People, Aug. 3, 1936

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

As Albany’s Charter Day parade came to a momentary halt, a moppet in white scampered up to New York’s Governor Herbert Henry Lehman, asked: “Will you please sign your name on my pants?” While the crowd gawped, Governor Lehman squiggled his signature across the boy’s bottom.

Off from Manhattan for three weeks in Europe, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was asked if she did not regard the domestic labor situation as critical. Sniffed she: “If I did, I would not be leaving.” In Washington, meanwhile, Artist George Biddle put finishing toucheson his fresco for the new Department of Justice Building called: The Sweatshop and Tenement of Yesterday Can Be the Life Planned with Justice of Tomorrow. Some 600 feet square, Artist Biddle’s didactic mural is filled with the portraits of real people.One of them, a sweatshop seamstress in a smock (see cut) has the face of Madam Secretary Perkins.

Ill lay: Secretary of War George Henry Dern, of complications from his attack of influenza last April, in a Washington hospital; Chairman Jesse Jones of the Reconstruction Finance Corp., of influenza, in Rawlins, Wyo.; James Ramsay MacDonald, of an infection, in London; John Jacob Raskob, of neuritis, in Idaho Falls, Idaho; Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor General of Canada, of a gastric ailment, in Quebec (see p. 9).

Invited to Europe by onetime (1919) President of Hungary Alexander Garbai, now on a U. S. lecture tour, Alfred Emanuel Smith snorted: “What! me in Europe? I’ll wait until they put a bridge across.”