Revealing that he has given away all his medals (including his D.S.C. and Medal of Honor), Author-(To Hell and Back) Cinemactor Audie Murphy announced: "I've been fed up with that 'most decorated' business for a long time. I realize it is an honor, but only because it symbolizes the work done by a lot of other guys, too. It has never meant much to me."

Cinemactress Ann ("The Oomph Girl") Sheridan decided that "women have gone to extremes in nudity . . ." Unless the girls "do something about it," she warned, "the wolf whistle will soon be a thing of the past."

Cornered by a direct question, Kentucky's Alben Berkley made an admission: yes, it is true that he mixes ginger ale with his bourbon. "The ginger ale may not do much for the bourbon," the Veep explained, "but the bourbon certainly does something for the ginger ale."

Informed that the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America had banned Sweet Adeline because of its "alcoholic associations," W.C.T.U. President Mrs. D. Leigh Colvin commented dryly, "I have never heard of a song which has ever made anybody drunk."

"This business has ruined me for thinking," bestselling Humorist Max (Sleep Till Noon) Shulman complained to the Hartford (Conn.) Courant. "Every time I start thinking, a little voice intrudes and whispers, 'Hey, maybe there's a story in this somewhere.' "

The news that her husband, Anthony Eden, had divorced her on grounds of desertion (see MILESTONES) was calmly received by Beatrice Helen Eden. In Manhattan, where she was staying with friends, Mrs. Eden commented: "So what?"

"I have done what I wanted to do here," said Wales's pudgy, pink-cheeked Poet Dylan Thomas, after a three-month tour of the U.S. "I met Charles Chaplin and Carl Sandburg, and I insulted a rich industrialist." Thomas, who has been writing scripts for the BBC, was puzzled by one thing: "Why do so many American poets teach? They graduate from college, and then they stay in college. When do they learn anything?"

In the Running

"If I'm defeated in the next election," said Race Horse Fan Winston Churchill, "I think I shall concentrate on racing. That Ago Khan has had it all his own way far too long."

In Hartford, Conn., the Democratic State Central Committee appointed Novelist John (The Wall) Mersey to help draft a party platform on which Governor Chester Bowles will run for a second term this fall.

In Washington for the annual celebrity golf tourney, Jim Thorpe, 62, famed Carlisle Indians halfback, Olympic track star and onetime major-league (N.Y. Giants) outfielder, wound a bulging arm around Texas' Babe Didrikson Zaharias, 36. Photographers caught a good shot of two of the half-century's outstanding athletes (see cut).

Down the streets of Boston, a rifle on his shoulder, marched a brand-new private of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts: Admiral Louis E. Denfeld, 59, former Chief of Naval Operations.

Announcing the world premiere of a union movie about a cloakmaker, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' bouncy David Dubinsky described the fictional hero: "This cloakmaker built our country no less than the people who made the railroads and the people who pioneered through the wilderness ... So our hero's name isn't Kit Carson or Daniel Boone ... So his name is Alexander Brody, and he likes to play pinochle."

On the Go

While Norway's King Haakon and 30,000 of his subjects watched in silence, Eleanor Roosevelt unveiled a heroic granite statue of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt on a site overlooking Oslo Harbor. Then Mrs. Roosevelt thanked her hosts, Crown Prince Olav and Crown Princess Martha, and was off to Stockholm for a little visit with Sweden's King Gustaf.

In a Boston hospital, Pakistan's Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan and the Begum were recuperating from their operations (hers was gallstones, his goiter). Before starting for home, the Begum had one worry: would her two sons be too chubby to get into the Hopalong Cassidy outfits she has bought them?

From Paris, Playwright Tennessee (A Streetcar Named Desire) Williams admitted that he had just finished his first novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, about a retired American actress living in Rome. The book will not be published until September, but Williams has already set his heart on Greta Garbo to star in the movie version.

Japan's junketing Elder Statesman Yukio Ozaki, 91, onetime mayor of Tokyo who gave the city of Washington its famed Japanese cherry trees, dropped in at the Manhattan apartment of Elder Statesman Bernard Baruch, 79, for a chat. The two talked some about world affairs and then got down to a more immediate problem: comparing the relative merits of their hearing aids (see cut).

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