Hardboiled, often embroiled Elisha Hanson, general counsel for the American Newspaper Publishers Association, is soft on pigeons. Exhibiting home-bred prize pouters in Philadelphia, he remarked: "There are philanderers and wantons among pigeons, but not many. Generally they are ... just a little more loyal to each other than the human race."

At a Manhattan dinner where Author Carl Van Doren gave him a scroll for one of the ten best non-fiction books of the year (Inside Asia), slab-sided Journalist John Gunther announced he had still to learn enough about his native land to write an Inside America.

Party-throwing Elsa Maxwell, in Hollywood to make a series of shorts to be called How to Get Fun Out of Life, officiated at a children's party given by Warners for their radiant baby star, 17-month-old Peter B. Good. Present were the offspring of Hollywood's great, gooing with pleasure at the smart talk. After games, they sat through Brother Rat and a Baby, in which Peter B. Good is the baby. Baby Peter (whom directors have trouble making cry) watched the picture closely, howled.

Frank Veloz, of Veloz & Yolanda, announced the permanent retirement of their famed dance team. Reason: Mrs. Yolanda Casazza Veloz expects a child in July, will thereafter devote herself to motherhood.

Royal sportsmen and sportswomen skated on well-frozen ice in Sweden, Holland, Switzerland (see cuts). King Ananda, 14, monarch of Thailand (formerly Siam), played shinny with his brother, Prince Pumipol, on a Swiss lake. On a canal in The Hague, Princess Juliana wobbled on old-fangled Dutch curl-tipped skates with the Baroness Van Asbeck. Out on the pool before Drottningholm Castle near Stockholm slid Prince Gustaf Adolf, eldest son of the Swedish Crown Prince, with his sprawling little daughters, Princesses Margaretha and Birgitta.

Bubbling Elspeth Huxley, photographer, big-game hunter, agriculturist and mystery writer (latest: The African Poison Murders), cousin-by-marriage of Aldous and Julian, told a Manhattan reporter how she had her personal devils exorcised by black tribal quacks in Kenya Colony, British East Africa: "There was a lot of mumbo-jumbo with a goat, for which I paid three shillings. The witch doctor chalked up my face and between my toes. I did as I was told until I was supposed to lick the intestines of a goat. I hired a substitute for a shilling, being assured that this wouldn't break the spell."

Asked to write a plea for Herbert Hoover's Finnish relief fund, crusty old Author Theodore Dreiser replied: "I am not just another American propaganda sucker," added: "If our papers do not lie, and they never lie, it is the Russians who seem to need help against the Finns."

Stewart Reburn, Sonja Henie's figure-skating tango partner, stumbled, hung on to Sonja, dragged her with him, treated 16,500 fans at Manhattan's Madison Square Garden to the sight of Sonja (for the fourth time in her professional career) pratt-fallen.

Slight, brisk, spruce in the uniform of a major general of the British Expeditionary Force, the Duke of Windsor appeared at a London hotel, quickly turned in, leaving a "do not disturb" request at the desk. He was in England "on business." The Duchess of Windsor remained in France.

New York City's peppery little Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia sat on the conference table before which coal teamsters and employers agreed to end a strike, sauced the ganders by having the heat shut off in the conference room.

In Hollywood's gaudy Trocadero restaurant, Redbook magazine gave a gaudy party to celebrate its selection of Bette Davis as 1939'$ outstanding film actress. More in evidence than Bette Davis were: 1) Actress Joan Bennett, with 2) her third husband, Producer Walter Wanger; 3) Actress Hedy Lamarr, with 4) her second husband--and Actress Bennett's second--Writer Gene Markey. A brash photographer, well aware that since Joan Bennett dyed her hair the color of Hedy Lamarr's (brown) they look like a sister act, asked the Wangers and the Markeys to pose together. The Wangers grabbed their wraps, fled.

In Hollywood hospital lay John Marion Fox, Joan Bennett's thrice-married first husband. After she had the name of their daughter Diana changed from Fox to Markey, Playboy Fox became despondent. Lately he had been running an Oriental art bazaar. When he heard that Joan had married Walter Wanger, John Fox gulped a handful of sleeping tablets, called an ambulance, babbled to attendants: "I can't bear the thought of Diana's being brought up by another man. I want to sleep." Told that physicians had pulled him through at Actress Bennett's expense, he was too far gone to care.

To charities and family went $369,067 net (including $246,769 in Egyptian bonds) from the estate of Pearl (Perils of Pauline) White, whose episodic escapes from death & worse left cinemaudiences of 25 years ago in weekly anguish and to whom death came inescapably on Aug. 4, 1938.

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