Greetings

John Nance Garner, mildly sulphurous, bourbonophilous ex-Vice President, reached 77 in Uvalde, Tex., three days later celebrated his golden wedding anniversary with Wife Ettie, swore to live to 93, which would make him the "oldest Garner that ever lived."

Mrs. Martha Ellen Truman, the President's mother, reached 93 in Grandview, Mo., swore that she would reach 100. Son Harry surprised her with a spur-of-the-moment flight from Washington. "I had a notion to do this," he said, "and I did it."

Margaret Truman, swinging a bottle of champagne against a plane's hull to inaugurate American Overseas Airlines' Washington-to-London commercial flights, scored a splashing smash on the third swing (her mother hammered a hull nine times last spring and finally gave up).

Sinclair Lewis brought glad tidings to the University of South Carolina, where he talked to the students. "America has been a very childish country," he said. "It is now beginning to grow up."

The Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson, "Red Dean" of Canterbury, set the age of the U.S. more exactly: "I look upon the U.S. as the magnificent adolescent," he said just before flying back to Britain. "We [the British] are approaching middle age."

General George S. Patton Jr. became the second American in history (first: General John J. Pershing) to be made an honorary citizen of Verdun. He was also made an honorary citizen of Metz, Reims, Chateau Thierry, Epernay, Toul, Sarreguemines, and the city of Luxembourg.

The Aga Khan, pumpkin-shaped, 264-lb. spiritual ruler of some twelve million Ismaili Moslems, was the cause of a commotion in diamonds. From London came reports that great quantities of rough-cuts, gifts from his Moslems, were piling up against his forthcoming Diamond Jubilee, when the Khan will be weighed in diamonds. He will keep the stones, and give charity their money equivalent (some $3,200,000).*

Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., who would "neither confirm nor deny" reports that he was politics-bound, joined a new Manhattan law firm--Poletti, Diamond, Rabin, Freidin and Mackay.

Wendell Willkie's son Philip, a Navy lieutenant, enrolled at Columbia University School of Law while on terminal leave, was elected president of his class (first year).

Lauritz Melchior, heroic-size Metropolitan Opera tenor, arrived in Denver for a concert, sent his suit to the cleaner's, then found that his baggage had not come, had to receive the press toga-ed in a blanket.

Hearts & Thistles

Emily Harm's boyish-looking Major Charles Boxer, 41, finally arrived in Manhattan from Hong Kong, ran from a plane into her arms, posed with her and their four-year-old daughter, Carola. As the Major got news from Britain that his wife, Ursula, had finally divorced him (Miss Hahn considered herself divorced from her onetime Chinese companion, Sin-may), the well-publicized couple planned to make it legal this week.

Marine Lieut. Tyrone Power, fresh back from Japan, walked off the boat in Portland, Ore., into the arms of his wife, Cinemarmful Annabella. His post-discharge plans: Hollywood again, after three years of realism.

Ernest Hemingway, whose first marriage lasted nearly six years, his second thirteen, filed suit for a Havana divorce after a five-year stretch with Writer (The Trouble I've Seen) Martha Gellhorn.

Jascha Heifetz, 44, famously married to his violin since the age of three, and for 17 years to Florence Vidor, cinema star of the '20s, hoped aloud for a reconciliation after she announced to the press that they had separated.

Tilly Losch was still the Earl of Carnarvon's wife despite his efforts to the contrary. A London judge threw out the Earl's divorce suit, finding it no desertion that the prewar dancing star went to the U.S. from Britain in blitz-busy 1940.

Quiet Zone

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose wife was hospitalized in Boone, Iowa, with pneumonia, went to a White Sulphur Springs, W. Va. hospital, with a bad cold. Reports from both hospitals: improving satisfactorily. The new Chief of Staff (see ARMY & NAVY), unable to return to Europe to tidy up his affairs there, could not accept in person a little present from the Scottish people: an apartment of his own (with elevator) in rambling Cul-zean Castle on the Ayrshire coast.

Princess Margaret Rose, 15, under the weather for days though up & around in public, had her royal appendix removed in her Buckingham Palace bedroom. Participating: Sir Lancelot Barrington-Ward (her father's surgeon), four doctors, six special nurses. All went well.

Joan Fontaine, warm-blooded Hollywood heroine of Frenchman's Creek, was bedded in Manhattan with pneumonia and pleurisy, but reported "getting along very nicely."

Merle Oberon, almond-eyed cinema siren, five-month wife of Cameraman Keith Ballard, was reported "doing very nicely" after an operation performed "to increase likelihood of motherhood."

Pigs & Poets

Sir Oswald Mosley, Britain's prewar fascist leader who spent most of the war years in the clink (for the empire's protection), was haled to court for neglecting the pigs on his Crow Wood Farm. An in spector said that the pigs -- 76 in a pen 40-by-35 ft. -- looked underfed and "most unhappy." Worms, not starvation, made the pigs look peaked, Sir Oswald explained, and was promptly freed.

Ezra Pound, in Washington awaiting trial for treason (pro-Axis broadcasts from Rome), was freshly reindicted for 19 overt acts, and became the center of a literary flurry in Manhattan. Pulitzer Prizewinner Conrad Aiken considered him "less traitor than fool", E. E. Cummings whipped up a paraphrasing of "To thine own self be true. . . ." ; Louis Untermeyer favored life imprisonment among the works of Eddie Guest. Random House hastily dropped Pound from a forthcoming poetry anthology.

* His weight has long been a fascinating subject to the Khan. Before the war, he used to drop in almost daily at London's Berry Bros, (spirits), weigh himself on their famed century-old scales, and jot down the figure, carefully noting the exact items of apparel included.

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