A columnist on the Manchester Guardian asked old George Bernard Shaw if he had sent Hitler a congratulatory telegram on his escape from the Bürgerbraü bombing. Shaw said he had not, but that Chamberlain should have wired Hitler: "Greatly as the British nation regrets your escape, decency obliges the British Government to congratulate you on it."
To celebrate the golden jubilee of Barnard College, Dean Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve asked visiting notables to review their adventures in scholarship, to show students that "It's fun to use your mind." English Professor Marjorie Hope Nicolson of Smith College remembered her elation at discovering the "Conway Letters" (detailing the romance of a Cambridge University philosopher and a beautiful young viscountess) in a chilly Cambridge library: "I wore all the clothes I owned, all the sweaters, all the coats. I wore mittens and gloves and I sat writing and copying those letters, with tears partly of cold and partly of joy running down my face, because that library at Christ Church College had never been heated and it has grown colder by geometrical progression for 500 years."
In Manhattan for Christmas shopping, Mr. and Mrs. Oliva Dionne—ex quintuplets—went to see a musical comedy Too Many Girls.
For three minutes ($29.75) Russian born Cleveland Oilman Abraham ("Abe") Pickus, self-appointed telephone diplomat who thinks he helps world peace by overseas calls to heads of European and Asiatic governments,* talked with Finnish Foreign Minister Eljas Erkko, warning him that Finland must cooperate with Russia or "she will have the same experience as Poland."
In Paris, Vienna-born Composer Oscar Straus, 69 (The Chocolate Soldier), was granted final French citizenship. In London, Rogers S. Lament, Manhattan lawyer, distant relative of Banker Thomas William Lament, took the oath of allegiance to King George VI, began training as an artillery cadet. In a Ukrainian city, Ruth Marie Rubens, 31, Philadelphia woman who went to Russia in 1937 on a forged passport, became U.S.S.R. Citizeness Ruth Friederichnova Boerger. In Manhattan, Elisabeth Rethberg, Metropolitan Opera soprano, received her final papers for U. S. citizenship.*
British Author Stanley Richardson, landing in Manhattan for a lecture tour, was asked for news of Naziphile Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford, marooned in Germany and at last reports desperately ill (TIME, Nov. 13). Said he: "Unity is just crazy in love with Hitler. But, boys, don't make the mistake of thinking she is a pathetic figure."
Prison-pallid Dr. James Monroe Smith, convicted ex-president of Louisiana State University, hunched up in a jail bathtub at Baton Rouge, La., tried to commit bloody suicide by slashing his right foot. (It was his second attempt: last July, in the Federal House of Detention at New Orleans, he tried to have bichloride of mercury smuggled to him in an ice cream carton.) Two days later an ambulance carried off ineffectual Convict Smith to Angola State Penitentiary, to begin serving eight to 24 years for forgery.