People, Dec. 27, 1937

"Names make news." Last week these names made this news:

In Republican Westchester County a jury awarded $21,000 damages to Frederick Grewen, 34, knocked down on Manhattan's Park Avenue last April by Mrs. James Roosevelt's automobile. The President's mother and her chauffeur, Louis E. Depew, who was alone in the car when the accident occurred, were codefendants. Said Supreme Court Justice Mortimer B. Patterson: "The jury was generous, all right."

Sexational, robustious Cinemactress Mae West appeared on a commercial broadcast for the first time in four years. Result: the most indignant wave of protest from radio listeners in radio's history. Cause: Miss West had turned the Biblical story of Adam & Eve into a burlesque act full of drawling double-entendres, elliptical references to fig leaves and nakedness, talk of the "original applesauce." No sooner had the program closed than angry comments began to pour in to the sponsors (Chase & Sanborn), the broadcasting company (NBC), the advertising agents (J. Walter Thompson). The National Legion of Decency threatened to clean up radio. Some Chase & Sanborn customers threatened a boycott. "Bad taste," mourned the Motion Picture Daily. Such terms as "profane," "filthy," "obscene," "vomitous," burst from such varied commentators as the Chicago Tribune, the Battle Creek Federation of Women's Clubs, New York's Congressman O'Toole, churches, plain citizens. Washington's Rev. Dr. Maurice Stephen Sheehy, head of Catholic University's department of religion and Don Ameche's great & good friend, was hopping mad. NBC and J. Walter Thompson officials, thoroughly alarmed, hastened to placate him with an apology, announced publicly they would never do it again. At week 's end the Federal Communications Commission, itself the recipient of many a how-now, demanded an electrical transcription of the program, a copy of the sponsor-broadcaster contract, names of all stations which had carried Miss West's impious Adam & Eve.

General Motors' Alfred P, Sloan Jr. gave $10,000,000 worth of securities to institute the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for "the promotion of a wider knowledge of basic economic truths generally accepted as such by authorities of recognized standing." About a third of the gift was in General Motors stock.

Charles Atlas, mail-order musclebuilder who admits that he is the "World's Most Perfectly Developed Man" and poses for pictures in a simple leopard-skin loincloth (TIME, Feb. 10, 1936), inserted the following advertisement in the New York Times: "LIVE LEOPARD CUB WANTED; coat perfectly spotted. . . ." Explanation: Mr. Atlas was dissatisfied with his current pelt because it was irregularly marked.