In Lake Success, N.Y. appeared scholarly Kung Teh-cheng, 28, for a look at U.N. headquarters. He proved to be the great-great-(to the 77th generation )grandson of Confucius, in the U.S. for conversations with U.S. scholars. To the press, Kung said of U.N.: his ancestor would have okayed the general idea.
In San Diego reappeared Ruth Elder, famed speed-&-distance flyer of the '205. Ruth, who has survived one forced landing in mid-Atlantic (in 1927) and five marriages, has now set her hand to writing an aviation column for the San Diego Journal.
In Los Angeles, a new career was begun by another flyer: Gregory ("Pappy") Boyington, famed in wartime as a Marine ace and in peacetime for his girl trouble (TIME, Jan. 21, 1946). Adventurous Pappy was now in shirts & ties, behind a haberdasher's counter. Said he: "I've got that old retailer's smile."
The Literary Life
Standard Classic Maurice (The Blue Bird) Maeterlinck, who filed suit against Dodd, Mead & Co., publishers, for $250,000 last summer (complaining that they had failed to publish and promote him properly), changed his mind, dropped the whole thing.
Russian Novelist llya Ehrenburg, who a few years ago won a Stalin Prize (currently worth $18,862), won it all over again with The Storm, a novel about Russia's wartime heroism and the Allies' rapaciousness. Dramatist Konstantin Simonov, whose The Russian Question (about corrupt U.S. journalism) won him a Stalin Prize last year, got none this time—but prizes went to the men who made a movie of his play.
Dr. William Carlos Williams, whose poetry operates without anesthetics (The Wedge, Adam & Eve & the City), got a $1,000 award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
In Atlanta, Margaret (Gone With the Wind) Mitchell and visiting lecturer Lady Astor were introduced to each other, and quickly showed U.N. how. "You will never know how much that book meant to us," said Lady Astor, speaking for England. "Lady Astor, I hope the British will send over here more people like you," said Novelist Mitchell, "with the power to speak to the heart."
"The atom bomb," confided George Bernard Shaw, "is out of the question, just as gas was in the last war. It is too destructive to both sides."
To Have & Have Not
Left by the late Earl Baldwin of Bewdley (Britain's onetime Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin): an estate worth $1,123,884.
Allowed by the court to ex-Ziegfeld Girl Gladys Glad, out of the estate left by her late husband, Hollywood Producer Mark Hellinger: $4,000 a month, for living expenses.
Lost by Comedians Bud Abbott & Lou Costello, at poker: considerable. Testifying last week at the income-tax-evasion trial of a Chicago gambler, they tried to remember their losses for certain periods. Abbott thought he had dropped from $20,000 to $25,000. Costello's contribution, he recalled, was only "around $15,000."
All in the Family
Dwight Eisenhower, in civilian clothes just six weeks, climbed back into uniform and rushed to West Point to play a supporting role in a dewy-eyed, unmilitary picture with son John, daughter-in-law Barbara Jean, and first grandchild Dwight David II (see cut).