People, Mar. 7, 1938

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

Few hours after handsome Anthony Eden resigned as Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Glasgow haberdashers marked down the Eden-style black Homburg from £1 to four shillings. In London’s West End, however, it still held its own. “It has too much character,” said one Mayfair hatter, “to be blown off by a political breeze.”

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg is a healthy old man. For many years he has worked hard, ridden a bicycle for exercise, worn white clothes the year around “to let sun-light through,” chewed each mouthful of vegetarian fodder 32 times. Editor of Good Health, author of Plain Facts (sex education via pictures of plant life), he is the inventor of flaked cereals manufactured by his brother, W. K. Kellogg. Dr. Kellogg once dictated (indoors) for 20 hours straight, dressed only in his summer underwear. Last week he celebrated his 86th birthday by stripping to a loin cloth, dictating (outdoors) to a secretary, having his picture taken (see cut).

True to his name, the late banker Percy Avery Rockefeller, nephew of John D. Rockefeller Sr., believed in taking every precaution. Although the last disastrous earthquake in New England was in 1755, in 1908 he built the walls of his Greenwich, Conn, home of reinforced concrete three feet thick, carried $1,000,000 earthquake insurance. Last week wreckers who had contracted to raze the house decided to use dynamite.

Operatic Tenor Giovanni Martinelli is a gourmet. Day after a delicious late supper of crab meat, the 52-year-old singer felt somewhat queasy, but did not allow his feelings to interfere with his duty: a matinee of Aida at Manhattan’sMetropolitan Opera. But in the famed aria “Celeste Aida,” Martinelli began edging toward the wings, speeding up the aria’s sluggish phrases. In the shadow of the wings he collapsed of indigestion. Next morning the New York Herald Tribune printed a column of Martinelli’s hints on Italian food.

A Hearst plane, carrying International Socialites Terence Conyngham Baron Plunket and Dorothé Lewis Barnato Lady Plunket to visit Publisher Hearst’s San Simeon Ranch, glided down to San Luis Obispo field in a heavy fog. The pilot overshot his mark, crashed. All three were killed. Next night, in Reno’s various clubs, including Club Fortune, Mrs. Lois Clarke de Ruyter Spreckels Clinton, her divorced sugar-heir husband, Adolph Bernard Spreckels Jr., and two friends toasted each other until all hours. Before dawn they boarded Mr. Spreckels’ private plane to fly to San Francisco. The plane rose 100 feet, nose-dived into a swamp. Results: a fractured pelvis for gay Mrs. Clinton, death for Spreckels’ professional pilot.

Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary James Roosevelt boarded the S. S. Manhattan to bid farewell to Joseph Patrick Kennedy, off for his new post as U. S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James. A young woman flounced up to him, sighed: “I’ve never kissed a Roosevelt and I’ve always wanted to.” Secretary James bent down, turned a cheek, blushed as she kissed him. Swept away by the crowd, she shouted: “I think you’re wonderful. I think your father is wonderful. All the Roosevelts are wonderful.”