When Senator Kenneth Wherry, Republican floor leader and onetime Nebraska mortician, made reference last week to "the Senator from New Michigan," gallery regulars promptly added it to their growing list of Wherryisms. Samples: addressing the chair as "Mr. Paragraph," offering a comment as "my unanimous opinion," referring to Indo-China as "Indigo China" and the old War Department Civil Functions Bill as the Civil War Functions Bill, calling Spessard Holland of Florida "the Senator from Holland" and Oregon's Wayne Morse "the distinguished Senator from junior."
A reporter who tried to get in to see Maurice Chevalier after a performance in Rouyn, Quebec, was turned away by the star's manager: "My good man! You must realize he is a tired old man. How do you think you will feel at 63?"
In the midst of the cattlemen's fury over his price rollbacks on beef, Price Stabilizer Mike Di Salle went to a University of Denver banquet, complained after taking only a couple of nibbles of his sirloin: "I just can't stand steak any more" (see BUSINESS).
Columnist Walter Lippmann, after 20 hard years at the job, announced that he was taking a "long" leave from his New York Herald Tribune column chores. "Anyone who has been that long in the boiler room of the ship," he wrote, "had better come up on deck for a breath of fresh air and a look at the horizon." Besides, he was anxious to get going on his new book, The Image of Man, meant to be a successor to two earlier books, A Preface to Morals and The Good Society.
During a day at the Senate Office Building, the Washington Red Cross bloodmobile got a donation from only one Senator: Oklahoma's Robert Kerr. "They're so busy, you know, with all these awful investigations going on," explained a Red Cross lady. "One girl just called me to say her Senator said he'd been sweating blood for a week with Secretary Acheson, and didn't have a drop left."
Matter of Opinion
Variety's Editor Abel Green, touring in Europe, sent back his impressions of continental night life for the folks in little old New York: "No question about Paris' gaiety, which long since has had the edge on British austerity. And while the British festival . . . has resulted in the city on the Thames having a little more bounce than usual, it still makes the British capital a road company of Paris, so far as esprit is concerned . . . The Rue Blondel maisons de tolerance have long since been outlawed, [but] the prosties [on the streets] are as surprising in their pert good looks and simple good taste in clothes as in the plenitude of numbers."
New York City's Metropolitan Opera, said its Vienna-born manager, Rudolf Bing, during an audition tour of European music capitals, "is superior to anything in Europe . . . One of the worst things I find [in Europe] is that young singers are pushed into heavy work far too early because they need money."