PEOPLE

"Names make news." Last week the following names made the following news:

Rev. William ("Billy") Sunday, silent, these many months, screamed at a Pitman, N. J. camp meeting: "The Church has got its back to the wall! They're building nine theatres to one Church. All people think of is entertainment--movies and the like. They offered me $1,000,000 to go into the movies, but I turned it down. I can do more good speaking to the people face to face."

Fred Stone, still recuperating from his airplane crash of last August, visited the Hollywood ranch of his good friend and theatrical understudy, Funnyman Will Rogers. To show his physical fitness he rode a bicycle, danced a jig, told watching reporters that in November he would return to Broadway for a new show, Ripples. Playing with him in her first appearance will be Paula Stone, his 17-year-old daughter. Dorothy Stone, his 19-year-old, hurried to Manhattan last week to replace Ruby Keeler Jolson, ill, in Show Girl (TIME, Aug. 12).

Lenore Ulric, actress, heard last week in Hollywood that Sidney Blackmer, her leading man last winter in the Belasco production Mima, had announced that he and she got married on May 23 at her Harmon, N. Y., home. Emphatically she declined to confirm the marriage, refused to talk about it. Gilda Gray, mentioned by Actor Blackmer as a witness, drawled to newspaper men: "I cannot recall any such wedding."

Hubert Prior ("Rudy") Vallee, crooning, blond, Yale-graduated orchestra leader and radio idol (WEAF) was arrested for speeding on Manhattan Bridge. To the patrolman who reported him came many a letter and telephone call from indignant females of all ages.

Mrs. Bula Benton Edmondson Croker,* second wife and widow of Tammany Chief Richard Croker, lost the famed Croker-McDonald suit involving the sale of 10,000 feet of Palm Beach ocean frontage. Mrs. Croker had sought to break a nine-year-old option that gave J. B. McDonald, Palm Beach realtor, the privilege of buying for $150 per foot the land now valued at over $700. To Mrs. Croker the difference will be $5,000,000, besides large attorney fees.

Another Croker suit, pending judgment in Miami, is between Mrs. Croker and her stepson, Richard Croker Jr. He accused her of alienating his father's affections from the young Crokers. asked that she be restrained from helping manage the estate.

Fortnight ago Willard Huntingdon Wright, more famed as "S. S. Van Dine," detective story writer, gave up a murder case because it was outside his jurisdiction as Honorary Police Commissioner of Bradley Beach, N. J. Last week the mystery was taken up by John D. Coughlin, lately ousted as chief of New York City detectives for his failure to solve the Rothstein murder. Quickly tracking nebulous clues, Detective Coughlin caught the driver of the murder car within three days, closed in on the actual murderers. Readers of Van Dine books (The Bishop Murder Case, The Canary Murder Case), are still wondering if bemonocled Arthur Van Dine and his super-detective "Philo Vance" could have solved the crime if they had tried, looked forward to seeing a new trick of detection incorporated in the next adventure of "Philo Vance." The trick was Detective Coughlin's. To rattle his prisoner into a confession and forestall reports of "third degree" methods, the questioning was held in a lighted sedan with a crowd pressing at the windows.

Henry Ford, sitting in his shirtsleeves on the porch of his Wayside Inn at Sudbury, Mass., heard a crash as three automobiles and a bus collided, burst into flames. He ran to the wreck, helped extract two men, a boy and three other persons badly burned.

Gloria Swanson, cinemactress, Europe-bound to see her latest husband, James Henri la Baily de la Falaise, Marquis de La Coudraye, squealed with delight at a present in her steamer stateroom. Within a gilt-edged, blue-ribboned box, wreathed with laurel, lay an antique bottle labelled: Bethlehem Rye, Guaranteed Twenty Years Old. She sent for charged water, ice, glasses, corkscrew. She held the bottle to the light to admire its tawny contents. The bottle was empty.

* Indian name: Kotaw Kaluntuchy. She claimed direct descent from Sequoyah, Cherokee Indian Chief credited with invention of the Cherokee alphabet. In 1914 she, 23, married Croker, 73. They lived in Iceland. She said to reporters: "It is the dearest ambition of every Indian girl to win a chief . . . I have won the chief of mine.