PEOPLE

"Names make news." Last week these names made this news:

Hollywood Hearstattler Louella Parsons reported a rumor that Hitler had clapped his onetime favorite, oldtime Cinemactress Pola Negri, in a concentration camp because she talked too much.

Officials of Westinghouse Co., gathering material to go into an 800-lb. cupaloy* time capsule which is to be buried 50 feet in the earth on the New York World's Fair site, not to be opened for 5,000 years, collected letters to posterity written by Nobel Prize-winners Albert Einstein, Robert Andrews Millikan, Thomas Mann--and by Grover Aloysius Whalen (Fair Manager). Einstein: ". . . Anyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror." Mann: "Among you, too, the spirit will fare badly--it should never fare too well on this earth, otherwise men would need it no longer." Whalen: "We were thinking of you in the World of Tomorrow. . ."

Eighteen-year-old Ben Freedman, son of radio's late No. 1 Gagman David Freedman/- left for Hollywood to write Al Jolson's radio scripts, took with him his father's private file of 40,000 jokes.

Back from a trip to Trinidad, Dr. Raymond Lee Ditmars, New York Zoological Park's curator of mammals and reptiles, shamefacedly admitted that on the way home he had eaten twelve large, golden-hued frogs which had been intended for exhibition at the zoo.

On vacation in Europe, RCA President David Sarnoff compared Europe's dictators to Suicide John Warde, who waited eleven hours on a Manhattan window ledge before leaping to his death (TIME, Aug. 8): "To Europe's ledge-walkers is promised this or that in case they come inside, but it does no good. It is a pity that Europe is not able ... to say: 'All right, go ahead and jump if you want to, but it will be the end of you if you do.' "

Swarthy Painter Thomas Hart Benton, famed for his Missouri murals, attacked New York City's examination for high-school teachers of fine arts, declaring the mural problem would have stumped him, complained "It is impossible to perform in the time limit allowed. As a matter of fact, it is impossible of performance no matter what the time limit."

Speaking as "an humble tennis player," Great Britain's Henry Wilfred ("Bunny") Austin wrote a letter to the London Times pleading with the world's youth who 'are bound together by a common love of physical fitness and in a spirit of sportsmanship engendered by their love of games ... to let their voice be heard in a call for moral rearmament . . . under the guidance of. God, who is the Father of all."

Back to Chicago's Hull House, where in 1922 he played in the band, went Swingmaster Benny Goodman to play his clarinet before 1,600 cheering boys & girls, who refrained from shagging in the aisles, but did bounce in their seats.

In Deal, N. J., the 38-room summer home of 77-year-old William Crapo Durant ("Godfather of the Motor Car Industry," "Gunga Din of Wall St.") was put up for auction with its furnishings. A Kermanshah rug appraised at $6,000 went for $750, a $6,500 tapestry for $275, the $500,000 house itself for $44,000.

Arriving at Manhattan's Hotel McAlpin to judge the finals of a contest for the title of Ideal College Girl, careering Novelist Fannie Hurst was disgusted to find that the major ambition of all the finalists was marriage, not a career. She snapped: "I'm sick of the lot of you. ... If this is the younger generation--ugh!" The London Times published a quatrain written by England's Poet Laureate John Masefield to commemorate Prime Minister Chamberlain's visit to Reichsfuehrer Hitler: As Priam to Achilles for his son, So you, into the night, divinely led, To ask that young men's bodies, not yet dead, Be given from the battle not begun.

To a Manhattanite who wrote him suggesting playgrounds for dogs, New York's scholarly Deputy Mayor Henry Hastings Curran replied: "The city is a hard place for a dog. . . . Cats do better. . . . One of the most beautiful sights in nature is the hindquarters of the common cat upended on the rim of a garbage can. ..."

* A copper alloy supposedly as hard as steel.

/- Some of his former customers: Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Fannie Brice, Burns & Allen, Jack Benny.

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