People, Jun. 3, 1940

PEOPLE

When Alexander Loudon, Netherlands Minister to Washington, heard reports that his countrymen were angry with his Queen for fleeing to Britain, he indignantly ejaculated: ”The fate of the former Chancellor of Austria gives an idea of what might have befallen Queen Wilhelmina. Of what use is Dr. Schuschnigg to Austria now?”*

Chosen ”best developed and proportioned amateur athlete” at a weight-lifting contest in Manhattan, John C. (“Mr. America”) Grimek posed with his trophy, glowingly flexed his mighty biceps, triceps, quadriceps.

Connecticut’s Representative James A. Shanley told the House that Benjamin Franklin had envisioned parachute troops in 1784. In a letter about balloon ascensions in Paris that year he wrote: “Where is the prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defense, as that 10,000 men descending from the clouds might not in many places do an infinite deal of mischief, before a force could be brought together to repel them?”

Suggesting that the U. S. “declare war on the Nazi as a mortal enemy of mankind,” Lawyer Henry Breckinridge, onetime (1913-16) Assistant Secretary of War, personal attorney of Charles A. Lindbergh, added: “There are those among us who, posing as American patriots, are the veritable intellectual and spiritual agents of the Nazi philosophy and policy. They should be discerned for what they are and spurned for what they preach.”

In Cairo, Egypt, the mummy of 3,000-year-old King Tutankhamen, snugly wrapped in cotton wool, was gently removed to the basement of the Cairo Museum, to a secret bombproof tomb.

On sale in Manhattan “at a substantial reduction from their true worth” went the cobwebbed contents of the wine cellars of Inisfada, Long Island estate of the late Papal Duchess Genevieve Garvan Brady Macaulay. Items: 1901 Belmont Bourbon, 100 proof (case: $125); 1911 Veuve Clicquot champagne (case: $84); Jiminez Varela, Oloroso 1840 sherry (case: $58); Berry Bros. Prince’s Port, 50 years in wood, 34 years in bottle (case: $48); Pre-Expulsion Green Chartreuse, 4 litres only (bottle: $1,25).* Burke’s Irish Whiskey, 90 proof, believed laid down in 1901 (case-$45)

Skull-faced Italian Senator Dr. Giuseppe Bastianelli, former house doctor to the Italian Royal Family, who treated Benito Mussolini’s nose when it was bullet-pinked in 1926, arrived in Manhattan on “private business,” said of his onetime patient’s health: “. . . doing very well . . . 100% condition.”

Said Laborite Arthur Greenwood, British Minister Without Portfolio in charge of industrial production, to U. S. correspondents in London: “I dislike the British press and I hate the American press.”

* On last reports from darkest Austria, Kurt von Schuschnigg was still alive, had been spirited to the Nazi-guarded Wittelsbach Palace near Munich, after an attempt to rescue him from solitary confinement in the garret of the Hotel Metropole in Vienna. *”To pay $20 or $25 a bottle for what is known . . . as ‘original Chartreuse’ (that manufactured before the expulsion from France of the Pères Chartreux) is . . . to pay a matter of $15 for a superiority which simply does not exist” (Schoonmaker and Marvel, The Complete Wine Book).