For Ralph Bunche, Negro, Nobel Peace Prizewinner and United Nations Under Secretary, it was a peaceful moral victory. Only a week had passed since Bunche disclosed that his 15-year-old son had been barred from membership in New York City's fashionable West Side Tennis Club (in Forest Hills, Queens) because of his race (TIME, July 20). Club President Wilfred Burglund, the Manhattan public relations man who had told Bunche that the club excludes Negroes and Jews, resigned last week amidst public clamor for his singed scalp. Then the club's governors were moved to announce: "It is the policy of the club to consider and accept members without regard to race, creed or color." But Dr. Bunche had no plans to push Ralph Jr. through the West Side's newly opened door. He had amply proved his point. "This has not been a pleasant experience, and I'm glad it is over," said Bunche Sr. "In this community, happily, bigotry cannot long stand the heat of public exposure."
On a Manhattan radio station, Eleanor Roosevelt made a rare public utterance in Italian, a tongue that she first picked up long ago as a schoolgirl in England. Target of her somewhat critical shafts: Fellow Democrat Carmine Gerard De Sapio, leader of Manhattan's Tammany Hall, who might have followed Mrs. Roosevelt's remarks but scarcely replied in kind, because he speaks little Italian.
On a leisurely state visit in the U.S.S.R., where he got the sort of red-carpet greeting ordinarily reserved for important allies, Ethiopia's wiry Emperor Haile Selassie, 67, took a sightseeing cruise down the Volga and through the Volga-Don Canal. At Stalingrad he took the helm of the steamship Arkady Geidar, gave a brief demonstration of seamanship to prove that the Lion of Judah is no landlubber.
Ireland's tosspot Playwright Brendan (The Quare Fellow) Behan, 36, bedded in a Dublin hospital after tying on a monumental jag in London (TIME, July 20), scrawled a "confession" for a Dublin Sunday newspaper. "I'm neither dead, dying, drunk nor dotty," wrote he. ". . . It is true, however, that I am an alcoholic." Why does he tipple? "First, because I like the stuff. Secondly, because I like company, and thirdly, because a pint of orange or lemon juice is twice the price of a pint of stout."
Japan's comely Crown Princess Michiko, 24, suddenly stopped appearing at public functions with Crown Prince Akihito only three months after the royal wedding (TIME, April 20). Then the imperial household's chamberlain issued a very cautious bulletin: Michiko "may be with child," but the doctors are not yet absolutely positive.