Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
Gallup Pollsters added up the figures in their annual popularity contest for women, proclaimed that Eleanor Roosevelt, in the opinion of the U.S. public, is the world's "most admired" living woman—a distinction she has won nine years out of the past ten.* The runners-up, in the order of their public appeal: U.S. Ambassador to Italy Clare Boothe Luce, Mamie Eisenhower, Helen Keller, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, Madame Chiang Kaishek, Britain's Princess Margaret (a newcomer to the top ten), India's Madame Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Maine's Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith, former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Oveta Culp Hobby.
About to turn 81, French Equatorial Africa's revered Nobel Prizewinning medical missionary, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, tersely answered a newsman's questionnaire that sought Schweitzer's birthday opinions. Wrote he: "Silence should fall around me. I must not always talk about myself to the world. Let me be simple and modest ... I would not be true to myself should I address myself again and again to the world."
Returning to civilization from a fortnight's safari in Tanganyika, Army General (ret.) James Van Fleet, a rugged 63, brought out proof of a mighty trophy he bagged last month. Van Fleet's kill: a hefty rhinoceros whose lethal front horn measured 29 inches.
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On the eve of a trip to India for a month's preaching, Evangelist Billy Graham, in Louisville for a laymen's conference at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, got a phone call from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Summoned to Washington, he reported, to confer with Dulles and President Eisenhower, Graham canceled a sermon ("Our Christian Heritage"), hopped a plane that evening. Next day, although he missed seeing Ike, Religious Diplomat Graham emerged from an hour's chat with Dulles in the Secretary's Georgetown home. He had got a solid briefing on India, told waiting newsmen that Foster Dulles has repeatedly demonstrated himself to be "a man of peace."
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Interviewed by the quarterly English-language Paris Review, rough, tough Chicago Novelist Nelson (The Man with the Golden Arm) Algren, 46, gratuitously slipped a needle into the unprotected backside of rough, tough Chicago Novelist James T. (Studs Lonigan) Farrell. Said Algren: "Farrell . . . isn't even a real good stenographer ... He compares himself with Theodore Dreiser, but I don't think he's in Dreiser's league. He's as bad a writer as Dreiser, but he doesn't have the compassion that makes Dreiser's bad writing important." In Manhattan, Author Farrell, 51, compassionately turned the other cheek: "Algren's attacked me on the Roman Catholic Church, on splitting infinitives, and now on Dreiser, but I have no desire to attack him."
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At a news conference, Treasury Secretary George Humphrey was needled by a reporter wanting to learn what Humphrey will do about Utah's unruly Republican Governor J. Bracken Lee, who won't pay his 1955 income tax until ordered to, because he hates to see tax dollars going out in foreign aid. Harrumphed Republican Humphrey: "I'm going to sue him!"
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