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The Vatican's Pope Pius XII was back in Rome, after four months in summer residence at Castel Gandolfo.
The Boston Red Sox's thumping Ted Williams, already nearly two months into his five-month vacation, stopped off in Hayward, Wis., took the kind of strike he likes the best, proudly displayed the result: 21 pounds, 32 inches of musky.
Rich young (32) Publisher Michael Straight (the New Republic), a wartime B-17 pilot, ran into a snowstorm while flying from Cleveland to Washington, landed his Navion and three passengers safely in a Virginia cow pasture.
Painter Georgia O'Keeffe, 61, dropping in to a Manhattan exhibit of portraits of prominent people, posed briefly beside a portrait of a younger Georgia O'Keeffe (painted 40 years ago by promising Fellow Art Student Eugene Speicher).
Bobby Breen, onetime inescapable boy soprano of the movies, now 21 and an obscure nightclub tenor, was back again. On a Wisconsin hunting trip (he neglected to take along a gun), his plane was reported lost. All night long, search parties slogged through the snow, and press services hummed to keep front pages posted on Bobby's peril. Next day he turned up safe & sound at a Glidden, Wis. hotel. His plane had run out of gas, he explained, but landed safely near by. Was it all just a publicity stunt? Please, he begged reporters: "Get it right, will you? Tell everyone it wasn't a gag." After some prodding by the sheriff, Bobby kicked in $300 to cover expenses of the search.
The Laurels
In Manhattan, Novelist William Faulkner, 51, got the nod from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: he was elected to fill one of 1948-5 four vacancies.-His three fellow neophytes: Novelist John (The Grapes of Wrath) Steinbeck, 46, Painter Leon Kroll, 62, crop-haired Litterateur Mark Van Doren, 52.
Radio's Fred Allen, having by now offi cially made good, was awarded the James E. Downey medal (given each year by Boston High School of Commerce alumni to an outstanding alumnus). Alumnus Allen couldn't make the reunion for the formal presentation. In a note apologiz ing for his absence, he expressed con siderable hesitation about accepting the medal: "I assume it is made of metal.
With the present shortage of housing ma terials, this metal might have made a doorknob. How will I feel if I read . . .
that a veteran, with his wife and children, is standing in front of a new house? In side, the house is complete, but the vet eran cannot enter the house because the builder ran out of metal and there is no doorknob . . . Can I face that veteran, knowing that I have his doorknob, the James E. Downey medal, in my pocket?"
The British public regards Joseph V.
Stalin, Vyacheslav M. Molotov and Harry S. Truman, in that order, as the three men "doing the most harm in the world today," according to a poll pub lished in the London weekly News Review.
Molotov and Truman were "usually men tioned together [along with Foreign Sec retary Ernie Bevin] as power politicians."
The three ranking do-gooders: Sir John Boyd Orr, onetime head of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization ; George C.
Marshall, and Sir Alexander Fleming, the doctor who discovered penicillin.