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New York's Mayor & Mrs. Fiorello Henry LaGuardia formally adopted two children: brunette Jean, 6, niece of the Mayor's first wife, and blond Eric, 4, an orphan.
The Philadelphia office of strenuous, steel-eyed William Wallace Atterbury, 68-year-old president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, great & good friend of the late Ivy Lee (see p. 34), got wind of rumors that "The General" was critically ill. Since he had a gallstone removed last August, General Atterbury had kept away from his office. For a fortnight he had been cruising off Florida in his yacht Arminia. There the rumors were relayed to him last week. The Arminia put in at Miami, where her master received newshawks on deck, thumped his chest heartily and crowed: "I'm the livest, kickingest person you ever saw. I haven't felt so good since last July."
"I have always loved poetry. I have deplored its decline in this country. . . . Numbers of my friends felt the same way. We decided to do something about it." By way of doing something about it, Mrs, Hugh Bullock, daughter-in-law of Investment Banker Calvin Bullock, announced in Manhattan the birth of the Academy of American Poets. Prime function of the Academy, as soon as Founder Bullock & friends can raise a fat endowment, will be to patronize eight or ten lucky U. S. poets by annual stipends of $5,000 apiece. No poet herself but a rich and comely young socialite. Mrs. Bullock had enlisted as sponsors Mrs. Calvin Coolidge (The Open Door, The Quest, Watch Fires}, Mrs. James Roosevelt. Owen D. Young, Princess Barbara Hutton Mdivani. many an other bigwig, poetic or unpoetic. Said Mrs. Bullock: "Poets must eat. . . . Our entire purpose is to free genius from the necessity of gaining a livelihood by almost any means except the means it was born to use."