“Names make news.” Last week these names made this news:
To settle a $29,900 delinquent tax bill on 40 acres in Brooklawn, N. J., rich Andrew William Mellon, onetime Secretary of the Treasury, offered 50¢ on the dollar. For a similar bill of $90,000, nearby Belmawr accepted his check for $45,000.
North Tarrytown, N. Y. received a check for $10,000, half the tax due from its largest taxpayer, John Davison Rockefeller Sr. It, was the first time he had failed to pay the taxes on his Pocantico Hills estate in one sum.
Virne Beatrice (“Jackie”) Mitchell
is the name of the left-handed girl baseball pitcher who two years ago struck out “Babe” Ruth and Lou Gehrig of the New York Yankees in an exhibition game at
Chattanooga. Now 19, only girl in professional men’s baseball, Pitcher Mitchell was taught in Memphis, Tenn. by her next-door neighbor, Arthur C. (“Dazzy”) Vance of the National League (long with Brooklyn, now St. Louis). She has made as much as $500 a week in exhibition games. Last week she signed to pitch at $1,000 a month for the able, bewhiskered House of David team of Benton Harbor, Mich., which tours the East and Midwest in sum mer, carries a $40,000 lighting rig for night games. Four hours before a scheduled court hearing to determine whether he was too feeble-minded to stand trial, Joseph Wright Harriman, 66-year-old indicted Manhattan banker, disappeared, second time in two months (TIME, May 29). While his wife and daughter, who were to testify, waited in Mrs. Harriman’s apartment, he slipped out of the service en trance of his sanatorium, took a cab to a Hudson River ferry. Back & forth between Manhattan and New Jersey, Banker Harriman rode six times on different boats, gazing moodily at the water. Twice he started to climb over the rail, was hauled back by deckhands who failed to recognize him until hours later when they heard of the search. They last saw him driving away from the Manhattan pier in a cab.
An automobile crash in San Antonio, Tex. injured plump, benevolent Edgar B, Davis, rubber & oil tycoon who spent $1,500,000 to keep the play The Ladder going for 22 months in 1927-28 because he believed in its “message” about transmigration of souls.
Errett Lobban Cord, automobile & aviation tycoon, was watching an airplane motor on a test block in a Los Angeles shop. The propeller snapped, sheared through a wire netting, knocked him unconscious. At a soaring meet at Elmira, N. Y., Richard Chichester du Pont, 24, son of Vice President Alexis Felix du Pont of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. took his father for his first hop in a sailplane. A shift in the wind whipped the heavy glider into a ground loop, spilled it into a clump of bushes. Pilot du Pont & parent were unscratched.
As a protest against German antiSemitism, Henry Ludwig Mond, Baron Melchett, British chemical tycoon, half-Jewish member of the Church of England, embraced Judaism in a liberal London synagog.
U. S.-born Alfred Chester Beatty,
Rhodesian copper tycoon (Roan Antelope), announced he would become a citizen of England, where he has lived for 25 years.
In Washington, Mrs, William Edgar
Borah, wife of Idaho’s Senior Senator, who nearly died last year of psittacosis (parrot fever), offered her blood to save a psittacosis victim in Baltimore. But blood had already been supplied by Dr. Charles Armstrong, psittacosis expert whose blood serum had saved Mrs. Borah.
Because she increased her income by selling cosmetics, famed Author Colette, onetime actress, divorced wife of Henry de Jouvenel, Ambassador to Rome, was refused promotion from Officer to Commander in France’s Legion of Honor.
The distinguished French Academic des Sciences Morales et Politiques, whose ranks heretofore included only two foreigners (Belgium’s late great Cardinal Mercier and her King Albert), elected Rudyard Kipling a “foreign associate.” Poet Kipling’s works are practically unknown to French poetry lovers, but during the war he wrote violent pro-Ally propaganda which appeared in French newspapers. His election was clinched by a new Kipling book. Souvenirs of France (yet to appear in the U. S.) which flays Germany, exalts the French. When he heard of his new honor, rheumatic Poet Kipling broke his non-broadcasting rule, hobbled to a microphone in London.
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