Washingtonians

Senator Kenneth Douglas McKellar, 74-year-old, fancy-dressing Tennessean, introduced a bill providing that Senators be given cards explaining that they are Senators. Reason: in Capitol offices many a guard has been keeping them at arm's length till they could prove their identity. The bill passed unanimously.

Associate Justice Hugo La Fayette Black strode into the Supreme Court Chamber and sat down, cracking a precedent as he did so. Attorneys decently averted their eyes; a court clerk whispered into the Justice's-ear. Out scurried Justice Black, at length floated in again, now properly swathed in his black judicial robe.

Showfolk

Ernest Loring ("Red") Nichols, erstwhile leader of the jazz-famous Five Pennies, got some publicity in the rat-ridden little California town of Albany. The Mayor had called for a good extermination plan. In an attempt to pied-pipe the rats, Nichols started tooting his trumpet in the center of town, started marching toward the Bay. A few children and photographers were all that followed.

Errol Flynn had more blonde trouble (TIME, Oct. 26, et seq.). Shirley Evans Hassau, long-limbed, curly-locked wife of a singer and mother of a three-year-old girl, charged that Flynn was the baby's father, sued him for $1,750-a-month support, $17,000 for hospital and legal expenses. The actor promised to "fight . . . to the bitter end before I'll make any payoff to avoid unpleasant publicity."

Rebels' Kin

Mrs. Helen Dortch Longstreet, 85-year-old widow of Lieut. General James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee's right-hand man at Gettysburg, turned up as a student in "assembly, fabrication and riveting" at a training school in Marietta, Ga. A tireless individualist* Mrs. Longstreet lives alone at a trailer camp, goes to classes every day from 2 to 11 p.m., hopes to be in an assembly line job by next week. She explained simply: "I couldn't stay out of this war."

Willie ("Pancho") Villa, 38-year-old son of Mexico's late, highly-seasoned revolutionary, turned up at an attorney's office in Sapulpa, Okla. and set the lawyer tracking down the Villa birth certificate. Villa needed it to get a war plant job in Tulsa, explained he wanted to "start paying back for some of the trouble" his late father had caused the U.S.

Litterateurs

Sinclair Lewis, on a debating tour with Author Lewis Browne (This Believing World), was interviewed in Spokane by a girl reporter, gave her an earful. Said he: "I went through the fifth grade and I think that is sufficient." When she soberly recorded this in the Spokesman-Review, Lewis (Yale A.B. '07, Litt.D. '36) stomped into the paper's city room to raise the roof. The girl reporter fled in tears as Lewis blatted: "My dear young child . . . you should have known . . . My God . . . I've been called nine kinds of s. o. b., but I've never been called an illiterate. . . ." An older newswoman promptly gave the Nobel Prize winner a proper scolding: "You scared that poor girl spitless."

"The late William Lyon Phelps," who died last August, was listed by the book-peddling Classics Club, in full-page newspaper ads, as one of the four members of the Club's selection committee.

Hedda Hopper, in her Hollywood gossip column, threw in some motherly advice "I have the greatest admiration for Winston Churchill, but he needs a manager. He's making too many speeches and repeating himself."

Marie Corelli, best-seller of the '90s (The Sorrows of Satan), was so sure of her literary immortality that she willed that her Stratford-on-Avon estate be preserved as a shrine--"the home of a great English novelist." Preparations were begun last week, 19 years after her death, to auction the place off because royalties from the Corelli books have not been enough to maintain it. With it goes a genuine gondola which she imported (with a gondolier) from Venice.

John Adams' opinion of George Washington, expressed in a private letter sold at a Manhattan auction last week, was that "if he was not the greatest President he was the best Actor of Presidency we have ever had." On another contemporary: "The Declaration of Independence I always considered as a theatrical show. Jefferson ran away with all the stage effect of that; i.e. all the glory of it." The letter, among the family papers of Philadelphia's late Alexander Biddle, went for $575 to an undisclosed buyer.

-In the Virgin Islands eight years ago she achieved local fame by refusing to adapt herself to the British-style traffic rules, consistently drove on the wrong side of the street.

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