Sergeant Marion Hargrove, the Army's best-selling humorist, who wrote feelingly in See Here, Private Hargrove of the "fiendish cruelties" inflicted on him by Sergeant Thomas Mulvehill, found the situation still normal. Now feature editor of the Army's magazine Yank in Manhattan, Hargrove got a telephone call from Lieut. Mulvehill, now of the A.A.F. Barked , Mulvehill: "I'm getting married tonight and I need an usher in a hurry and you're it." Hargrove obeyed. Mulvehill let him kiss the bride (see cut).
Earnest A. Hooton, loquacious Harvard anthropologist, pondered the cigaret shortage, decided: "The boys in the foxholes ... their lives endangered, are nervous and miserable and want girls. Since they can't have them, they smoke cigarets. The girls at home . . . their virtue not endangered, are nervous and miserable and want boys. Since they can't have them, they too smoke cigarets. So what happens? The briar pipe resumes its rightful place as the companion of the philosophic male whose gonadal preoccupations have vanished with the years."
Martha Gellhorn, 36, gilt-haired, restless novelist-correspondent (for Collier's), wife of Collier's War Correspondent Ernest Hemingway, driving between Toulouse and Paris, lost control of her car after a blowout, dived over a 16-ft. embankment, cracked a rib.
Patriots
Rosalia Mercurio Di Maqgio, 66, plump, Italian-born mother of Baseballers Joe, Vince and Dominic Di Maggio, two other sons, four daughters, passed her naturalization test in San Francisco's Superior Court with flying colors, became a U.S. citizen. Papa Joseph Di Maggio Sr., 72, flunked his, was told he could try again.
Mabel Thorp Boardman, 80-odd, able, stately, longtime (25 years) secretary of the American Red Cross, who has watched the membership grow from 300 to some 30,000,000, retired (after 44 years) last week, received a Distinguished Service Medal (first one to be awarded by the Red Cross) and a citation from President Roosevelt for being the "inspirer" of the organization. Victorian Miss Boardman, one of Washington's top society hostesses, who looks amazingly like Great Britain's Queen Mary,* planned to write her memoirs.
King George VI celebrated his 49th birthday† by giving the first dance at Buckingham Palace since World War II began—a birthday ball with 100 invited guests and the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, attending their first ball in London.
Alexander Feodorovich Kerensky, 63, brush-haired, short-time head of Russia's Provisional Government in 1917, overthrown and exiled by Lenin, spoke up at a meeting of the Foreign Policy Association in Manhattan for the U.S.S.R.'s territorial claims in eastern Poland and the Baltic States, declared that for Russia to give up these claims was like asking the "U.S. to disannex its possessions or . . . part of its own borders." Hedged anti-Communist Kerensky: "I am still the implacable enemy of the . . . dictatorship in Moscow. But since the first day of the (German) invasion, I have supported . . . the war aims of my country, Russia. I make a distinction between Stalin, the national leader, and Stalin, the leader of international Communism."
Debunkers