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Paulette Goddard, long an inspiration for students of anatomy, announced that she and her husband, Burgess Meredith (see below), planned to establish scholarship funds in a number of U.S. colleges and universities. The first scholarship (valued at $10,000) will go to the University of Southern California, to be used for scientific research.
Robert Burns, greatest of Scottish poets, who supposedly drank himself to death (in 1796) when he was only 37, and whose admirers have periodically attempted to redeem his honor, got his bad reputation newly scotched by Dr. Sidney Watson Smith, onetime president of the British Medical Association. In the B.M.A.'s Journal, Dr. Smith presented medical evidence against the "gossip's fable," declared that Burns "suffered and died from subacute infective endocarditis —that microbic inflammation of the heart which usually has a fatal ending in septicaemia."
Ernie Pyle, on his way to report the war in the Pacific, stopped off in Hollywood, posed with his cinema self, bewigged Burgess Meredith, who plays the U.S.'s favorite war correspondent in the forthcoming film, G. I. Joe.
Eleanor Roosevelt was named Woman of the Year by the National Council of Negro Women.
Charles Spencer Chaplin, laid up in his Hollywood home with cuts in his left ankle after kicking in a glass door because he had lost his keys, heard that the paternity suit brought against him by Joan Berry had ended in a mistrial: the jury had deadlocked at 7-to-5 for acquittal (nine votes needed for a verdict). It will be summer before the court can schedule a new trial.