People, May 22, 1933

Names make news. Last week these names made this news:

Sir Francis & Lady Wylie, making a round of visits to Rhodes Scholars in the U. S., were treated to something more than a meal at the formal dinner given in their honor at the University of Iowa. Harry Breene, Iowa City’s newly elected Republican Mayor, a onetime railroad ticket agent, slipped, sprawled headlong into a fountain. He crawled out spluttering. shook water on nearby guests, fled in confusion. Nonplussed, Jacob Van der Zee. Iowa’s Rhodes Scholarship committeeman, ordered the banquet to proceed. Local newspapers loyally suppressed their best story in years.

Canada’s Governor General Vere Brabazon Ponsonby, ninth Earl of Bessborough, in England on leave, tried to catch a drunken monkey on his Hampshire estate by swooping on it in an airplane, dropping a net. The monkey, which had taken to the Earl’s whiskey, escaped in the underbrush.

On the same speaking program as Dean Virginia Gildersleeve of Barnard College, at a W. O. N. P. R. luncheon in Manhattan was Funnyman Jimmy (“Schnozzle”) Durante, To make sure he “wouldn’t say nuttin outa line,” Durante had prepared his speech in advance. Excerpt: “I simply drove into the subject and when it comes to droving into a subject a Durante admits no peers. I’m not talkin’ at this luncheon from hearsay or hunger, but because I was asked to talk. While drovin’ and delvin’ into de subject of Prohibition, I digs up plenty of data— not disa and dat-a—but data, data. And what do I find out, I’m askin’ you? I finds out that I didn’t have anyt’ing to do wit’ passing dis Eighteent’ Amendment. … I finds out dat none of my friends has anyt’ing to do wit’ it. So I don’t see how dey ever could have passed it in de first place.”

President Henry Noble MacCracken

of Vassar College sees Yalemen about his campus every weekend. Interviewed by a Yale Newsman, said he: “We are now faced by the grave problem of extensive lack of manners in regard to liquor, and I dread the approach of beer for that reason. I resent unmannerly actions resulting from liquor, and I can neither forgive nor forget them. . . . Drinking is an art, and while in France it may be productive of good conversation, in Germany of music, and in England of social living, here it makes fools out of gentlemen. . . . We have arrived at a point where a decided stand should be taken, not by authorities, but by college men themselves, and I now rank Yale among the worst in this matter.”

Motoring to lecture at Cornell College (Mount Vernon, la.) Dr. Arthur Holley Compton, co-winner of the Nobel prize in physics for 1927 (cosmic rays), skidded on the wet pavement of the Lincoln Highway, crashed into another car, demolished his own, escaped serious injury. Hospitalized were his two companions of last summer’s cosmic ray junket to the Andes (TIME, March 28): his wife, with cuts about the body and head, a nail through her left hand, and their son Arthur Alan, with a lacerated scalp.

A big bay gelding tripped on a hurdle near Fox Point, L. I., throwing Harvey Dow Gibson, Manufacturers Trust Co.’s president, fracturing his clavicle.

James Bausch, Olympic decathlon champion, now an orchestra crooner, was set upon by thugs at night in Kansas City, banged on the head, robbed of his watch. In the public prints he challenged his assailants to try it again one by one.

Under an agreement made with Chicago World’s Fair officials, Al Simmons, Jimmy Dykes. “Red” Kress consented to try for a world’s catching championship by catching baseballs thrown to them from the top of a 625-foot Sky Ride tower (see p. 14). When a mathematician found that the balls would be traveling 136.80 miles an hour, would strike with an impact of 6,604 foot pounds, White Sox Owner Louis A. Comiskey refused to risk his players.

Fifty pretty girls paraded in Manhattan before a jury gathered to select New York’s 15 most beautiful mannequins to model clothes at the World’s Fair. When no decision was reached, someone suggested that the mannequins lift their skirts. Someone shouted, “Hike ’em up!” All the jurors tittered except Robert EcU mond (“Bobby”) Jones, famed stage set designer. Said he sternly: “We came to look, not to leer.”

When Pennsylvania’s U. S. Representative Charles Isaiah Faddis came home to his Washington apartment he opened the door on a young burglar. The burglar pointed a pistol at Representative Faddis, told him in a rich Southern accent to put up his hands. Faddis took one step forward, swung his fist against the burglar’s jaw, knocking him down, jarring him loose from his pistol. Mr. Faddis then called police who took the young man, one Clarence Roberts, 17, to the hospital.