People, May 10, 1937

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

Novelist Thomas Dixon, 73, who made a fortune from The Clansman (filmed as The Birth of a Nation) and other books, took a job as clerk of the Federal District Court at Raleigh, N. C., explaining he needed the salary as “a backlog of security.”

Arriving home in Alexandria, Va. without his house key, Labor Leader John Llewellyn Lewis spurned his chauffeur’s offer to climb in, scrambled up a ladder, boosted his 235 Ib. in a window.

California’s onetime Representative John Henry Hoeppel (“Colonel Hoopla”) was released on parole from Occoquan (Va.) Workhouse, where he was jailed last December for conspiracy to sell a West Point appointment for $1,000. Heading home to Arcadia, he announced that he would re-enter politics, “advocate good government and prison reform and fight the liquor business.”

On his 76th birthday having completed a half century on the public payroll, tobacco-chewing Chief Justice Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia’s Supreme Court, father of Georgia’s junior U. S. Senator, announced that he would seek re-election in 1940 because “a man is better informed when he is over 70.”

The Admiralty in London announced that two new battleships, for which contracts were recently awarded, will be named Jellicoe and Beatty after Britain’s two late, great Wartime admirals.

Motoring in the San Bernardino Mountains Cinemactor Edward Everett Horton skidded off the highway, miraculously escaped a 300-ft. drop into Lake Arrowhead when a tree blocked his plunging automobile 30 ft. down the embankment.

In Alajela, Costa Rica police arrested Ricardo Castro for playfully firing an unlicensed revolver into the air, wired his brother, Costa Rica’s President Leon Coiv tes Castro, for special instructions. Instructed President Castro: “Impose the prescribed penalty of 30 days’ imprisonment . . . without the option of a fine.” To pay for his first European trip, beginning next month, Alfred Emanuel

Smith contracted to cable five 1,000-word dispatches to McNaught Syndicate at “approximately $1 a word.”

Mrs. Huberta Potter Earle, wife of Pennsylvania’s Governor, sailed for the Coronation, having contracted to write three articles about it for J. David Stern’s New York Post, Philadelphia Record and Camden (N. J.) Courier, her earnings to go to charity.

On the closing night of Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus’ Manhattan run, The Wallendas safely completed the famed, heart-thumping act in which Helen Wallenda stands on the shoulders of her husband, who is standing on a chair balanced on a pole supported on the shoulders of two more Wallendas. who are seated on bicycles poised on a wire 60 ft. above the arena. Climbing down from her dizzy perch, Helen Wallenda reached the wire, fainted as she was stepping back on the platform, was seized in time’s nick by her partners, lowered to the ground by block & tackle.

Famed Mayor Andrew J. (“Bossy”) Gillis of Newburyport, Mass, was fined $20 for “arbitrarily and capriciously” holding up the city paychecks of the superintendent of schools and a girls’ physical director.

In Manhattan it was revealed that since last autumn Nikola Tesla, 80, eccentric, Lika-born electrical inventor, had been paying Western Union to send a messenger boy to the Public Library promenade twice daily, scatter 5 Ib. of corn for the pigeons.*

In the first China Clipper transpacific air mail to Hongkong, Cinemactress Luise Rainer (The Good Earth) sent Mme Chiang Kai-shek six peach trees.

-Another Western Union service: throwing rice at weddings.