People, Dec. 16, 1935

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"Names make news." Last week these names made this news: Traveling through Austin, Tex., Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was assured by local boosters that in Texas the poor are rich in "sunshine and wide open spaces." Snapped Madam Secretary: "I can't see they help any. ... If I were making a choice I would starve in the city with a lot of other people."

Novelist Gertrude Atherton, 78, whose Black Oxen told the story of a woman who was rejuvenated, decided to tell the Press about her own two ''reactivation" treatments. "At first," said she, "I thought it was nobody's business. But I tell it now. Why not? I myself have seen the benefits." Old Novelist Atherton first had her ovaries stimulated by x-ray in 1922 when she found herself unable to keep up her literary output. Thereafter she turned out six books in eight years. Now working on a novel about Horace, she has "no trouble at all" adopting the outlook of the poet's 18-year-old niece. By way of proving her youth, Mrs. Atherton wears golden hair, red-tipped fingernails, feather-trimmed pink satin jackets. "My Dear Sir Edgar. . . . We have been to the Pole and we shall die like gentlemen. . . . If this diary is found it will show how we stuck by dying companions and fought the thing out until the end—I think this will show that the spirit of pluck and the power to endure has not passed out of our race. . . . Do your best to have our people look after those dependent on us. . . ."

So wrote the late heroic Explorer Robert Falcon Scott to Sir Edgar Speyer as he lay dying on the Ross Ice Barrier on March 16, 1912. Last week in Manhattan Sir Edgar's widow, Lady Speyer, solemnly handed the famed letter to Richard Evelyn Byrd. "Admiral," said she, "I want you to have this." U. S. Ambassador to Denmark Ruth Bryan Owen, daughter of the late great William Jennings Bryan, had a life-mask made in Washington, scrutinized it, exclaimed: "Why, I look like my father!"