Men at Bay

Hirohito, Son of Heaven, celebrated a warm 43rd birthday sweating over the problem of Jap plane production.

"General" Jacob S. Coxey finally finished his famed speech (in behalf of interest-free Government bonds as an economic cureall. The speech started in 1894 on the steps of Washington's Capitol, before his "army" (rumored 5,000, in fact 336) of fellow townsmen he had led from Massillon, Ohio, but was stopped in midphrase by the police. It ended this week on the same old steps, before an audience of 200 not-so-busy Capitol Hill employes.

Bernard De Voto, caustic and choleric critic of his contemporary writers, was blasted by heavy literary and legal artillery. Critic De Voto's lambasting, broadsiding The Literary Fallacy (TIME, April 24) aroused Sinclair Lewis, one of the book's targets, to solid invective: "... a tedious and egotistical fool ... a pompous and boresome liar. . , ." In Cambridge, Mass., where Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit was banned as "impure and indecent," and where Crusader De Voto rode his white horse straight to a bookshop to buy a copy publicly (TIME, April 17), District Judge Arthur P. Stone approved the ban, cracked the book as filthy, rapped De Voto: "The spectacle of a citizen notifying the police, the press . . . that he is about to commit an action which may be a crime . . . has little to recommend it."

Women at War

Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, only daughter of the President, won a $185 Hattie Carnegie dress on a $1 raffle ticket at a benefit fashion show and auction in Washington's Stage Door Canteen. Altogether, some 500 capital socialites (present at $5 a head) saw the show and admired such models as:

Mrs. Hugo L. Black, wife of the Supreme Court Justice -- in a soft, voluminous, blue-and-grey print;

Mrs. Patrick Jay Hurley, wife of the onetime Secretary of War--in a dramatic black dinner gown;

Mrs. Douglas MacArthur II, wife of the General's nephew (TIME, March 20)--in a navy-blue afternoon dress;

Mrs. Ira Eaker, wife of the Mediterranean theater's air chief--in a gay block print with a Chinese hat;

Mrs. Thaddeus Brown Jr., wife of the former FCC chairman's son--in a plaid cotton evening dress.

Out of the Past

Orville Wright flew the giant new 57-passenger Lockheed Constellation (TIME, April 24) at Dayton's Wright Field. The 72-year-old aeronaut was up for almost an hour, piloted the great plane for five minutes. His comment: "Wonderful!"

Coast Guard Commander Jack Dempsey and Navy Commander Gene Tunney spoke at a Manhattan dinner for physical-fitness directors, listened to each other dourly (see cut).

Frau Alwine Dollfuss, widow of Austria's Nazi-murdered Chancellor, turned up at a Red Cross benefit in Montreal. At first a tragic wanderer (from Austria to Italy, Czechoslovakia. Hungary, Switzerland, England), Frau Dollfuss has lived quietly and obscurely in Canada since 1940. At the Montreal benefit, she posed for a picture (see cut p. 34) with a fellow refugee:

Oscar Straus, famed Viennese conductor-composer (The Chocolate Soldier), who was in Canada conducting a series of concerts.

Jan Kiepura, star of the Manhattan revival of The Merry Widow, as a patriotic whim sings an out-of-show Polish folk song in the middle of the performance. When a visiting Polish Pestka (WAC) was moved to tears, a portly, white-haired man seated beside her spoke sympathetically: "I expect Poland to be free again." After the show he stopped the Pestka, shook her hand, urged: "Keep your chin up." Gratefully, she asked if she might know his name. "Of course. It's Hoover--Herbert Hoover."

Prized

Daniel De Luce, amiable, able Associated Press war correspondent, who last year scored with his dispatches datelined "A Partisan Brigade Headquarters, in Yugoslavia" (TIME, Oct. 18), was awarded $500 on the recommendation of Columbia University's School of Journalism Pulitzer Prize Committee --"for a distinguished example of telegraphic reporting on international affairs. . . ." Other $500 Pulitzer Prize winners:

Ernie Pyle, Scripps-Howrard Newspaper Alliance war correspondent, famed for his reporting of the human side of the Tunisian and Italian campaigns;

Clifford K. Berryman, Washington (D.C.) Evening Star cartoonist, for But Where Is The Boat Going? -- a biting cartoon on the manpower-mobilization muddle.

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, for the Theater Guild operetta smash hit Oklahoma!

Martin Flavin, for his American novel Journey in the Dark.

Sergeant Karl Shapiro, poet (Person, Place and Thing), now in the South Pacific, who just won a $2,500 Guggenheim fellowship, received a $1,000 grant from the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. So did:

Eudora Welty, short-story writer (A Curtain of Green) and novelist;

Bob Hope, radio's far-traveling, top-ranking comedian, received a special citation as a George Foster Peabody radio-award winner for 1943: "The joy and strengthened morale which he has given to the men and women of the armed forces cannot be measured." Other Peabody winners:

Edward R. Murrow, chief of CBS's European news bureau, for "outstanding reporting of the news. . . ."

Cecil B. De Mille's Lux Radio Theater, for "outstanding entertainment in drama."

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