People, Oct. 9, 1939

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In Brooklyn, N. Y., Claude Joseph ("Brad") Bradley, cement salesman whose friends recently celebrated his approaching death with a bang-up party (TIME, July 31), still had cancer of the spine, still lived, although Mayo Clinic physicians gave him only a few weeks in May. Said Salesman Bradley, hearty, slightly more hale and still selling plenty of cement: "The old docs tell me I'm getting along swell. For a dead man I'm doing all right."

Out of business as a rooming house was the late Mme Katherine Branchard's "house of genius" in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Comfortable under its roof had been scores of stray cats, many a famed writer, including Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O'Neill, O. Henry, Willa Gather, John Reed, Frank Morris, Stephen Crane.

Bug-eyed Jewish Comedian Eddie Cantor made a personal appearance at Pittsburgh's First Baptist Church, preached on Christianity and Democracy. Excerpt: "Christianity and Democracy go hand in hand. Go to church and practice true Christianity, because edifices like the one we are in tonight will live long after Hitler and Stalin are forgotten. Some one should tell those two birds that you can't put God in a concentration camp. To my humble way of thinking, there are too many Gentiles in the world and not enough Christians."

Button-eyed Freddie Bartholomew, whose parents have sued him 16 times in four years for slices of his big Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer salary, sought to enjoin them from suits still pending, complained that they keep him in court so much that he does not have time to act properly.

Before sailing for France with the 15th Canadian General Hospital contingent, Sir Frederick Grant Banting, co-discoverer of insulin, addressed in Boston the supreme council of 33rd Degree Scottish Rite Masons, predicted: "Scientists, like musicians, cannot do their work under fear of air raids and other disasters. The uncertainties of war will bottle up the products of creative minds and many of them will crack. There will be an incidence of mental disorders, because the person of highly sensitive nature will be affected."

Britain's Poet Laureate John Masefield, whose job it is to muse on State occasions for a butt of wine or £75 a year (he takes the cash), officially recognized a state of war. Poet Masefield, who once said: "The office of Poet Laureate is responsible for much of the world's worst literature," published a poem entitled Some Verses to Some Germans. Excerpts:

This is no idle boast or empty story;

One of the glories of the English race

Is that we recognized Beethoven's glory,

And at his dying moment won his grace.

And, of our poet, we have heard you

say We call him unser Shakespeare; he is

ours. . . .

Upon another morrow, if we strive, Our links of life, now broken, may unite, Not each for each but both for all alive Opening the other shutters for more light.

In Bakersfield, Calif., Jacqueline Cochran, wife of Tycoon Floyd Bostwick Odium (Atlas Corp.), broke her own record for the loo-kilometer airplane course, set a new mark of 286,418 m. p. h. In Manhattan, Mrs. Hortense McQuarrie Odium, ex-wife of Tycoon Odium, celebrated her fifth year as smart president of smart Bonwit Teller's store.