PEOPLE

"Names make news." Last week these names made this news:

Citizens bent on refining Pittsburgh's ebullient Mayor William Nissley McNair last fortnight took him to Kaufmann's Department Store to see "Broadacre City," a scale model of a modernistic decentralized community by Radical Architect Frank Lloyd Wright Mayor McNair whistled, let fly: "It's all right but you could never put Democrats in there. What if they'd want to get drunk or visit somebody's wife? This thing is Utopia. I'll bet they even tell you how many babies to have in each house. I just sent a gang of drunks to the workhouse. Put that bunch in Wright's village and it wouldn't be two weeks before they'd wreck it. This town is built for a lot of social workers."

"The Mayor," snapped sinewy, grey-maned Architect Wright, "knows next to nothing about drunks, babies or Democracy." Furious Mr. Wright's opinion of Pittsburgh shortly appeared in the Sun-Telegraph: "Pittsburgh as a centralization is obsolescent."

Last week when Architect Wright turned up in Pittsburgh, newshawks took him on a tour of the city. Passing over slums, mills, grimy houses, he fixed on the new Mellon Institute, which looks like the Parthenon, snorted: "That's what happens when men get rich and bring Greece to Pittsburgh." Of University of Pittsburgh's Gothic, skyscraping Cathedral of Learning: "The most stupendous 'Keep off the Grass' sign I've even seen."

"What," asked newshawks, "could be done about Pittsburgh?"

Judged Architect Wright: "It would be cheaper to abandon it!"

Upheld by unanimous decision of the Appellate Court was New York's Supreme Court order making Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, 11, a ward of the court, giving her to her mother, Mrs. Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, for weekends, Christmas and July, to her aunt, Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, for the rest of the year (TIME. Dec. 3 et ante). Though the opinion went out of its way to exonerate Mrs. Vanderbilt of her onetime maid's charge that she behaved indiscreetly with the Marchioness of Milford Haven, it pointedly concluded: "If the relator [Mrs. Vanderbilt] shall avail herself fully of her rights under the order, she will spend more time with her child than for many years past."

With $5 in his pocket, bulky, vigorous Author Thomas Clayton Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel; Of Time and the River) arrived in Manhattan after four months abroad. Said he to newshawks: "There's one swell thing about Americans--as a race we are not snobs. . . . For one week I had a service flat in London with an English butler that was such a prude he would make Ruggles of Red Gap look like a blacksmith. . . . One night I decided to find out just what kind of a fellow he was under his servant's mask. I gave him so many whiskeys and sodas that I got cockeyed drinking with him. He wouldn't sit down and relax, but just stood there tossing off the drinks without a change in his tone, manner or posture. Finally I said, 'For God's sake, can't you be human and talk for once like a human being?' And what do you suppose this guy said, without changing his dead-pan expression --'Begging your pardon, sir, but here in England we're all a bit of a snob.' So that was that."

Fearful on the eve of his 96th birthday lest two front teeth would have to be extracted because he bit a cherry pit four years ago, John D. Rockefeller Sr. visited his dentist. Reassured to learn that his 19 teeth were all sound, he quietly celebrated his birthday on his 500-acre estate near Lakewood, N. J. Biggest Rockefeller birthday present was $5,000,000 in cash representing the face value of his insurance policies. The money was returned to him because he had outlived the actuarial tables, which do not go above 96.

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