In San Francisco rotund Alexander Woollcott, playing in The Man Who Came to Dinner, dined with friends, on snails with French dressing, rice balls, bisque of clam, baby squid with sauce a la Genoise, saddle of lamb, fondue of truffles, cress salad. Result: he got a heart attack, was put to bed and the show had to close.

Norway's patriarch of letters, hardbitten Nobel Prizewinner (Growth of the Soil) Knut Hamsun, 80, turned on his Government for continuing to oppose the Nazi invasion. Cried Writer Hamsun in Oslo: "The Government ordered mobilization, then fled. Norwegian youths now die for that 'Government.' "

Refereeing a wrestling match in Atlanta, Jack Dempsey several times warned Wrestler Cowboy Lutrell against rough tactics, finally awarded the match to his opponent on a foul. Indignant Lutrell took a poke at Dempsey, and Prize Fighter Dempsey, long out of training, went into action, nailed him with a hard punch, drove him to the ropes (see cut).

Blonde, blue-eyed Sonia Maria Noel Stokowski, 18, daughter of famed Maestro Leopold Stokowski and his exwife, Pianist Olga Samaroff Stokowski, announced her plan to enter summer stock, become a great actress. Said she: "You've got to do something in life, you can't just sit around."

Brisk British Tycoon John Richard Sofio, chairman of the board of British Home Stores (a chain of 60 cheap stores with a 1939 gross of -L-15,000,000), admitted when he arrived in the U. S. that business was good, particularly in one item: because of blackouts Britons have bought millions of electric torches (flashlights).

From retirement on his isolated ranch in the hills of Southern California, William S. Hart, 69, strong, silent two-gun man of cinema fame, and his Great Dane, Prince Hamlet the Dane II, emerged to charge his neighbor Duncan McDonald, 20, with peppering Hamlet's hide with buckshot.

American Speech, linguists' quarterly, reported that "grifters" (tank-town confidence men) describe a sucker as a "willing winchell." Retorted Walter Winchell (in absentia): "Probably because some unsuspecting namesake once was such an easy mark."

Fearful for the wartime rights of expectant mothers and expected children, famed English Feminist Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst, mother of an illegitimate "eugenic" son, urged that pregnant women receive the Army allowance regularly given to children already born (maximum weekly payment: 5s).

Illinois' Governor Henry Homer turned over to the Illinois State Historical Library his Lincoln collection (2,000 books, 3,700 pamphlets, 800 catalogs and miscellaneous items), one of the best in the world, "to be used permanently by the people of the State and nation."

Visiting in San Francisco, Countess Barbara Hutton Haugwitz-Reventlow, who never before gave a hoot for photographers, posed cooperatively, ingratiated herself with them, got herself some good publicity. Result: a picture of her in Chinatown offering a piece of candy to Hoover Lee, 2.

At the first annual Founders' Day dinner of the Thompson Club of America, held at Thompson's Restaurant in Chicago, Oscar Q. Thompson presiding, Writer Dorothy Thompson was chosen "the outstanding Thompson of the year."

Because comic strip hero Superman recently spread pacifist propaganda in the trenches, singlehanded attempted to destroy the Westwall and all its works, Das Schwarze Korps (organ of the Nazi SS Guards) stormed, "Instead of taking wise advantage of the opportunity really to further serious virtues, he sows hate, injustice, laziness and crime. ... It is pitiful that American children . . . don't even recognize the poison."

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