Aboard a train southbound from Chicago, Henry Agard Wallace and Charles Linza McNary, rival candidates for Vice President, sat down to breakfast at adjoining tables, their second such meeting of the campaign. "Hello, there, Henry," said Senator McNary as they shook hands. "Well, well," replied Wallace. "This is getting to be a habit."

Having missed his chance to fight for Finland because the war ended before he could get there, Jesse C. Carson, 27, grandson of famed Frontiersman Kit, tossed up his Colorado cowpuncher's job, volunteered for Army service.

Because he talked English to friends he was seeing off at the Gare d'Austerlitz, short, dark, voluble Maynard Barnes, U. S. charge d'affaires at Paris, was jailed by suspicious German soldiers, released two hours later after Embassy officials intervened.

Lean, long-fingered Alexander Brailowsky, Russian Chopin virtuoso, stepped onto the stage of Barranquilla, Colombia's Municipal Theatre, acknowledged applause, then turned toward the piano. It wasn't there. The manager had forgotten. There was no concert.

Rebuking British Author Somerset Maugham for a reference to the "thrilling and original poetry of T. S. Eliot." deep-eyed, soil-revering Author-Poet Carl Sandburg (Abraham Lincoln; The People, Yes) counseled a Manhattan audience: "If you wish to pray or if you wish to sit in silent meditation in a quiet corner and have music of words, you will get it from this poet. But if you want clarity on human issues, he's out -- he's zero . . .antidemocratic . . medievalist . . . royalist . . . and so close to Fascist that I'm off him, to use a truck driver's phrase. And we've got to consider the truck drivers in the present hour, rather than the intellectuals."

Strollers in Cannes spotted jaunty, whistling Maurice Chevalier cycling off to his greengrocer's, a market basket bouncing on the handle bars. Similarly straitened by gasoline famine, Cora Lapercerie, once the lissome toast of gaslit Montmartre, now circa 250 lb., rode over the cobbles in a small cart drawn by a straining Shetland pony.

In Middletown, Conn., Republican James Lukens McConaughy, president of Wesleyan University who is seeking reelection as Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut, was solicited for a contribution to the campaign of his Democratic opponent, Trinity College's Professor Odell Shepard. President McConaughy came through with a "very small check" and the promise to do all he can to defeat his learned opponent.

At Santa Monica, Calif., 21-year-old, 200-pound George Temple, Shirley's big brother, signed up for four years with the Marines, hoped to become a captain and a flier.

New York City's hen-shaped Mayor Fiorello ("Little Flower") LaGuardia, after collaring and shaking the shirt buttons off a tall Detroit heckler who dared ask whether Boss Flynn had sent him, toddled back to Manhattan, pitch-piped (to a N. Y. Herald Tribune Forum audience): "Myself, I never get mad."

Bandmaster Guy Lombardo, who has long pined for the day when auto horns will sound the first few bars of the anthem of their owners' native States, joyfully announced that a manufacturer had agreed to produce them at $15 apiece.

Glass-jawed Phil Scott, onetime British heavyweight champion, was discovered deep in London rubble, heading a squad of wardens digging out a bombed air-raid shelter. Puffed Fainting Phil as he leaned for a moment on his shovel: "And I used to think boxing was hard work."

Pittsburgh's Variety Club, orphan-succoring organization (started twelve years ago after an actor found a baby at a local theatre), feted a ten-month-old foundling, named him Joe E. Brown. On hand for the festivities, shovel-mouthed Comic Brown bounced the baby on his knee, talked of adopting him (though he had five of his own).

Elected King of Ak-Sar-Ben ("Nebraska" backwards) at Omaha's fall festival was bald, bulging William Martin Jeffers, 50 years ago a Union Pacific roundhouse callboy, since 1937 Union Pacific's president.

In Burlington, N. J., Etiquettical Emily Post made a political speech. Conceding President Roosevelt "a beautiful radio voice and social charm," she nevertheless raised her cultivated accents for tousled, frog-hoarse Candidate Wendell Willkie.

Pink-cheeked, bushy-browed Maestro Walter Damrosch, 78, built a baton-swinging cardboard effigy of Wendell Willkie at his Manhattan house, summoned musicians to see it. Putting politics before mythology, he crowed: "We are going to elect Willkie the conductor of 130,000,000 people for four years. ... He is playing the music from Wagner's opera Siegfried, in which Siegfried comes to awaken Bruennehilde, who has been asleep for eight years."

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