“Names make news.” Last week these names made this news:
Since 1895, when she was editor of the Smith College Monthly, Mrs. Elizabeth Cutter Reeves Morrow has written much, has seen her gentle verses published in half a score heavy-paper monthlies. In 1931, a few months before Knopf published 46 of them under the title Quatrains for My Daughter* she remarked: “The stuff of poetry is happy memories in the heart.” Last week three new poems by Mrs. Morrow appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. They revealed unhappy memories in the heart, memories of March 1931 when her grandson Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped and murdered. Excerpts:
HOSTAGE
He who has given A hostage knows All ways of dying Terror shows:
All this is naught To waking when He dreams the hostage Safe again.
SAINT OF THE LOST
Walking Elysian fields the saints forget The salt of human tears. . . . Only Saint Anthony can never rest
Saint of the lost who cannot sleep nor stand While one child wanders from his mother’s hand.
Aboard S. S. Roma, Sicily-bound out of New York, Mrs. Thalia Fortescue Massie, assaultee in Honolulu’s great 1932 rape case, divorced two months ago, slashed both her wrists with a razorblade, moaned: “I wanted to die.” Sewn up, she was hospitalized, landed at Genoa. Hospitalized ashore, she smiled at her doctor: “I am going to die. You may stop me now. But I will show you. I might cut my wrists again.”
Three times in the last 18 months Fritzi Scheff, creator of the title role in Mile Modiste (1905-08), persuaded judges to postpone foreclosure on her thrice-mortgaged cottage & four acres near Waterbury, Conn. She sang for a while in a Broadway taproom in an unsuccessful effort to raise the $1,500 she needed. Last week, day before final foreclosure. Home Owners Loan Corporation took over her mortgage, gave back to Fritzi Scheff her only home.
Equestrienne Mrs. John Hay (“Liz”) Whitney was chosen Queen of Virginia’s Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival in May, will harness her own thoroughbreds to her rolling throne.
In Wilmington, Del., Mrs. Jean Piccard, sister-in-law of Stratonaut Auguste Piccard, announced plans to pilot a balloon ascension near Detroit this summer. With her will go her husband to make scientific observations. Said Mrs. Piccard: “There really isn’t much danger. . . . I’ll know my two children are in good hands while I’m gone. We are anxious to avoid having to land in the ocean. And I’ll be the one to worry about that. . . .”
In Kansas City, where a reform movement to oust Boss Thomas Joseph Pendergast from city control was defeated fortnight ago in a mayoral election accompanied by wholesale sluggings and four fatal shootings (TIME, April 9), a bullet whizzed into the dining room of lanky, white-haired City Manager Henry F. McElroy, 68. Manager McElroy, in the adjoining sun room, was uninjured. Next clay his 26-year-old Daughter Mary, for whose release he paid $30,000 when she was kidnapped last May, was summoned to the telephone. A voice barked: “We never miss the second time.”
During a law suit in Wilmington, Del. Mme Yvonne Alexandrine Cotnareani, divorced wife of Perfumer Francois Coty (real name: François Spoturno), revealed that he had settled half his fortune on her before their divorce in 1929. Amount settled: $17,000,000.
From Baltimore’s Southern Hotel, where he shared a room & bath with his lawyer, to Baltimore’s Safe Deposit & Trust Co. went Tobacco-Heir Richard Joshua Reynolds, just 28, to sign a few papers, claim his $25,000,000 patrimony. Said Heir Reynolds: “It’s a lot of money but I can’t get excited.”
During a wrestling match in Alexandria. La.. Combatant Johnny Plummer became enraged at a ruling by referee Jack Dempsey, hit him. Referee Dempsey knocked out Combatant Plummer with three quick uppercuts to the chin. Up from a ringside seat scrambled 95-lb. Mrs. Johnny Plummer. She screech-scratched Referee Dempsey into a corner, tore his shirt, pulled his hair, drove him out of the ring.
*Mrs. Morrow’s first book, The Painted Pig, appeared in 1930.
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