Bill & Bumpy

Wrote Columnist Raymond Clapper from North Africa: "The biggest thing in [the pilots'] lives ... is an American Red Cross girl under an olive tree serving coffee and doughnuts. Only after the second cup of coffee and the third doughnut do you begin to hear about what happened over Sicily a few minutes ago."

For coffee and doughnuts--and many other things--the soldiers can bless a handsome, energetic couple from Stamford, Conn., Mr. & Mrs. William Edwards Stevenson, known to generals and privates alike as Bill and Bumpy. Bill is Red Cross delegate (manager) to North Africa. When Bill forsook his profitable Manhattan law practice for the Red Cross 15 months ago, his wife Eleanor joined up as a Red Cross worker herself, wangled her way somehow to Algiers.

"The S.I. Girl Friend." Columnist Ernie Pyle discovered the Stevensons a few weeks ago, when he marveled at 25 Red Cross clubs--with lodgings, game rooms, snack bars, movies--which Bill had managed to set up in North Africa. And he wrote of Bumpy: "She is a sort of roving delegate, cheerer-upper, smoother-over and finder-outer for the whole Red Cross of Africa and half the Army, too.

Everywhere she goes she lends her pretty ear to tales of woe, turns her pretty smile on generals and privates without distinction and gives her strong shoulder to be wept upon by all and sundry. Bill calls her 'the G.I. girl friend.' "

Before going to North Africa last November, at General Dwight Eisenhower's request, Bill Stevenson had been Red Cross delegate to England. There, after endless conferences with Army and civil authorities, pleading for space and equipment, he had dotted the United Kingdom with 75 Red Cross clubs.

Bumpy reached North Africa last Christmas, spent two months in the Atlas Mountains, distributing food and clothing to the Berbers.

Preacher's Son. Tall (6 ft. 1 in.), smooth Bill Stevenson, 42, onetime Princeton track star, is a descendant of Jonathan Edwards, the New England preacher. His grandfather was a minister; his father, the late J. Ross Stevenson, was president of Princeton Theological Seminary. His twin brothers are missionaries; one is a prisoner of the Japs in Manila. Bill was graduated from Princeton in 1922, won a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, ran on the U.S. Olympic team which set a mile record in Paris in 1924. He and Bumpy lived with their two daughters in a remodeled farmhouse in Stamford (now rented to Lyricist Dorothy Fields). Their daughters, 15 and 14, used to play tennis and swim with their parents in summer, skate and ski with them in Vermont in the winter. Now they are both working on farms for the summer.

Bumpy does not feel too badly about breaking up the family for the duration. Her mother did the same thing in World War I. Her father, Yale Physics Professor Henry Andrews Bumstead, was caught in London at war's outbreak, became scientific attache to the U.S. Embassy. Her mother went to London to be with him, and Bumpy spent the war with her grandmother.

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