Leather-lunged Bobby Breen, 12, retired from work as a cinemasinger. Reason: his voice is changing.

Up the red-&-blue-carpeted, wide circular staircase to the main ballroom of Manhattan's Ritz-Carlton Hotel paraded 99 of this season's debutantes, wealthy, wellborn, circumspect in public, acceptable to the Old Guard of Manhattan society.

The occasion: first of three Junior Assembly dances, demarcating what Society calls Society from what the public calls Society (run-of-the-mine Social Registerites). Notably present: Mary A. (for Alrichs) Steele, tall, blonde, beauteous daughter of the late Socialite Banker John Nelson Steele, earlier this year the candidate of Stork Club's Pressagent Charles ("Chic") Farmer for 1940 Glamor Girl. Notably absent: Patricia Plunkett, shapely, blonde daughter of Mrs. Dunbar Plunkett, suggested by Glamorizer Farmer as substitute candidate when Mrs. Steele yanked Mary back into the shadows of glamorless respectability.

When low tide kept his pilot boat from landing at Tulum, Quintana Roo, impulsive Mexican President Lazaro Cyrdenas, anxious to get on with his job, pulled on his bathing suit and plunged overboard, swam ashore, followed by 60 cursing members of the Presidential party.

Week before he reopened his uncut Hamlet on Broadway, British Actor Maurice Evans was asked: "Who is the best Hamlet you've ever seen?" Prompt Evans retort: "I haven't got any mirrors."

Publisher John Macrae Sr., longtime president of E. P. Button & Co. (books), shot himself in the upper left arm and chest while hunting 'possum near Greenwich, Va., was hurried to Fauquier County* hospital for a blood transfusion.

Violinist Jascha Heifetz suggested that U. S. concert audiences should hiss whenever they feel like it: "American audiences are too standardized . . . too timid to express their real opinion of an artist.

. . . Some day when an audience has cooperated fully with me in giving a good performance, I am going to answer their applause for my concertizing by applauding them for good listening."

Pearl Sydenstricker Buck Walsh

(Pearl Buck), best-selling novelist, sounded off on bestsellers: "To read a book because others are reading it is no reason at all. For myself, I should like to see every best-seller list abolished, and the volume of sale of any book kept a secret, even in advertising."

Silver-haired, sharp-tongued, zealous Dr. Charles Giffin Pease, founder of the Non-Smokers' Protective League (he used to snatch cigars from the lips of subway smokers), celebrated his 85th birthday in his usual fashion, delivering a good-natured diatribe to newshawks against whiskey, wine, beer, capital punishment, the killing of animals, the eating of flesh. Said he: "The dear chickens, how they scream and struggle in their effort to break away from the hands of the assassin. If it were right to kill chickens there would be no expression of fear on the part of the chicken." To show up meat eating, he told of how he utterly confounded a woman who argued that one must eat meat to gain strength. Snapped Dr. Pease: "I never before knew why the measly elephant is so weak."

Convicted of simple assault & battery were three Warrenton, Va. aristocrats who last June oiled & feathered Washington Society Chit-Chatter Count Igor Cassini, because they did not like his printed references to their families and friends (TIME, July 3). Ian Montgomery, 38, took all the blame, thereby pulled the teeth of the indictment for mob assault, which might have jailed the trio for ten years each. To a court jampacked with Fauquier (pronounced faw'-kee-a) County hunt society, a Fauquier County jury declared the act a misdemeanor, ruled that their fun would cost the defendants $500 (Ian Montgomery, $300; Brother Colin Montgomery, 28, $150; Alex Calvert, 21, $50). Smart Defense Attorney Aubrey G. Weaver spoke for the hunting set when he declaimed that the boys had done "what any red-blooded Virginian* would have done . . ." And that "these young men have rendered a public service to this community."

Aging, grey Convict James Monroe Smith, ex-president of Louisiana State University, who tried suicide by slashing a vein in his foot with a razor blade while he sat in a jail bathtub (TIME, Nov. 27), was given a machete, set to work chopping sugar cane at Louisiana's Angola Prison Farm.

In an automobile collision at Azusa, Calif., Thomas Leo McCarey, cinema director (The Awful Truth, Ruggles of Red Gap), and Gene Fowler (born Eugene Devlan), journalist, author (The Great Mouthpiece, Timber Line, Illusion in Java), were burned by gasoline flames. Director McCarey had a fractured skull, Writer Fowler injuries to back and chest. First to recover, Fowler telephoned his agent, offered him 10% of his cuts.

*For news of another Fauquier County event, see p. 61.

*To native Virginians, the Fauquier County horsy set is "the second Yankee invasion." Red-blooded Virginians Montgomery are Britishers "once removed," the Calverts hale from Pittsburgh.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.