Human Element

To Franklin Roosevelt last week came many a quiet reminder of the human tragedies, joys and kindnesses that go on in peacetime and in war. On one sober, solemn day he presented Congressional Medals of Honor to the families of two of his old friends who had died heroes' deaths in the Solomons (see p. 86). And twice more in the week the busy routine of White House news was stopped for the business of humanity.

Reunion in Amarillo. To the White House went a plea from Widow Mary Phillips of Shawnee, Okla. Her twin sons, Bobby and Billy, 19, had enlisted together, had gone to Sheppard Field, Tex. for training together. Now for the first time in their lives, they had been separated. One had been transferred to Arizona, the other to Amarillo Field in Texas. Could they not please be reunited?

Warm-hearted Franklin Roosevelt promptly answered Widow Phillips' letter. Out went an executive order: Billy went post-haste to join brother Bobby at Amarillo Field. Henceforth, wherever Billy and Bobby Phillips go, they are under orders from the White House to go together.

Remembrance in France. From London came news of a short story, called The Flame, that had been distributed through France in an Office of War Information pamphlet. It told how the Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy, traveling through France in 1918, had come upon an elderly priest knocked down by a Navy pilot car. The priest refused personal compensation; instead the Assistant Secretary wrote out a Navy requisition for $200 to pay for releading the windows of the priest's "very lovely old church."

Continued the author of The Flame:

"Several months later, an officer reported . . . that he had been in the church and that the work of releading the stained glass windows was nearly completed. In one of the bays of the church ... a perpetual candle had been lighted by the old priest in honor of the American Navy.

"Six or eight years later it still was burning, and ... no doubt . . . now, in 1942, it is still burning--unless the Germans have put it out."

A note on the author explained: This Story has just been written by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1918.

Last week the President also:

>Entertained an eminent Good Neighbor: Cuba's stocky, determined President Fulgencio Batista.

> Denied Senator Harry F. Byrd's charges of waste in Government payrolls by insisting that more than 1,500,000 of the 2,500,000 Federal employes are employed in production (in Navy yards, Government arsenals, etc.). Retorted Senator Byrd: the President had not been given "the true facts" by his subordinates; he had used "figures four months old and even then they weren't correct."

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