Personages

Birthday. The 40's are mature, the 50's dignified, the 60's distin- guished, the 70's venerable. Last week the only living U. S. citizen besides Calvin Coolidge who has been President of the U. S., reached his 70's--Chief Justice William Howard Taft of the U. S. Supreme Court, happy, healthy, at his summer home on Murray Bay, Quebec.

German. Robert Ferdinand Wagner, junior U. S. Senator from New York, bosom friend of Governor Alfred Emanuel Smith, returned to the U. S., impressed by European aviation and by Mayor J. J. Walker's tour. Also, he had visited the village of Nastaetten in Hesse-Nassau, Germany, where he was born.

Cup Giver. In 1899, a potent young Harvard tennis player named Dwight Filley Davis donated a cup to be played for by tennis teams from all nations. Last week, at a dinner on the S. S. France, moored in the Hudson River, Mr. Davis, now U. S. Secretary of War, bade "a sad and long farewell" to his tennis cup, congratulated three Frenchmen on winning it from U. S. players who had kept it the past seven years.

Secrets. A slender, partly bald little man with a bristling mus- tache, last week carried a mass of official-looking documents to a va- cant lot in Denver, tore the papers to tatters, heaped them high, squirted them with kerosene, touched off a match and cried out over the flames: "Do you think I want homes in Denver ruined? . . . All you poor girls, you troubled women, who have given me your confidence that I might help you, rest now in peace. Your secrets are safe."

The burning papers were intimate confessions of some 5,000 women who had come before the little man, whose name was Benjamin Barr Lindsey, during the 27 years that he was judge of Denver's famed Juvenile Court. After Judge Lindsey was ousted (TIME, July 11), he was accused by Philip S. Van Cise, onetime Denver district attorney, of removing court records. Gathering the ashes of his conflagration and crushing them into an envelope, Judge Lindsey cried out: "I'll send them to Van Cise--that's my answer to his lying charges!"