People, Jan. 15, 1940

Elected first president of the Harvard Club of Chungking, temporary capital of China, was owl-eyed, moon-faced T. V. Soong (’15), “China’s Smartest Banker” and Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law.

After a 54-year argument, a Boston, Mass, sculptor, 78-year-old Cyrus E. Dallin. was finally commissioned to cast in bronze a statue of Paul Revere. One of Sculptor Dallin’s appeals: Listen, my children, and you shall hear Of the ignoble failure of Boston to rear The greatest creation of my long career, The equestrian statue of Paul Revere. A citizens’ committee of well-known men Selected my model from a competition of ten On July the Fourth, eighteen hundred and ighty-five. The committee, of which not one now is alive, Made a contract with me all legally signed To erect in Copley Square my statue designed To honor the hero whose cry of alarm Aroused every Middlesex village and farm For the country folk to be up and to arm. Alas! No statue now graces Copley Square. ‘Tis enough to make even an angel swear, But being only human I refuse to despair. And I hope that means will be found somewhere So after the lapse of many a year Due honor be paid to Paul Revere.

For the first time in some 60 years, white-polled, popular, old (70-odd) Negro Harry Parker, grandson of George Washington’s body servant, longtime (48 years) messenger for the House Ways & Means Committee was absent from the opening of Congress. What kept him away was the misery in his back. Said Harry Parker sadly: “The Lord has took me up the big hill for 60-odd years, but now He’s put on my brakes and it ain’t for me to complain.”

Smithtown Branch, L. I. physicians hoped they would not have to amputate the left foot of Alden Sanford Blodget, Manhattan broker, husband of Monologuist Cornelia Otis Skinner. Mr. Blodget dislocated and fractured his foot when he whacked into a wooden fence while bobsledding with his ten-year-old son.

Mrs. Frederic Watriss, mother and guardian of 1939 Glamor Girl Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, who will be 19 in June, applied to Surrogate’s Court for her daughter’s 1940 living expenses: $52,000. The application read: “[Brenda] … is a grown woman moving in the society in which, because of her parents’ and grandparents’ background, she has taken a definite place.” To another young heiress.

Sub-Debutante Gloria Laura Morgan Vanderbilt, who will be 16 in February, Surrogate’s Court allows $25,750 a year for personal expenses.

In a drab office of New York City’s, Parole Commission, behind a glass door lettered “Commissioner Gehrig,” sat Baseball Hero Lou Gehrig, sworn in for a ten-year term. His keynote: “I’m not going to talk about [criminals] for one year. I want to become fully acquainted with my duties before I start spouting about crime.”

On the way to the opera with Society Empress Grace Wilson (Mrs. Cornelius) Vanderbilt, Georgia-born Mrs. J. Ormond Lawson-Johnston, once a Broadway mammy singer known as Betty Lee, now a London socialite and intimate friend of the Windsors, dropped her evening bag (containing diamond-studded, gold-plated doodads, value: $2,500) on a Manhattan street. Missing it, the party returned to the Vanderbilt Fifth Avenue mansion, questioned all the servants. Flustered Mrs. Vanderbilt called in the dicks. Next day the bag was returned by an honest jobless couple who had found it.

Angela Coyle Kaufman, divorced wife of the late American Razor Co. President Joseph Kaufman, who threatened to cede her “Castle” in Newport, R. I. to Negro Cultist Father Divine last July if she was not granted a liquor license (she can now get one), offered the stone mansion as a potential night spot to Manhattan Night Club Impresario Sherman Billingsley. Said cautious Impresario Billingsley, who has two going concerns in Manhattan (Stork Club, Nine O’Clock Club) and who knows the potentialities of a nightclub in stuffy Newport: “I’m considering.”

After eight weeks of freedom, spent in Baltimore’s Union Memorial Hospital, Scarf ace Al Copone, still under treatment for paresis, moved to a private home in Baltimore, Md.

Soprano Grace Moore, asked by Connecticut Governor Raymond Baldwin to record a song for the State’s highway safety campaign, had her secretary reply: “Miss Moore says she will be very happy to make the recording but would like very much for her favorite Governor to get the road fixed going up to her farm [in Newtown, Conn.] from the main road. … I am sure Miss Moore would not only make the recording for Governor Baldwin, but would go out and sing to everybody, ‘He Should Be President.’ ”

*Glamor Boy Fletcher Godfrey.