"Names make news." Last week these names made this news:
Colyumist Arthur Brisbane, who has never touched tobacco but who as a youngster delighted the late Charles Anderson Dana by recognizing Cháteau Yquem by taste, made his first visit to one of Manhattan's 50,000 speakeasies, found in it material for a half-column description. Excerpts: ''It is one o'clock in the day and somewhat surprised you see every seat occupied, practically all of them by young girls, chatting with the bartenders, taking cocktails or 'absinthe drip,' if you know what that is.* Some experienced, with mucous membranes well seasoned, take 'old fashioned whiskey cocktails. One hundred thousand dollars were spent in decorating the inside of a small dining room."
In an appeal for support, signed by Rabbi Nathan Krass, Patrick Joseph Cardinal Hayes, Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick and Bishop William Thomas Manning, Manhattan's Committee of Fourteen (antivice) declared the Depression is forcing many young women "either directly into prostitution or at least into borderline occupations from which the ranks of prostitution are most generally recruited," and that the underworld is ''taking advantage of this situation."
Col. Charles Augustus Lindbergh to the American Council of St. Luke's International Medical Centre at Tokyo: "I have no hesitation in saying that St. Luke's Hospital is the most outstanding American development I saw while in Japan." Whereupon the Council at once elected him a director, and Council President George Woodward Wickersham exclaimed: "Well, boy, now we've got you."
To Mrs. Katharine Dexter McCormick, whose husband, Stanley McCormick, was 25 years ago declared incompetent, a Chicago court awarded an allowance of $25,000 a month for 1932, the same amount which Mrs. McCormick received last year. Informed that Mr. McCormick is now recovered enough to manage his own establishment near Santa Barbara, court directed an administrator of the estate to visit Mr. McCormick, determine whether he needs a proposed new $400,000 dwelling to be called "Stone House."
James A. ("Jim") Reed was in court in Jefferson City, Mo., arguing the $1,000,000 suit of the wealthy Snyder Brothers against Union Electric Light & Power Co. when a whispered message interrupted him. He strode to the bench, asked to be excused on urgent business, hurried by automobile to Kansas City. There he learned that his good friend Mrs. Nelly Quinlan Donnelly had been kidnapped with her Negro chauffeur. Onetime Senator Reed was shown a letter just received from Mrs. Donnelly by her husband Paul:
"These men . . . want $75,000—$25,000 in $20 bills, $25,000 in tens and $25,000 in fifties. . . . If you refuse to pay I will be blinded and the Negro killed. You will be told where to take the money. They want money and you might as well give it to them."
The Senator thundered: "These people undoubtedly have Mrs. Donnelly in their power. If they will deliver her safely they can have the $75,000. . . . I will say further that if there is a single hair of her head harmed I will, and Mr. Donnelly will, spend the rest of our lives running down the culprits and securing for them the extreme penalty of the law, which, in Missouri, is hanging."