People: Jul. 21, 1930

“Names make news.” Last week the following names made the following news:

Thomas Alva Edison at his home in West Orange, N. J. was the recipient of the Rotary International Service Medal “in appreciation of a life of service to science, the arts, and humanity.” While newsmen, photographers, waited after the ceremony he told a story: a man who suffered from a liver complaint went to Los Angeles for cure, recovered, started a sanitarium of his own. “Eighteen years afterward, the man died,” declared Inventor Edison, “but before they could bury him his liver had got so strong they had to kill it with a club.”

On his annual London visit King Alfonso XIII of Spain ate his meal in his favorite Spanish restaurant in Cavendish Square, dined on an annual dish, “Salad of the Gardens of Spain.” Concomitants: cold sliced chicken reposing on lemon-yellow hearts of lettuce, criss-crossed with ribbons of pimiento, topped by a mold of fruit salad—sliced oranges, large green Malaga grapes, thin strips of pineapple— all chilled and jelled in fruit juices. Gourmet Alfonso then finished the “Gardens” off with cubes of melon and succulent strawberries soaked in rare old sherry, enjoyed himself thoroughly.

John Philip Sousa, returning to the U. S. from England, started down a companionway of the S. S. Leviathan at Manhattan, tripped, sprawled five steps. Physicians took two stitches in a bloody but not serious cut on his head.

Elizabeth, 17, daughter of Senator Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg of Michigan, suffered lacerations on one hand and a bruised head when an automobile in which she was riding at Grand Rapids collided with another.

Glenn Hammond Curtiss, aviation pioneer & tycoon, defendant in a $1,000,000 patent suit brought against him by Herring-Curtiss Co. at Rochester, N. Y. was stricken suddenly with appendicitis. After four physicians had pronounced him in danger, the plaintiffs agreed to allow Defendant Curtiss to leave Rochester, go to Buffalo for an appendectomy, which, though badly needed, was successful.

Mrs. Eldridge Reeves Johnson, wife of the founder of Victor Talking Machine Co., on board a yacht anchored in the Johnson yacht basin at Bridgeboro, N. J., dropped a $2,000 bracelet overboard in 20 ft. of water, hired a diver to hunt for it.

Amy Johnson, England-to-Australia solo flyer (TIME, June 2 et seq.) boarding a ship for London, admitted she had been “bored to tears” by Australia’s adulation.

Bertram Blanchard (“Bert”) Acosta, co-pilot on the Byrd trans-Atlantic flight in 1927, was released from jail at Mineola (L. I.) after serving five and one-half months of a six-month term for non-support of his wife and two children, who met him at the gates, welcomed him, took him home.

Paul Mellon, son of Secretary Andrew William Mellon, arrived in the U.S. from Cambridge, England, where he has been studying in Clare College. During the summer vacation he will study business and banking under his father’s eye. Said he to Manhattan newshawks: “I do not think I would be a great success as a banker or industrialist. Commerce and banking hold no particular interest for me. . . . Other members of my family . . . are better fitted than I am to look after the family interests. I have certain ideas of my own about the business of book publishing . . . but I don’t think they will bear discussing now, especially since I have not been offered a job.” At Yale, Paul Mellon was on the staff of the Daily News, contributed to the Literary Magazine.

In England the British Home Office issued orders that if Earl Carroll, Broadway producer on trial last week for obscenities in his Vanities, should leave the U. S. for Great Britain, he must not be permitted to land. “Ridiculous!” snorted Brother Norman Carroll at rumors that Producer Carroll might flee the law and the land.

Rear Admiral Gary Travers Grayson, personal physician to President Wilson, returned from England, revealed that David Lloyd George had told him: “The outstanding figure in America politically, in my judgment, is Owen D. Young. I should not be surprised to see him Presi-dent before I die.”*

*David Lloyd George is 67.