"Names make news." Last week the following names made the following news:
Charles Michael Schwab arose at the American Institute of Steel Construction, in session in Mississippi, and said: "Boys, listen to the old steel master from Bethlehem. I am getting old [66]. ... I have learned a lot since I started as a boy with Mr. Carnegie. I learned a lot about steel, but more important I learned a lot about life. Ah, that is the thing. Be happy. . . . When my time comes to die I do not want to be surrounded by granite and marble. I want to be amidst steel, beams and 'Ls' where I have been happy all my life. I will now leave you to go back to my business but I again will say—be good natured."
Mrs. Charles C. Goodrich, wife of the tire tycoon, traveled last week from York Village, Me., to Phoenix, Ariz., in a Pullman. The cost: $3,900. The reason: Mrs. Goodrich, long and seriously ill, needed the care of a doctor, nurses, and her husband, the privacy of a single Pullman, a swift trip without stopover or change.
Armand Tokatyan, tenor, bit Mario Basiola, baritone, on the ear, one evening last week. That was all right, for they were performing Cavalleria Rusticana at the Metropolitan Opera House and biting was in the stage directions. But Tenor Tokatyan bit the ear of Baritone Basiola so thoroughly that first-aid had to be performed at the end of the scene. Thereafter, Tenor Tokatyan explained that the unintended ferocity of his bite was caused by a nail which stuck up from his shoe into his foot.
William Gustafson, Metropolitan Opera basso, moved out of the La Rochelle
Apartments, Manhattan, last March, six months before his lease was up. The landlord brought suit to collect rent for the balance of the lease. Basso Gustafson, last week in court, thundered that he had two good reasons for moving out: 1) Killer Harry K. Thaw was his neighbor, 2) patrol wagons at the door and policemen riding in the apartment's elevators were annoying, especially when they came to arrest disorderly women. Mrs. Sinclair Lewis (née Dorothy Thompson) last week accused Theodore (American Tragedy') Dreiser of plagiarism. She had written an able book entitled The New Russia, based on her despatches to the New York Evening Post. She was at that time the best U. S. newspaper correspondent in central and eastern Europe. Mr. Dreiser, too, had travelled in Russia and he came out a little later with a rambling book called Dreiser Looks at Russia.
In making her charge, Mrs. Lewis quoted, side by side, dozens and dozens of paragraphs and sentences from her book and Mr. Dreiser's, which were practically identical* But, said Mrs. Lewis: "I want to reiterate that Mr. Dreiser's book as a whole and mine as a whole have numerous important differences. We do not arrive at the same conclusions regarding the Soviet experiment. . . . What strikes me as peculiar in the whole affair is that the passages in question deal with precisely those things which I should have thought a novelist would wish to describe in his own words."
This was not the first time that Mr. Dreiser had been accused of plagiarism. George Ade shamed him in 1926; Columnist Franklin P. Adams of the New York World found remarkably similar passages in Mr. Dreiser's works and in Sherwood Anderson's earlier Winesburg, Ohio.