MILESTONES

Married. Henry Browne Wallace, 23, older son of the U. S. Secretary of Agriculture, and Florence Kling, 20, coed; in Des Moines, Iowa.

Married. Frederick Bernard ("Boiler Kid") Snite Jr., 29, infantile paralysis victim, and Teresa Larkin, 25; in River Forest, Ill. While touring China in 1936 Fred Snite was seized by poliomyelitis. His diaphragm muscles paralyzed, he would have suffocated had he not been near Peiping Union Medical College Hospital, which owned an iron lung. A year later, when his wealthy father (in the small loan, furniture and real-estate business in Chicago) decided to bring Fred home, it was necessary to transfer him from one iron lung to another. The transfer took three precarious minutes, left Fred gasping and half-strangled. Gradually Fred Snite improved. Most of the time he stays in the big tank, but for five or six hours a day he can get along with a light, chest-sized inhalator which he wears sitting propped up in bed. From month to month the period during which he can breathe by himself has been extended (record to date: one hour and three minutes) but during these periods, as a precaution, he wears the small inhalator with the motor shut off.

This spring his father took him on a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Miracles at Lourdes, France, where, good Catholic that he is, Fred quietly hoped for a miraculous cure, went away heartened nonetheless when no miracle occurred.

With the Snites on the trip to Lourdes went a schoolfriend of Fred's sister, the tall, brunette daughter of a Dayton, Ohio businessman. To forestall comment, she was generally referred to as "Cousin Teresa." Evenings she would sit and converse with Fred's head.

One morning last week a man from the County Clerk's office went to the Snite house in River Forest, a suburb west of Chicago, and issued a marriage license for Fred and Teresa. A few minutes later with Fred beaming from his 900-lb. iron tank, a priest married them. When newshawks arrived Snite Sr. met them at the gate, told them it was all over, took them in to see the newlyweds, who were about to start on a one-day wedding trip to Wisconsin in Fred's trailer.

Day after the marriage, newspapers ran a statement by Fred's doctor to the effect that "there is no reason why he [Snite] should not have a normal marriage and become the father of children." The press forgot that Snite and his bride were married by a Catholic priest, that the Catholic Church forbids the marriage of an impotent person.

Died. Cecilia Waterbury Cummings, 40, third wife of former U. S. Attorney General Homer Cummings; of high blood pressure; in Washington. She was 29 years younger, 17 inches shorter than her 6-ft.-4 husband, but official Washington considered them its most devoted couple. In 1937 she asked for--and got--permission to wear a red dress when presented at the Court of St. James's. As a hostess she was tough, delighted to scramble New Dealers and Conservatives, took no political sides herself: "Politics is Homer's business, not mine."

Died. Amy Irwin McCormick, 59, artist, art patron and wife of Publisher Robert Rutherford McCormick (the Chicago Tribune), of pneumonia; in Chicago.

Died. Philip Albright Small Franklin, 68, Wartime director of the U. S. merchant marine and onetime (1916-36) president of International Mercantile Marine Co.; in Long Island.

Died. Daisy Green (real name Mrs. Marie MacGillivray), 57, one of the original six Florodora Girls of 1900; after an 18-months illness, in Los Angeles. Sang the Sextet in ruffled petticoats with parasols:

Tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you?

There are a few, kind sir, but simple girls and proper too.

If I loved you, would it be a silly thing to do?

For I must love someone, and it might as well be you.

Died. T. E. Powers, 69, oldtime cartoonist ("Joy" & "Gloom"); in Long Island.

Died. James Francis Harry St. Clair-Erskine, Earl of Rosslyn, 70, gay blade; of shock following a tragic report that his daughter's foot had been amputated by a crocodile;* in London. In 1927 his patrician relatives groaned, unsuccessfully tried to suppress his memoirs, My Gamble With Life (written "solely for money"), telling about his three marriages, two divorces (wife No. 2 recommended him as "an altogether delightful person, but absolutely impossible"); the loss of a $1,500,000 inheritance, mostly by gambling, which fascinated him as a mathematical problem to which he was always finding a new "solution."

Died. Leonard Merrick, 75, novelists' novelist, whose whimsically unhappy stories (When Love Flies Out o' the Window, Cynthia, Conrad in Quest of His Youth) were cold-shouldered by his British reading public, tolerated in the U. S.; in London. He usually wrote about people of his own stamp: sensitive, unsuccessful, unembittered, garret-inhabiting. In 1918, after he had published twelve novels, a dozen top-flight authors--including Barrie, Wells, Chesterton, Howells, Pinero, Hewlett--published an appreciative edition of his work, called public attention to him.

*Actually she sprained her ankle while visiting a Florida alligator farm.

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