PEOPLE

Mrs. D. Leigh Colvin, President of the New York State W.C.T.U., laid the blame for U.S. war reverses squarely on U.S. intemperance.

Seventy-two-year-old Captain Edward Page Gaston of the New York National Guard, founder of the rum-hating New Vigilantes, strong advocate of the repatriation of the body of Pocahontas, onetime believer that "Fascism is what this country needs," noted that Hitler has avoided bombing British breweries. Said he: "[Hitler] knows that liquor is his best ally."

Members of U.S. Navy training units at Northwestern University petitioned National W.C.T.U. President Ida B. Wise Smith to undertake "a drive against the misconception that Navy men are intemperate," to "seek to discredit the popular simile 'reeling like a drunken sailor.' " Said President Smith, reassuringly: "We of the W.C.T.U. will be glad to help them defend their reputations."

Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe told the Women's Auxiliary of the West Virginia Medical Association that the Dionne quintuplets consist of two matched pairs and an odd, unmatched baby; that according to the laws of genetics they should have been sextuplets.

Fortunes of War

Admiral Husband Edward Kimmel, facing court-martial (but probably not till the war's end) for alleged laxity in his command of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, got a job with the Manhattan firm of Frederic R. Harris, Inc., naval designers, doing "special work which the Navy insists must be kept secret."

Jan Struther, author of the best-selling Mrs. Miniver (whose cinema version broke all records last week by starting its seventh week at Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall), received word that her husband, Lieut. Anthony Maxtone-Graham of the British army, had been captured in North Africa.

Licensed

When Homer Stille Cummings, 72, onetime U.S. Attorney General (1933-39), married Julia Alter, onetime secretary to the late World War I Correspondent Floyd Gibbons at Cockeysville, Md. (and his fourth wife) he remarked: "She is not a career girl. . . ."

Vaudeville's veteran Funnyman Pat Rooney II, 62, got a license to marry blonde Actress Janet Reade, onetime member of Eddie Cantor's Whoopee, one time wife of Funnyman Pat's son, Pat Rooney III. Said Pat Rooney II of Pat Rooney III: "I haven't seen him for some years." Said Actress Janet Reade: "I haven't seen him either. Anyway I like his father better. He's a funny little guy but I love him."

Faux Pas

To beat the gas & rubber shortage Manhattan's Mrs. Kingdon Gould took the old family carriages out of moth balls, sent Daughter Edith to buy a pair of horses. Inexperienced Daughter Edith came back with a pair of brewery-truck-model Percherons.

Heavily engraved invitations sent out by Lady Decies (formerly Elizabeth Drexel of Philadelphia) sent the British Library of Information bustling about over a point of etiquette. Said the invitation: "Lady Elizabeth Decies (the Right Honorable Elizabeth Beresford, Baroness Decies) requests the pleasure of your company," etc. But Lady Decies, pointed out the B.L.I., is merely wife of a privy councillor of the lowest rank of the peerage (John Graham Hope de la Poer Beresford, Baron Decies). is therefore a "Lady," but not a "Right Honorable." Nor can she call herself "Lady Elizabeth," nor "Elizabeth, Lady," titles proper only to the daughter of an earl or better or the widowed mother of a baron or married baronet, or the widow of a knight.

Father Divine, famed Negro Mahatma, announced that he was moving his heaven from Manhattan to Philadelphia "because of the maliciousness of the people of New York through their officials." Said he: "I would have hovered continually in New York. . . .

Present or Accounted For

Major Elliott Roosevelt was ordered to Colorado Springs' Air Support Command Base, to take command of an aerial photography group.

Veteran Hollywood Producer Hal Roach was ordered to active duty as a major in the photographic division of the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

In New Delhi, sandy-haired Socialite Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney was promoted from major to lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps.

Mary K. Browne, who held the U.S. women's singles, doubles and mixed doubles tennis championships from 1912 to 1915, arrived in Australia with the U.S. Red Cross.

Heroic battlefield surgery during the Japanese invasion of Burma (TIME, April 13, 20; July 20) earned Burma-born Major Gordon S. Seagrave, onetime medical missionary with the American Baptist Mission, the Order of the Purple Heart (originated by George Washington).

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