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Franklin D. Roosevelt's stamp collection, appraised at $100,000, was up at auction in Manhattan. About half was sold; it brought $134,550. Curiosa: 52 "Brickbat & Bouquet" covers. Philatelist Roosevelt had happily kept envelopes addressed to "Dishonorable Franklin Deficit Roosevelt," "Plutocrat F. D. Roosevelt, Owner of 4 Estates, Member of 13 Clubs, White House," "The Sit-Down Politician," "White Father of the Pretty Bubbles." A Manhattan department store bid in the lot for $525.
Sacred & Profane
Harry S. Truman, only recently elected to the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, Inc., 'was made an honorary member of the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York.
Sir Stafford Cripps, rigidly respectable president of Britain's Board of Trade, who looks like a cross between Woodrow Wilson and an old maid, plumped for more public aid to private romance. "Love in a cottage is all very well," he observed, "if the roof doesn't leak." Mere muddling-through in marriage, said he, is the result of unlettered prudery. "We have been half-ashamed of our divinely created animal instincts."
Harold Laski, British Labor's international problem child, got hit by another spitball, but went right on reciting. Conservative M.P. Cyril Osborne urged Parliament to send beefy Ernest Bevin to the U.S. to offset waspish Laski's influence. Declared Osborne: let the Government "keep some of their wandering minstrels from the London School of Economics at home." Minstrel Laski's proposal of the week: let the U.S. relax international tension right now by destroying its atomic bomb stockpile.
William Saroyan, once U.S. letters' Public Show-off No. 1, had become a Garbo for privacy. Since release from the Army last September he had cut nary a public caper—not even last January 11 when Wife Carol bore him their unpublicized second child, first daughter.