New York City's Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was once U. S. consul at Fiume, was once official interpreter at Ellis Island, speaks eight languages. Morning after the news of Belgrade's coup d'etat, he paused in a turmoil of annual budgetmaking, announced in spotless Serbian: "Zora puca bit ce dana!" (The dawn is breaking; I see the day.)

Few days after his New York City bus strike had ended, Transport Union Chieftain Michael J. Quill was flagged to the curb by an angry policeman for steering his car down the wrong side of Riverside Drive. "Don't you know who I am?" complained Busman Quill. "Who?" said the cop. "I'm Mike Quill." "Never heard of you," grunted the cop, wrote out a ticket.

His Indiana University historical murals at last installed and paid for, swart, swashbuckling little Missourian Thomas Benton wrote the university a bread-&-butter letter. He thanked the building's architects for the "great gilded spittoons which they have placed to hide as much of the paintings as possible," since "spittoons of Indiana's tobacco-chewing era are more appropriate to my murals, even when they hide them, than Greco-Roman statues or Mayan reliefs."

Between Cabinets and Committees, Winston Churchill finished Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, plunged into For Whom the Bell Tolls.

When Model Patricia Garfield tossed a cocktail party at Manhattan's Stork Club, Captain Elliott Roosevelt arrived from Wright Field, Ohio, in full-dress Army Air Corps togs. This, he explained with the assistance of Stork Club press agents, was the proper dress for a captain upon his "initial" appearance at any club.

The Republican National Committee got a bill for $13,000 from Dr. Harold Draeggert Barnard, Beverly Hills throat specialist, for services rendered. The services: doctoring the husky campaigning throat of Wendell Willkie for 52 days last September and October.

Off Halifax, the Canadian naval patrol boat Otter, 2,000 tons, burned and sank with loss of 19 lives. Until last year, the Otter was Vincent Astor's famed Nourmahal, on which Seadog Astor often took Franklin Roosevelt fishing.

With stirrup pump on his arm, tin hat on his head, but without his celebrated beard, Cartoonist David Low, whose war with the dictators began long before Britain's, was caught by a photographer padding patriotically along his London fire-watch beat.

When two slick fellows wrote him offering to trace his ancestry for $2, Secretary Harold L. Ickes sent the $2. Back came not only genealogical tables but a nice coat of arms. Having established after a four-way check that there is no Ickes coat of arms, Honest Angry Harold turned the tables over to the Department of Justice, had the men arrested for using the mails to defraud.

Undismayed after three days in Del Rio, Tex. court over his voluntary bankruptcy petition, goat-bearded, goat-gland-grafting old Dr. John Richard Brinkley emerged cheerfully with Lawyer Herbert Davis, declared he would meet every just claim among the million dollars his creditors seek.

When bald, bustling Baron Beaverbrook, British Minister of Aircraft Production, praised "the boys in the back room," in his BBC speech, startled Britons wondered where he got the phrase. Last week they knew. The Beaver adjourned to his private projection room, saw Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again* for the 27th time.

Poet-Philosopher Carl Sandburg, partly rested after eleven years' labor on his Pulitzer Prizewinning Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, looked around for a new job, decided to take a long-standing offer to write a weekly column for the Chicago Times. His first piece (distributed this week by the Times Syndicate): 700 words of commonsensical philosophy on President Roosevelt's comment on the future ("We can't see that far") and President Lincoln's ("My policy is to have no policy").

Sporting a C. I. O. button on his lapel, Wisconsin's Governor Julius P. ("Julius the Bust") Heil turned up outside the Allis-Chalmers plant near Milwaukee as it was about to reopen. Taking a turn along the picket line, he handed out dollar bills to strikers' children, tugged the 6 5-day beard of one worker who had vowed not to shave till the strike was settled. Said a picket: "When this strike is over will you give us a barrel of beer to celebrate?" Replied Manufacturer Heil: "I'll give you 50 barrels."

* In which she dances on the bar and sings: See what the boys in the back room will have, And tell them I'm having the same.

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