People, Jan. 30, 1939

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Oldtime Pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander, 51, last year chosen by the Baseball Writers Association to join the 13 immortals in baseball's Hall of Fame, was discovered sharing the bill with "Sealo —Half Boy, Half Seal" and "Professor Heckler's Trained Flea Circus" in a Manhattan nickel museum.

Sixty-six-year-old Harold Fowler McCormick, millionaire head of the Chicago harvester clan, has recently been seriously ill with bronchopneumonia. Last week attorneys for Mrs. Olive Randolph Colby, Kansas City widow who is suing him for $2,000,000 (breach of promise), asked that the trial date be advanced. Reason: because of a crowded court calendar, the plaintiff saw "grave danger" that the defendant might not live until the case is reached.

Filed for probate in Manhattan was the will of the late, 71-year-old Colonel Jacob Ruppert, multimillionaire brewer, bachelor, owner of the World Champion New York Yankees. It disclosed that he had left all but $150,000 of his $40,000,000 fortune amassed in beer, baseball and real estate in trust for three women. Nieces Helen Silleck Holleran and Ruth Silleck Maguire each got one-third of the estate. To onetime bit-playing Actress Helen Winthrope Weyant, 37, "a very old friend," went the other third, and $300,000 in cash. To make sure that the Yankees would be maintained in the style to which they were accustomed, Colonel Ruppert stipulated that the estate should lend the Yankees all the money they need.

In 1933 John Ickes, 65, elder brother to Secretary of the Interior Harold LeClair Ickes, was reinstated in his Chicago municipal clerkship from which he had been ousted for "political reasons" seven years earlier. In short order Mr. Ickes sued the city for $51,462 back salary and interest. The case was declared a mistrial. Last week, with the approval of both Mr. Ickes and city officials, an appropriation of $15,000 was written into the 1939 city budget, to settle with Mr. Ickes.

Last November Representative Martin Dies's Congressional Committee on Un-Americanism threatened to summon Louise Hovick (strip-name: Gypsy Rose Lee) to testify about a Hollywood party to raise money for Spanish Loyalists. Interviewed in Manhattan last week, Miss Hovick suggested that she and Representative Dies form a vaudeville team. Said she: "With my act and his publicity we could bring back vaudeville."

To the consecration of Atlanta, Ga.'s new, $350,000 Roman Catholic Co-Cathedral of Christ the King, erected on the site of the Ku Klux Klan's Imperial Palace, Most Rev. Gerald Patrick Aloysius O'Hara, Bishop of the Savannah-Atlanta diocese, invited the Klan's Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans.

When Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest was revived on Broadway fortnight ago, New York Times Critic Brooks Atkinson reviewed it as though it were a new play, wound up by suggesting that Wilde showed promise. So many readers have telephoned in to correct Atkinson's "mistake" that the Times editorially made clear that he was spoofing.