Steichen, 71, veteran of two wars, was off on a 30-day camera-clicking tour of duty with the Navy in the Pacific.
Fancy Free
Baseball’s Leo (“The Lip”) Durocher gave Columnist Earl Wilson a dead-end kid’s impression of what it is like to share a transcontinental plane seat with Greta Garbo: “She sits next to me and I notice that she’s so nervous that her hand is shaking on the arm of the seat… It was her first trip … I guess she’d never had any bum talk to her before like I did. She got calm . . . That Greta’s wonderful. When you see her up close, she’s really got a beautiful kisser. Real sharp chiseled features.”
When reporters asked for a comment on his chat with President Truman, Myron C. Taylor, former White House envoy to the Vatican, commented: In these days, “there is altogether too much talk about everything.”
In Baltimore, Poet Robert Frost was asked why he liked to write eclogues, said: “Well, I guess I write ’em same as I chew tobacco, because the women can’t do it.”
To a meeting of the Royal Anthropological Institute in London, Julian (On Living in a Revolution) Huxley gave his view of man’s dilemma: “To all people at some time, and to many people much of the time, the world is an unpleasant and even horrible place, and life a trial and even a misery. Little wonder that many ideologies, religious or otherwise, are concerned with providing escapes from the unpleasant reality.”
Filed for probate last week: the will of Missouri-born Writer Agnes Smedley, workhorse propagandist for the Chinese Communists. She had ordered that her ashes “be laid to rest” in Communist China, that her U.S. Government bonds and royalties from published works go to General Chu Teh, commander of Red China’s armies.
Men like Ohio’s Senator Robert A. Toft, who try to cover their bald spots by combing up a fringe of hair, are known as “slicker-overers,” charged a fellow Republican Senator. Said Colorado’s Eugene D. Millikin, who is billiard-bald himself: “How can you get any place in politics if you deceive people?”
In Paris, Littérateur André (The Counterfeiters) Gide, 81, motored to the Comédie Française to sit in a red velvet seat and mastermind every rehearsal of the first stage adaptation of one of his novels, Lafcadio’s Adventures, written 36 years ago. A satire about a motiveless murder, the play is due to open next week.
Entrances & Exits
Out of the hospital and home for convalescence came two daughters of California’s Governor Earl Warren. Nina (“Honey Bear”), 17, had had a bout with polio, but her doctor predicted that she would be hale & hearty after a year and a half of treatment. Dorothy, 19, faced a week in bed after cracking some ribs and puncturing a lung in an auto accident.
In Detroit, with their costumes, scenery and props all snowbound in Pittsburgh, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne followed through the-show-must-go-on tradition, played I Know My Love in street clothes on a bare stage.
Leaving an understudy to play gold-digging Lorelei Lee for a couple of weeks, mop-haired Carol (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) Channing hustled off to a Manhattan hospital to have her tonsils out.
When Cole Porter’s new musical, Out of this World, opened in Boston, orders, went out to tidy up the lyrics and dress up the cast, particularly Venus, who wore only four white doves. The producers agreed, grumbling: “We regret that the Boston censor has found reason to be shocked by the authentic Greek bacchanalian atmosphere.”
If she appeared weary before her Baltimore concert, said Coloratura Soprano Lily Rons, blame it on a youngster in the adjoining hotel room. “I, who need eight and nine hours of rest. What do I get? A crying baby and two hours of sleep.”
When a group of highstrung American Legionnaires in Dallas heard that Mezzo-Soprano Jennie Tourel was scheduled to be soloist in the cantata Alexander Nevsky, a eulogy to a 13th Century Russian patriot, they stirred up civic feeling against the lyrics. Everybody was happy after the word “Russians” was changed to “people,” “Russian soil” to “fertile soil,” “Russian valor” to “native valor.”
In London, old Storyteller Somerset Maugham, 76, took a realistic backward look: “I am very glad to be old because I know that we had a better life before 1914 than we have ever had since. When I look at my grandchildren, I anxiously wonder what sort of life lies before them.”
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