THE CABINET: Gerontogenesis

Just a year ago, Harold LeClair Ickes. then 64, slipped away from Washington, sailed to Ireland and there, in Dublin, made screaming headlines for London papers by marrying titian-haired Jane Dahlman, 25, of Milwaukee. Last week at a press conference the press-baiting Secretary of the Interior blushed handsomely when asked if Washington gossip was true, that he was once more to become a father (in September).* Replied forthright Mr. Ickes: “I have hopes. It’s great to be in public life, isn’t it? … What we need is a little more liberty from the press.”

*By his first marriage to Anna Wilmarth Thompson, who died in a motor crash in 1935, Mr. Ickes has a son, Raymond, now 26, who last month got a job in the U. S. Attorney’s office, Manhattan. He had a stepson, Wilmarth, who committed suicide in 1936. He and the first Mrs. Ickes also had two foster-children: a girl who is now Mrs. ReQua Bryant of Evanston, Ill., and Robert H. Ickes, 25, onetime WPA clerk, now employed by Duquesne Light Co. in Pittsburgh, who last week eloped with Marcelle Charlotte Levine, 19, to Lisbon, Ohio, where they were married.