People, Mar. 15, 1937

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

Elliott Roosevelt (second son), struck oil (500 bbl. a day) on the Ed Hughes ranch in Crane County, Tex. which he leased with Elder Brother James, John Daniel Hertz of Yellow Cab Co., Poloist Tommy Hitchcock.

Visiting a Parliament of Religions in Calcutta while his monoplane underwent repairs at Nagpur, Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh heard himself compared by Indian Poetess Sarojini Naidu to Buddha, Galileo and “other spiritual figures of the world,” flushed scarlet.

From a wheelchair in Chicago Explorer Osa Johnson resumed lecturing less than a week after witnessing the burial at Chanute, Kans. of her husband Martin, killed in a Western Air Express crash in January that nearly cost her life (TIME, Jan. 25). Declared she, still pained by a brace on her right leg: “I want to get back to the jungles. I could never stand it to stay here in civilization very long. So can’t we talk about lions or elephants or orangutans or a beautiful sunset in Borneo?”

Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe of Callander, Ont. protested proposed reduction of his salary as town medical officer from $75 to $40 a year. Declaring that he had performed 75 smallpox and 800 diphtheria inoculations last year besides attending the Dionne quintuplets, whose publicity has made him well off, Dr. Dafoe demanded $350 a year: was given $150.

Iowa patriots who revere the Scott County birthplace of “Buffalo Bill” were shocked to hear that the Bologna newspaper Resto del Carlino had “discovered” that Colonel William Frederick Cody was really Giovanni Tambini, born in Barbigarezzo about 1840 and “a typical Italian … full of Fascist courage and daring.”

One-eyed Poet Gabriele d’Annunzio solemnly informed General Achille Starace, Fascist party secretary general, that he was making “final tests” on a powerful chemical of his own devising so that he could dissolve himself. Declaimed the author of A Hundred and a Hundred and a Hundred and a Hundred Pages from the Secret Book of Gabriele d’Annunzio, Attempter of Death: “I am an old man and sick, so I am going to hasten my end . . . disdaining to agonize between bed sheets.” Amended the 74-year-old eccentric’s long-time friend Luisa Bacarra: “He was speaking in rhetorical rather than literal terms.”

To the side of Winston Churchill’s 18-year-old Nephew Esmond Romilly, fighting with the Spanish Loyalists since last December, sped the Hon. Jessica Lucy Freeman-Mitford, 19, beauteous fifth daughter of Baron Redesdale. When fuming Lord Redesdale moved to have Daughter Jessica made a ward in chancery so that it would have been a crime for any Englishman to marry her without the consent of the High Court, Esmond and Jessica coolly announced that that was all right with them, “as what is marriage but a mere convention?” A British consular official was sent after the couple, instructed to “marry them if necessary, but at all events to bring them home.”

Venturing out one night last week without the bodyguards who have protected him since he evicted and indicted 345 sit-down strikers from the Douglas Aircraft factory, bugle-nosed, War-wounded, grandstanding District Attorney Buron Rogers Fitts, 42, missed death in suburban Los Angeles when an assassin’s bullet, fired from another auto, shattered his windshield, tore a channel half the length of his left forearm.