War Effort
Major Kermit Roosevelt, son of the late Teddy, took part in his first action against the Japs—a reconnaissance flight over Kiska. Back home, his 20-room manor at Oyster Bay, L.I., was opened as a convalescent home for torpedoed merchant seamen. Mrs. Henry A. Wallace, reviewing a parade of WAACs at Fort Des Moines, congratulated the leader of the winning group of marchers so successfully that Margaret M. Wheatley burst into tears. Emily Bradley Saltonstall, daughter of Massachusetts' Governor, enlisted in the WAVES in Boston as an apprentice seaman. Alfred Ryder, 26, long the "Sammy" of Radio's The Goldbergs, went off to Camp Upton as a private. Benito Mussolini, who used to pose at the controls of a plane, took an experimental, electric-drive car for a trial run.
Somewhere in England 22-year-old Corporal Ora A. Foster of suburban Pontiac, Mich, thumbed a ride in an outsize limousine, chatted in the back seat for some 14 miles with two pleasant ladies while a British colonel sat up front with the chauffeur. "I more or less did the talking," Foster reported later. Before he got out one of the ladies remarked, "I guess you don't know who I am, do you?" "You've got me beat," said Foster, and she told him: Queen Mary. Corporal Foster summed up classically: "You could have knocked me down with a feather."
White House Historian
The office of the President of the United States was an upstairs study when Rudolph Forster became a temporary clerk in the White House in 1897. McKinley kept him on, and so has every President since. He has broken in each new President to the White House routine, served as handyman, tutor, adviser, informal ready-reference, and casual White House historian—for the President's ears. If he wanted to he could write an inside-dope book to end all inside-dope books. Last week the President took official cognizance of 70-year-old Rudy Forster's approach to the retirement age next month by signing an executive order exempting him from the automatic retirement provision. The exemption of 73-year-old clerk Maurice Latta was extended. "This is permanent," wrote the President to modest, clam-mouthed Rudy Forster. "I do not want either of you to leave me as long as I am here."
Troubles
Publisher John Boettiger (Seattle Post-Intelligencer), son-in-law of the President, was sued for $150,000 libel by the local county prosecutor whose reelection Boettiger is fighting. His paper alleged that the prosecutor failed to report $12,000 of his income on his tax returns. Wellington Koo Jr., 21-year-old son of the Chinese Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, was held (briefly) in Mechanicsburg, Pa., as a suspected Jap spy. Prince and Princess Guido Pignatelli's 32-room mansion near Charleston was destroyed by fire. Estimated damage: $400,000. She is the former Henrietta Hartford, A. & P. heiress. Shrewd, brilliantly blonde Cinemactress Constance Bennett declared that the boy she had legally adopted a decade ago was actually her own child by the late Millionaire Playboy Phil Plant. Four-times-married Miss Bennett (who got $1,000,000 and a divorce from Plant in 1930) let out the news in the course of a $550,000 court fight over the Plant estate.
Man of Bataan