With her mother and father looking on, poised, 14-year-old Princess Elizabeth made her first broadcast, spoke to child evacuees at home and overseas: "My sister is by my side," she concluded. "Come on, Margaret." Princess Margaret Rose, 10: "Good night, children." Elizabeth: ". . . And good luck to you all."
To spur the U. S. air corps' recruiting drive Charlie McCarthy turned up with Edgar Bergen at March Field, Calif., offered a combination peashooter-bombsight "guaranteed to hit a cuspidor at 30 feet," was sworn in as honorary master sergeant by Colonel Benjamin G. Weir, base commander. Viewing 21 flying fortresses lined up in his honor, Charlie suggested: "Try putting a hostess in each."
Gruff Hugh S. Johnson, who regards polls as public evils "not to be swallowed whole," offered to eat his syndicated Scripps-Howard column if the Gallup poll should prove correct this fall. Dr. George Horace Gallup accepted and replied: "My newspaper existence will end if I fail to predict the election correctly, but General Johnson will only have to eat a page* of newspaper print."
Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe, only man who ever brought five human females into the world at once, affirmed: "America isn't masculine enough. And Canada is following suit in the trend toward femininity. It doesn't make for happiness."
From Tunbridge Wells, England, wrote F. D. Newman, 68, great-nephew of England's late, great Catholic Convert John Henry Cardinal Newman, to Manhattan's American Committee for Defense of British Homes, asking for: "a gun or some standard but powerful automatic or machine gun, which one man can handle in defense of his home. I can shoot from the hip with a revolver in each hand at once."
"I'm selling the oldest merchandise in the world," lectured Fan-Dancer Sally Rand to a luncheon of the Poor Richard Advertising Club in Philadelphia.
Ducking out of a conference with New York City's Mayor LaGuardia, Thomas ("the Cork") Corcoran forgot to duck when he entered a small city-owned car. He shattered the glass dome light with his head, was treated for a nasty cut on his crown.
In Shirley, Tenn., a slight, brown-eyed farm boy bade his widowed mother, Postmistress Daily Hull, goodby, hitchhiked 90 miles to Knoxville to enlist in the U. S. Army. Told because he was only 20 that he needed his parent's consent, he hitchhiked home, returned to say: "Mother didn't exactly want me to sign up, but she didn't make much of a fuss. Most every family in our [Fentress] county has had one volunteer. . . ." Then taken by a grinning Army sergeant to Fort McPherson, Ga., Private Elbert Lee Hull was sworn into the Army, explained he had talked things over with Grandfather Louis Hull, but not with Grandfather Louis' distinguished nephew, U. S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull. "I didn't think it right to ask too much of Cousin Cordell, so I just signed up without . . . any help from the judge."