Aged Hackwriter Gilbert Patten, who wrote the once-famed "Frank Merriwell" books, reminisced: "The stories were written in a Victorian age. ... If I did them today, I'd make the characters more natural. Frank used to say, 'You're a great guy.' Now I'd make him say, 'You're a damned fine old bum.' "

Most disgusted man in Harlem last week was Hubert Fauntleroy ("The Black Eagle") Julian, who once trained fliers for Abyssinia's Emperor Haile Selassie. Because he could produce neither plane nor pilot's license (it has expired), the Civil Aeronautics Authority not only refused him a permit to fly the Atlantic, but told him he would have to apply for a student's permit, like any beginner.

From various U. S. Senators the Hazelton, Pa. Flying Club got some queer-sounding telegrams. From Nevada's Key Pittman: "Mildred arrived as storm broke. She is spending the night with me." From Colorado's Edwin Johnson: "The members of the office staff are taking turns sitting on it [a pigeon's egg] in the hope that something might happen." In his office California's Hiram Johnson shouted to his secretary: "Get this chicken out of here. It's raising hell." Explanation: as a publicity stunt arranged by the National Youth Administration each Senator was sent a homing pigeon with instructions for releasing it.

Flying to a West Virginia convention, blind and deaf Educator Helen Keller asked whether the plane was not 8,000 feet up. It was, exactly.

Informed by a Saturday Evening Post article that London tap water tastes like soap, but that King George & Queen Elizabeth like it anyway, Philadelphia Chemist LeRoy Drew Betz procured a sample from his London agents. Chemist Betz then duplicated its color, hardness, chemical content, using as a base distilled water from the Schuylkill, sent 25 gallons to the White House ("purely as a gesture of patriotism and a possible means of increasing the comfort of the visiting monarchs").

To raise Spanish refugee relief funds, aphrodisiantic Stripper Louise ("Gypsy Rose Lee") Hovick auctioned off two autographed bestsellers: Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt's This Is My Story, Thomas Mann's Joseph in Egypt. To make them real collector's items she added her own autograph.

To world-famed Mayo Clinic went bullocky Baseballer Lou Gehrig of the New York Yankees, benched since early last month, to find out what ails his once-powerful legs.

In England, pale & frail after seven months in prison (to which Nazis sent him on a charge of sex perversion), Tennist Baron Gottfried von Cramm said that the U. S. had denied him a visa to compete at Forest Hills. Reason: U. S. law bans people convicted of a crime involving "moral turpitude."

One Charles Wiltschek, a crippled artist, persuaded Evelyn ("Evie") Robert--Washington Times-Herald columnist and wife of Lawrence ("Chip") Robert Jr., secretary of the Democratic National Committee--to let him paint her portrait from a photograph, then sued her for $750 when she rejected it as outrageous. Caught in the toils of the law, she last week settled out of court, then treated her portrait as she thought it deserved: kicked a hole through the face (see cut).

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