Having less need for an extra stop watch since Tommy Harmon stopped running, glib, studious Bill Stern, top NBC sportscaster, turned his over to Socialite-Explorer Charles Suydam Cutting, chairman of the American Committee for Defense of British Homes, who is collecting 5,000 stop watches to send (with binoculars, small arms, steel helmets) to Britain to help ward off invasion.

When Germany issued a special twelve-pfennig stamp advertising Italo-German solidarity (with pictures of Hitler and Mussolini, fasces, swastika and inscription) the British Broadcasting Corp. broadcast: "Now we can lick them both at once."

After 35 years as a member of New Jersey's Supreme Court, Justice Thomas Whitaker Trenchard, 77, who presided with memorably magisterial dignity over the turbulent trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, retired, saying: "Well, I figure I'm entitled to quit now."

Small, smoldering, one-gallused Theodore Gilmore ("The Man") Bilbo, whose noteworthiest previous legislative contribution had been a bill to send unemployed Negroes back to Africa, startled the Senate by offering a resolution to end the unwritten rule that "female attaches of Senatorial staffs" (i.e., Senators' secretaries and clerks) be not allowed on the floor. Statesman Bilbo, whose Colleague Mrs. Caraway already has the privilege herself by virtue of her Senatorial office, hinted as delicately as he could that present conditions cast doubt on senatorial "justice and chivalry."

In London, where a well-trimmed imperial might nowadays conceal a secret agent, a policeman looked suspiciously at bearded Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman inspecting a bomb crater near the Bank, asked him whether he had any business there. Norman replied casually that he worked in a bank. "Well, sir," sniffed the bobby, "how about buzzing off and doing a bit of banking?"

Quivered blonde, pants-wearing Cinemactress Marlene Dietrich: "When I started the custom of wearing men's trousers I never dreamed it would spread to such universal proportions. ... It actually makes me shudder when I see fat, squat women waddling around in slacks."

Joe Louis got ready for his next knockout by visiting a Manhattan art gallery, having his picture taken cheek-by-jowl with Sculptress%Ruth Yates's bust of the present world's heavyweight champion (see cut).

Invited by BBC to introduce Great Britain's latest tune was dark, vivacious Comedienne Bebe Daniels, star of over 250 oldtime Hollywood flickers, now the plump-&-40 wife of British Cinemactor Ben Lyon. Sang she:

John Bull has written a message and sent it off by clipper plane today. . . .

It just said: "Thanks, Mr. Roosevelt, it's swell of you.

You'll see the British Empire smiling through

When at last these dark, stormy days are gone.

And Franklin, by the way, please convey

Our congratulations to the folks in the U. S. A.

We're saying, 'Thanks, Mr. Roosevelt,

We're proud of you for the way you're helping us carry on.' "

To tall, white-haired Poet-Professor William Ellery Leonard (TheLocomotive God, A Son of Earth) came his 65th birthday and opportunity to retire from his chair in English at the University of Wisconsin. Locked in his "phobic prison" of six campus blocks by an ineluctable terror of distance (caused, he says, by a locomotive which roared at him when he was two), there was not much that Agoraphobe Leonard could do about it. Sighed he philosophically: "I plan to go on with my teaching. I feel well. I feel the university needs me."

In Helsinki, where he has been helping distribute American gifts among Finnish war orphans, bald old Composer Jean Sibelius received a big parcel of food and coffee from Mrs. Sara Delano Roosevelt, mother of the President.

Declared white-haired, deep-eyed Philosopher Bertrand Russell in Chicago: "Although I have preached pacifism all my life, I am convinced now for the first time that freedom cannot be preserved without military struggle. Liberty will die out over the world unless totalitarianism is defeated."

Tough, pink-cheeked Charles Erwin Wilson, 50, new president of General Motors, went skating at his country home in Oakland County, Mich., fell and broke his hip. Muttered Motorsman Wilson, preparing to do business for a while from his hospital bed: "It was just one of those skating accidents. I slipped and hit the ice."

Having paid a visit to the university's statue of his distinguished ancestor, Refugee John Harvard Baker, 9, direct descendant of Harvard's first big benefactor, broadcast disappointedly to his father in Scarborough, England: "He doesn't look like us at all."

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