Distinguished Visitors

The President of the United States last week enjoyed himself in the role of country squire at Hyde Park. He gave out one formal statement, expressing his hopes that the new Wages & Hours law would work, and that employers doing intrastate business would comply with its spirit. For the rest he drove in his car through the woodland roads of his estate, watching his trees grow, and enjoyed the squirely duty of receiving visitors. No ordinary squire, he naturally had callers of no ordinary distinction.

His most eminent caller was Ambassador to France ''Bill" Bullitt, one of the most trusted of his foreign emissaries. Unlike other Presidents, who frequently filled diplomatic posts to repay political debts to party fat-cats whom they were glad to have out of the way, Franklin Roosevelt has stationed two of his favored advisers, Joe Kennedy and Bill Bullitt, in important embassies abroad. Last week Mr. Kennedy in London advised Democracies and Dictators to learn to get on together in the same world.

When Mr. Bullitt arrived, after surviving a forced landing two days before in the airplane of Governor Earle of Pennsylvania, the perennial rumor of a War debt settlement with France revived. Europe's affairs were doubtless a leading topic for discussion. The pair went motoring, talked long and privately while picnic-lunching at the roadside.

>Governor Lehman of New York came for lunch and Franklin Roosevelt's understood purpose was to get his sore-tried friend to whoop up the New Deal in his campaign for reelection. Mr. Lehman, unforgetting foe of the Court Plan, returned to his stump with kind words for Franklin Roosevelt but no New Deal honey on his tongue.

>Senator Wagner of New York came to discuss the prospect of Palestine being closed to outcast Jews as a homeland. President Roosevelt promised to high-pressure England. Worrying Senator Wagner also was the sudden strength of Republican John Lord O'Brian's campaign against him for reelection. He sought and received the full-blast backing of the New Deal publicity machine.

>In My Day, some months ago, Mrs. Roosevelt casually remarked, mentioning no names, that she had tried on a pair of shoes which "make standing for hours a pleasure." After investigating, the radio MARCH OF TIME re-enacted on the air her White House fitting by the shoe's inventor, 54-year-old, Syrian-born Cobbler James Fikany. Last week, in Rochester, N. Y., Cobbler Fikany acknowledged the happy result. Deluged with orders from the U. S., Canada and England, he proudly signed articles for a $250,000 corporation. His backers hoped to expand the little Fikany business into an enterprise for Rochester's 2,500 unemployed shoe workers.

Hardly responsible was Popularizer Roosevelt for a less fortunate innovation in Green Bay, Wis. So interseted ina lecture she was giving were two women who collected admissions at the door that they welcomed the offer of two unidentified men to take over their duties, returned to find the men had walked off with the evening's receipts, which Mrs. Roosevelt had intended for charity.

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