In New City, N. Y., poetasty Playwright Maxwell Anderson (What Price Glory?, Mary of Scotland, Winterset) won a prize for the local artists' colony by a bit of trenchant prose. His composition: "The increasing odor from the pig pen which is wafted constantly to the study in which I write . . . is so rank that unless corrected it will force me to abandon my home." The prize: a civic order limiting the number of pigs to 20 at any one time in any one place in the township. Mr. Anderson objected to a large, newly-built pen which housed 200 pigs for a boys' camp. Now, said he, the camp would need more boys to eat the pigs, and more boys would need still more pigs.

In Hollywood devoted little Katja Mann, wife of Thomas Mann, told of shielding the nervous novelist from Nazis while they were flying the English Channel last spring: "He came back and wanted my seat by the window, but I made him stay up in front. He is very naive and seldom knows what is going on, so I didn't tell him until we reached London that there were German airplanes flying all around us. If they had seen him, he surely would have been recognized and arrested. The Germans flew past us and close beside us, looking me over carefully, but they didn't recognize me."

Hard-eyed, scowling, exiled Prince Ernst Ruediger von Starhemberg, onetime Vice Chancellor of Austria and leader of the fascist Heimwehr, after many an unsuccessful attempt to raise a pro-Ally Austrian legion, joined General Charles de Gaulle's Free French Air Force to fight against his onetime friends, the Nazis.

From his long-awaited Nazi burlesque, two years in the making, Charlie Chaplin released a double handful of stills, an nounced that The Great Dictator would soon appear on U. S. screens.

In 1937 a balding oldtime hoofer, Frank Wallace, announcing himself as Cinemactress Mae West's undivorced husband (he said he was married to her in 1911), claimed a share in her $500,000-a-year income (TIME, July 19, 1937). All he got from Miss West was grudging confirmation of the marriage. Last week Song & Dance Man Wallace tried again. Shifting his attack to her fat-faced, multiple-chinned manager, James A. Timony, Wallace sought damages of $105,000, charging that Timony had threatened his life, conspired against his chances for employment, assumed "the position and relationship of a common-law husband of the plaintiff's wife." Said Miss West: "Wallace is evidently a persistent suit-er."

When madcap, publicity-wise Salvador Dali, Spanish surrealist painter, arrived in Manhattan last year, he declared: "I used to balance two broiled chops on my wife's shoulders, and then by observing the movement of tiny shadows produced by the accident of the meat on the flesh of the woman I love when the sun was setting, I was finally able to attain images sufficiently lucid and appetizing for exhibition in New York." Last week, when Painter Dali and his wife debarked at Jersey City, he announced that he was "a reformed and much more conservative man."

Having sold his $2,500,000 yacht Corsair IV to the British Government last spring, J. P. Morgan chartered the 115-ft. motor yacht Inishowen V for the New York Yacht Club's annual cruise, ran aground off Fishers Island, N. Y.

Plump Colonel Frank Knox, new U. S. Secretary of the Navy, whose name has appeared in the Chicago Daily News masthead since 1931 as Editor and Publisher, dropped his title and job, appointed a three-man regency* to pinch-hit for him. Ten days later the Republican News in a front-page editorial came out for Willkie.

Celebrating his 82nd birthday, Dr. Henry Horace Williams, professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, said: "Regardless of where our sympathies lie, Germany will probably win the war and organize a United States of Europe. Hitler is trying to do the same sort of thing George Washington did when he organized the 13 American colonies. Both men met plenty of opposition. But I wouldn't compare the character of Hitler and Washington, for Washington was a greater character."

*Treasurer Lynn Ellis Aldrich, Advertising Director George Francis Hartford, Editor-in-Chief Paul Scott Mowrer.

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