People, Feb. 17, 1958

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In keeping with old-line Hollywood etiquette, Gossipist Louella O. Parsons announced formally that the mayor of Palm Desert, Calif, (pop. 3,000), Old Groaner Bing Crosby, 53, and his bride of almost four months, Cinemactress Kathy (Operation Mad Ball) Grant Crosby, 24, are expecting a little wailer in August. Flashed Lolly: "Kathy said that either a girl or a boy would be welcome." The rest of the press caught up with Kathy herself as she filled out an enrollment card at Los Angeles City College, where she will bone up on psychology and sociology while waiting for motherhood.

In San Francisco, Baritone Paul Robeson, 59, the best voice in the U.S. Communist chorus, was about to give his first full-scale U.S. auditorium concert in five years when the Chronicle quoted him as lamenting: "I am sorry now that I quit the concert stage because of politics. I see now that I should have gone on with my work." To some, these words sounded like a contrite solo, but Robeson himself soon drowned them out with the bizarre protest that the capitalist press was maligning him as a nonCommunist. Rumbled Robeson: "These nice people are trying to make me as they want me—to save me from my better self. I have not changed my views in the slightest about anything!" His afterthought: "I must make a speech after I sing."

From Lincoln Isham, a Vermont-based great-grandson of Abraham Lincoln, the Library of Congress got an old family Bible and three Lincoln manuscripts. Among them: a draft of a letter from Lincoln to an Illinois friend concerning the merits of re-electing a Congressman, Richard Yates, later governor of Illinois. The malicious word had spread that Yates had the same weakness that was to create complaints about General Ulysses S. Grant. Wrote Honest Abe, in endorsing Yates: "Other things being equal, I would much prefer a temperate man to an intemperate one. Still, I do not make my vote depend absolutely upon the question of whether a candidate does or does not taste liquor."