Object Lesson

In a letter to London's Times, George Bernard Shaw cried out in shocked protest against a new British sales tax of nearly 67% on musical instruments. "In my boyhood I had a chance of being qualified as an oboist," he recalled, "and I should have jumped at it if I could have obtained -L-14, which was the price of a second-hand oboe seventy years ago. For want of that sum I was lost to woodwind forever and had to adopt a profession in which the equipment was 6 pennyworth of stationery."

Hero's Week

"For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in aerial combat" the President of the U.S. gave him his country's highest military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor; the Secretary of the Navy promoted him from lieutenant to lieutenant commander; his home town (St. Louis) gave him the wildest public ovation since Hero Lindbergh's return there 15 years ago. Thus 28-year-old Naval Aviator Edward H. O'Hare, who shot down five Jap bombers in the Pacific, damaged a sixth, in one flight from a U.S. aircraft carrier, had the week of his life.

Also a part of his week was something that comes to few heroes, a court decision in Chicago which assured him some $80,000. His father, Edward J. O'Hare, was originally a brilliant St. Louis lawyer, too smart for his breeches. Father O'Hare became a wealthy Chicago operator of race tracks (for nags and dogs), notorious "front man" for Al Capone and other gangsters, and was shotgunned to death from a passing automobile a week and a day before Scarface Al got out of the pen in 1939. Against Father O'Hare's $250,000 estate, the bulk of which was left in trust to his children, George Remus, once-famed bootleg king and wife-killer, had filed a claim for $196,000 for liquor stolen from his St. Louis warehouses. The rejection of the Remus claim made the inheritance of the O'Hare children secure.

Sons & Heirs

Richard Joshua Reynolds Jr., multi-millionaire tobacco heir (Camels), got leaves of absence as Mayor of Winston-Salem, N.C. and treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, to join the Navy.

Twenty-five-year-old Henry Morgenthau III, elder son of the Secretary of the Treasury, quit his job with FHA in Cleveland to join the Army. Brother Robert, 22, is an ensign on a destroyer.

Lawrence W. Earle, 18-year-old son of Pennsylvania's ex-Governor George H. Earle, ex-Minister to Bulgaria, was among the rescued passengers of a U.S. ship torpedoed off the Atlantic coast.

Cellulosis

Cigar-mangling Director Ernst Lubitsch and his second wife decided to part one day last week. He was all set to leave the house when he remembered that guests were coming. "So I stayed for dinner," he reported later.

Some 8,000 parading schoolboys (and girls) who were being reviewed by shapely Carol Bruce in New Brunswick, N.J. got out of control in front of the stand, turned a patriotic rally into a juvenile riot of yelling and pushing. Result: bruised Miss Bruce went scooting out a back way and off to New York with a pair of torn stockings.

Bates College, Lewiston, Me., decided to make wide-eyed Bette Davis an honorary Doctor of Laws in June.

Brenda Marshall's husband of nine months, William F. Beedle Jr. (cinename: William Holden), enlisted in the Army.

After Frances Lillian Hunt had her name legally changed to Carole Landis, she sighed inexplicably: "I'm glad that's over."

The National Restaurant Association named appetizing Starlet Evelyn Keyes "1942's Tastiest Dish."

Fever Chart

Still bothered by four-year-old accident injuries, Hit Composer Cole Porter underwent his 29th leg operation in a Manhattan hospital--after arriving late and holding up the performance 20 minutes.

To the same hospital went the ex-Empress Zita of Austria, mother of Pretender Otto, for a goiter operation.

Joaquin M. ("Mike") Elizalde, Philippine Commissioner, underwent an appendicitis operation in Washington.

Physicians who examined Marie Dionne, smallest of the five Quints, found that her right leg was smaller than her left, but found no muscular atrophy, were inclined to blame radium removal of a tumor in her infancy.

Lucile de Vasconcellos Langhanke, better known as Cinemactress Mary Astor, just out of bed after a severe cold, started driving to work, collided with an autoful of carpenters, wrenched her back, blew three tires.

Ezequiel Padilla, Mexico's strapping Foreign Minister, turned up in Rochester, Minn., for a health checkup at the Mayo Clinic.

The U.S.'s first home-grown straw hat --woven of cocoanut fiber--was sported by full-fashioned little Price Administrator Leon Henderson, who tried to bend it to his will, looked about as happy as any male in a hat store.

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