In Manhattan, the critics, the columnists and the cash customers were all bubbling with delight over a return to the good old days. Two-a-day vaudeville was back at the old Palace Theater, and there was resounding applause for Judy Garland, who had brought it there. For 75 minutes on opening night Judy burned up the boards with "electric excitement," paused occasionally to wipe her brow with a bright scarf ("It isn't very ladylike, but it's very necessary"), and sang such old favorites as Somewhere, over the Rainbow and The Trolley Song. One critic predicted the show would stay a year. Wrote Critic Ward Morehouse: "I doubt if there'll be another night like it during the entire theatrical season."
Body & Soul
Speaking at a Protestant Episcopal laymen's Sunday service in Manhattan, Pulitzer Prize Poet W. H. Auden told the congregation: "It is important for us to be completely honest with ourselves about our religious experience—what it is. One might say that the typical experience of people in the Middle Ages was of God's nearness. Now our dominant experience is of God's absence, of His distance. We are false if we do not admit this. The danger is of despair and unbelief. But for our time, the distance of God may be something He wishes us to learn."
The Right Rev. Horace W. B. Donegan, Protestant Episcopal bishop of New York, dedicated a new sports window in Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The window was planned by the late Bishop William T. Manning, who believed good sportsmanship and religion had much in common. To illustrate his point, the stained-glass window shows the symbolic figures of athletes surrounding medallions of Esau the hunter, Jacob wrestling with the Angel, and St. Paul with his advice to run a good race. On the wall will be added the names of some modern sports giants: Tennis Champion Robert D. Wrenn, baseball's Christy Mathewson, football's Walter Camp and hockey's Hobey Baker.
Tony Trabert, 21, called up for training in the Navy after winning the National Intercollegiate and Clay Court tennis championships last summer, got news that he could postpone his naval career for awhile. After he had spent four weeks in Bainbridge, Md. boot camp, sports-conscious brass approved a go-day leave for him to represent the U.S. in the Davis Cup matches in Australia in December.
Elsewhere photographers snapped some candid shots of part-time sports figures in lesser events: in Biarritz on a recent vacation, two-year-old Arabella, daughter of Randolph and granddaughter of Winston Churchill, huffed & puffed till her tongue hung out playing solitaire with a beach ball. In Falkenstein, Germany, U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy practiced place-kicks before a game of touch football between his office staff and a team of American newspaper correspondents. The practice paid off: McCloy 's eleven trounced the writers 10-0.
Friends & Countrymen
Off on a hospital tour to cheer bedridden G.I.s, Cinemactress Rita Hayworth arrived at the Army's Madigan General Hospital, near Tacoma, where one orthopedic patient in a traction harness demanded a pair of socks to cover his naked feet before the noted visitor arrived. At the Bremerton Naval Hospital, a sailor achieved fame of sorts in his ward when he saw Rita and asked: "Who's that babe?"