Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
In his syndicated newspaper column Spires of the Spirit, Dr. Frederick Brown Harris, chaplain of the U.S. Senate, un-petaled himself about flowers and funerals. " 'Please Omit Flowers,' " he wrote, "is a request often issued when arrangements are announced for what is usually called a funeral service . . . Whence comes this incongruous suggestion? Omit flowers—in the Valley of Shadow, when every yearning impulse is struggling vainly to express feelings that are too deep for words! . . . In 'Say it with Flowers' there stretch enchanting vistas of sacramental beauty like the glory of a garden or the shimmer of moonlight on a silvery sea . . ." Last week Reverend Harris' picture and words were splashed all over U.S. newspapers in full-page ads bringing readers "An Important Message ... in the Public Interest." Joyous sponsors of the ads: "The 11,000 members of the Florists' Telegraph Delivery Association."
Owlish Pollster Elmo Roper was elected board chairman of the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Republic, replacing ex-Automaker Paul G. Hoffman.
The world's top-earning, high-fashion model, Manhattan's svelte Dovima (a blend of her given names, Dorothy Virginia Margaret), 28, announced that she will soon up her posing rate from a classy $60 an hour to a classier $75. Reason: just like a baseball player, Dovima, a onetime $30-a-week candy counter girl, really wants her golden years to pay off. Lean, long Dovima sighed a prediction: "Photographers still like us as long, lean and thin as ever for fashion. But I think they are looking for a more natural, happy look instead of the gaunt, hard look that prevailed for so long."
A bespectacled Dalai Lama, 21, nominal ruler of Red-ruled Tibet, was permitted to venture outside the Bamboo Curtain for the first time since the Chinese Communists forced Marxian enlightenment upon his Himalayan country five years ago. In journeying from his capital of Lhasa to New Delhi, where he was warmly greeted by India's Prime Minister Nehru, the "living Buddha" traveled on foot, pony, jeep and, on the final lap, by plane. A half hour later, Tibet's No. 2 puppet, the Panchen Lama, a benighted Red stooge, arrived on a second plane.
Sweeping into Paris from London, symmetrically stacked (35-23-35) Marian McKnight, 19, Miss America of 1957, was hounded by newshounds. After the publicity-shy creature of publicity coyly evaded them at the posh Hotel Meurice, reporters picked up her trail again, cornered her at the entrance to the Folies-Bergère. Their brief interview proved unilateral—all questions and no answers. "Miss Amérique?" politely inquired a France Soirman. She responded, reported he, "with the sad countenance of a doe at bay." Soon, stated France Soir sadly, the door of the Folies-Bergère "swallowed Miss America with her camouflage of sables and her 99 centimeters* around the breast."
After serving as host at a heaping Thanksgiving dinner for elderly folks, Boston's unpompous Archbishop Richard J. Cushing shifted into high, merrily danced an Irish jig with two robustious ewes of his diocesan flock.