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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Brussels Post, 1950-7-19, Page 3On Me Payroll By Richard 111l Wilkinson Jud has s.•cn the redheaded girl in Mr, Jones' cuter office every day for a week. Ile himself was a copy nun, and if she were after the sante job that he wanted it would complicate things, It would cut his chances of success in half, and it would be rather embarrassing because -- well, because he thought she was an awfully pretty girl and he liked the way she held her chin high and tried to appear brave. On Monday of the second week, the redheaded girl dropped her handbag. Its contents spilled all over the place. Jud helped pick them up—lipstick, a bunch of keys, a pawn ticket! Jud's lips tightened when he saw that. just as he thought—she'd had to pawn seine - thing in order to live. Of course the handbagepisode gave hint the liberty of talking with , her. Without half trying, he got her story. It was just as he fig- ured. A sad tale of deprivation and lost hope. If only she could see Mr. Jones. She knew he needed a stenographer and she really was awfully good. - t\ determined light carte into Jud's eyes. - Ignoring the protestations of the switchboard girl, he burst- through the railed -in space, crossed it •in two bounds and threw open the door of Mr. Jones' office., .Air. Jones was sitting at his desk, smoking a cigar. 1 -le looked up with a startled expression when Jud entered, I -le had heavy jowls and a shock of grey hair and belliger• - .enc, •bushy eyebrows. The cigar fell from his mouth. He stood up. Before Jud could utter .a word, he barked: "Your name Jud Essex?" "Yes, sir," said Jud, taken aback, "I'll be damned!" exclaimed Mr. Jones, "Did site tell you who she was?" "Of course, I'm serious. 1 made a bet with Dna that I'd marry you." "Did ttho tell me who who was?" Jud asked, beginning to think he was mistaken for someone else. , "My daughter! That redheaded girl in the outer office?" Tt was Jud's turn to drpo a cigar, if he'd had one. "Your daughter? That—the girl who wants a job as a stenographer. Mr. Jones carte round his desk. He was short, but rotund, He • glared up at Jud. "You're hired," he said, "I lost a bet, so you're hired. 131:1 you'd better make good, or you're fired. Get that!" "Shut upl Do you want the job, or don't you?" Mr. Jones stalked out of the of- fice. A man came in another door and told jud to follow him. "Kate always wins," the man said, "here's your desk. Kate wants. you to go to lunch tt'itb her this noon," bid sat down, speechless. "Do you mean—ani I one of several who have been hired in this fash- ion " .1Ltd passed a hand Through his hair, The man left, Jud sat down at his desk. He tried to straighten things out in his mind, and was beginning to get places, when Kate eete•ed At lunch Kate said: '"Would you like to marry ate?" "Sure," said fud, grinning weak- ly "All right then. Right after work, T'll he wa'ting. She was, • too, T. -Ie wondered what was next, I -1e found out. She took him to a minister's, She produced a li- cense. Jud tried to grin. He gulped and stared at her. "Good Lords You're not serious about this?" Jud suddenly no longer had the feeling that he lilted all this. "Now listen," he said. "1 can't marry , you, In the first place I don't love you, In the second T think you slid your old inn ate crazy, And in the next place. I'm already rant, ried and have three kids!" Mr, Tones called Jail on • the phone the next morning. "Mister, lou're still working for one if yeti want the iib. T won a bet from Kate, and it's cared flee of .her screwy notions, Conte on down. Your salary's doubled," They TI:w. To Shoot Albert Chevalier With a cluneal little fort set au the I,ttck of his head, wearing loud - striped trouser., wooden shoes, blue shirt and hugs' white gloves, a small hey stepped on 10 the small stag" of a cafe in a working-class sub- urb of Paris and began to sing. Staring at the ceiling and bawl- ing at the top of his voice, the diminutive figure shouted his way through two verses and choruses of a popular ditty. Little Maurice Chevalier, twelve- ycar-old son of a druiticett house painter, had started his stage career. But his first attempt as a come - Man was not wholly satisfactory. The hysterical shrieks and guffaws front the Saturday night audience of working people were induced not by the skill of the large -headed and small -bodied urchin, but by the fact that throughout the song he had consistently shrieked out the words in a voice that threatened to crack at any moment—three keys higher than the piano accompani- ment! Only one person who was pre- sent on that night in 1900 could have foreseen, even dimly, that this child, with no musical train- ing, would one day have not only Paris, but London, New York and Hollywood at his feet. And that one person was —Maurice. Tried Many Trades As he. says in his autobiography, "The Man in the Straw Hat" he was never meant for the stage. He was expected, as the ninth child of a poor family, to learn a trade. There was no artistic precedent in the family. And since only three of ten children born to his mother had survived there were few to bring in tnoney to the household. Maurice tried trade after trade. He was apprenticed in .turn to an engraver, carpenter, electrician, doll painter; he tried. his hand as clerk to a paint merchant, and he worked a machine making drawing pins. But his mind was on none of those jobs. He wanted to be a singer. The experience at the cafe did not • daunt the child Chevalier. He knew the laughter of the audience was not kind laughter, but he left the building more than ever determined to be a singer. As he puts it in his book: "At least I had made a start and the hardest part was over. From tomorrow on I just had to sing better." And he did, At fourteen he was sole sup- porter of his mother, Isis father had deserted the fancily and his two brothers had married. After various successes and failures la provincial shows Maurice got his first engagement on the Paris Boulevard at the Petit Casino— and failed. A sunnier of poverty followed as work eluded him, Then fortune smiled again with a six -months' contract for nine francs a day at the "Parisiana" Music Hall. And so to the Polies Bcrgere—and a criticism from the critic of 'Le Figaro' that did a great deal to change Maurice Che- valier's style, The vulgarity that had succeeded so well elsewhere lied to be cut out. Laughs would, in future, have to be born of skill and subtlety. Freed Ten Prisoners Between the two world wars Chevalier reached world farce. Then came 1940, when France was over- run by the enemy. Much has been said about Maurice Chevalier's part in the years of occupation, In his book he tells the story of his re- peated refusal to entertain German audiences and of the one slip he made that nearly cost him his life ttf tine hands of the Maquis. Maurice agreed to perform once at Aheh Grabow, where he had been a prisoner in World War I. .In return ten prisoners from his own birthplace, Menilntoniant,'were to be restored to their families. After the performance he returned to Cannes, where he was living. A German "Promise" Then the blow fell. Despite a promise from the Germans that no publicity would be given to the performance, the 'newspapers pub- lished ublished long articles on his visit to Alton Grabow. They implied that Chevalier had visited many pri- nt camps and made a tour of the German cities as well. A London paper stated he wad pro -Nazi and had sung everywhere in Germany except in the prison camps. Years passed, daring which Cltq- valier consistently refused to per- form anywhere, Then another blow fell, In February, 1944, London radio included his name in a list of T'rench collaborators! Though ND FESTIVA flair.rloamm 71, fi ,<r `' io FI R, HEALTH Charnp Milker—Grand champion milker Frederick Phelps, age 13, presented a "Key to 1lealth" to Wanda Matuszczuk, queen of the Dairyland Festival, Phelps also provided the queen, -and her attendants with the milk they are .drinking. He milked almost 19 pounds of it in three min utes. one of the leaders of the resistance movement got a message through to the broadcaster denying it, and the name was omitted from the lists after that ,the Mischief had been done. Some time after the landing at Arrainanches a man and woman rushed into the post office where Chevalier was listening to the radio. "Maurice! Maurice! Don't go back to your home. The Maquis are looking for you—to shoot youl" The London broadcast! And in Cannes very few knew the music - hall star intimately. IIe was some- thing of a stranger—a refugee from Paris. Maurice fled on foot to Cedouin, four or five utiles away, where friends hid him for several weeks. Then the Germans burned a whole village nearby and the Swiss, Lon- don and Paris radio announced that Maurice Chevalier had been exe- cuted at the town hall. To add to the confusion, the German radio confirmed his death, but stated that the had been killed by French patriots because he had sung to German audiences and to prisoners in Germany. Death Warrant Out One day three armed sten drove up to the house in Cedouin. Maurice was arrested and taken to Peri- gueux for questioning by a young Maquis fanatic known as "Captain Double Metre," It was abrious that given itis way "Double Metre" would have executed Maurice there and then, "Two months ago," he raved at Chevalier, "we would have had the pleasure of exposing you our- selves. We had orders for traitors like you who have been condemned by the court of Algiers. You know, don't you, that you have been con- demned to death? But unfortun- ately we are no longer allowed- to execute the death warrant without a superior decision from Paris. The interview ended with Maur- ice signing a statement coveritig his alleged collaboration with the enemy, IIe was free so far as "Double Metre" was concerned, un- less 'Paris reconfirmed the death sentence. That confirmation never came. Gradually, the cloud lifted. Maur- ice Chevalier retprned to the Paris he loved. At . fifty-seven he went back to work harder than ever— back to the footlights and his straw hat. - 'So you got the answer to that $64 question!" Ship Stabilizer Engineers are developing a sta- bilizer which will take the roll out of rolling seas. It's an old idea. Sir /Henry Bessemer invented such a`stabilizer in the last century. The present invention's purpose is to provide a steady platform for naval weapons and aircraft carrier land- ing. It may prove to be a boon on Passenger vessels 'as a preventive of seasickness. The theory of the stabilizer was developed more than a decade ago by Dr. Nicholas Minorsky, Experi- ments made with a model named the U.S,S, Minorsky and built at the New York Naval Shipyard in 1938, gave such good results that Navy engineers decided to build a device which is now being tested on the minesweeper U.S.S. Pere- grine. off the coast of Virginia. Two large tanks are installed on opposite sides of the ship. The tanks are partially filed with water, and the bottoms are connected across the skip by a duct. The instant the ship begins to roll a sensitive instrument called an angular accelerometer, flashes a signal which immediately starts pumps that force water through the transfer duct to the tank on the side where the roll started. By shifting water from one tank to the other, Navy engineers hope to reduce roll- ing at sea by as touch as 80 per cent. In recent experiments it has been found that the cross duct of the stabilizer should be placed above a ship's center of gravity. When this is done, the inertia of the moving water in the duct aids stabilization. BREAD TESTER • Chemists have devised a machine which •measures the freshness of bread by squeezing it, a familiar practice of housewives. George F. Garnett, director of the Kroger Food Foundation, recently described such a machine before the American Chemical Society. A disc is con- nected with a platform by a vertical shaft. A slice of bread is mounted under the disc. Into a flask on the platform, mercury runs at a standard rate. The increasing weight of mer- cury progressively compresses the tread until the standard compres- sion is reached. Then an electrically operated signal notifies the operator that the flow of mercury is to be stopped. The weight of the flask and mercury is a measure of the freshness or staleness of the bread, because fresh bread compresses un- der a lesser weight than stale bread. Said one electron to another: "I don't know you front atom." New Answers To Old Riddles About The Planet Mars Because it is relatively near, Mara Inas attracted more attention than Puy other planet ever since the tele- scope was first ,turned upon it. Is it alive in the 'sense that there are intelligent being on it? Do the re- gular appearance and disappearance of white caps at the poles indicate that snow falls there in winter and melts in the spring? Are dark re- gions vegetation? The questions were discussed for the nth time by Dr, Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto, at ' a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Back in 1877, Schiaparelli, a dis- tinguished Italian astronomer, made the first accurate map of Mars, Ln the course of his survey he discov- ered curious straight lines (actually arcs of great circles) which he called "canali." The English equivalent is "channels," but someone passed on the translation "canals„” with all that it implies. Thus arose a con- troversy on the nature of the canals, which has not yet been settled, Lowell's Mars The late Percival Lowell, who founded the observatory at Flag- staff, Arizona, went much farther than Schiaparelli. His maps of Mars have never been surpassed for de- tail and for accuracy. He saw not only all that Schiaparelli saw but more. He was certain that the polar caps were covered with hoarfrost cr snow, that intelligent beings had dug the canals for the express pur- pose of bringing the water from the melting polar caps to temperate and equatorial regions that could bring forth vegetation if irrigated. The planet certainly turns green, the characteristic color of vegeta- tion, as summer advances and the mid Martian soil is presumably irri- gated by canal water, according to Lowell; it also turns red as winter approaches and the canals dry up, red being the color of dying vege- tation. Along the canals there are also spots which Lowell called "oases" and which he conceived to be the sites of great settlements. As a class, astronomers rejected Lowell's reasoning. The canals were optical illusions to many; the polar caps might be solid carbon dioxide as well as hoarfrost or snow. Be- sides, there was little if any oxygen on Mars, so that animal life like that of the earth was impossible, Yet there is no doubt that Lowell knew more about Mars than any astronomer of his day and that he made it necessary to revise old not- ions, "Seas" Show Vegetation In the first place, the "seas," the name given to certain dusky mark- ings, were found at Flagstaff to be a mass of intricate detail quite out of keeping with water surfaces. Canals, for example, crossed the seas. Vari- ations in the color of the seas oc- curred synchronously with changes in the Martian seasons and justified the inference that they were vege- tation. The low oxygen content In the atmosphere of Mars has been 1n» geniously accounted for by Prof; Henry Norris Russell, He has sug- gested that the rocks of Mars are red because the iron in then[ has oxidized, which [Weans that oxygen Inas been taken from the sir, Stever to be returned, Some day the whole planet will appear a changeless rusty reo. Dr, Tombaugh holds that the red color of Mars is the natural color of its igneous rocks and not the result of oxidization of iron, To him the "Oases" of Lowell may be craters left by the impact of col- liding asteroids. The great dust clouds which have ben observed iadicate that there are winds. Hence there must be wind erosion, which would level off the high walls of the craters. Most astronomers now concede that the dark color that comes and goes seasonally on Mars is evidence of some low form of vegetation. Litre others before him, Dr. Tombaugh suggests that lichens constitute this vegetation. But intelligent life on Mars? Dr, Tombaugh spurns the thought. He is willing to accept the canals as real, but he will not accept them as artificial engineering works. Many of the canals radiate from oases. To Dr. Tombaugh the radii ate just cracks in the surface caused by the impact of asteroids. Dr, Lowell, however, insisted that the radii are geometrically straight lines, where- as natural cracks, whether they oc- cur in a sheet of glass or in the earth's crust, are never geometri- cally straight. Some of these controversial ques- tions will possibly be settled with the aid of the 200 -inch telescope on Palomar Mountain, California. It has been proposed that motion pic- tures be trade of Mars with that powerful instrument—not ordinary notion pictures, but pictures takes at intervals frequent 'enough to ob- tain a series of several hundred. Int such a series there would be a few "frames" in which details would be so clear that there could be no mistake about them. As it is, the canals have never been photo- graphed. A. trained observer has to draw what he thinks be saw in a clear fleeting second. The at- mosphere of the earth is constantly "boiling" as heat radiates from the surface, and it is this boiling that stakes it impossible to obtain a steady view 'of any detail of Mars. —Waldemar Kaempffert fit The New York Times. NO SALE A lady went to buy a drinking trough for her dog. The shopkeep- er asked her if she would like one with the inscription, "For the Dog." "It isn't necessary," site replied. "My husband never drinks water, and the dog can't read." Canadian Scientists Discover New Supply Source For `[Wonder Drug'" The first reported extraction of the wonder drug ACTH from cattle glands was -announced recently by a Canadian company, Frank W. Horner Limited, Montreal. Company spokesmen said that the success of the process after many months investigation means that the world supply of ACTH'could be greatly increased by large scale extraction front beef pituitaries, Until now, the very small quanti- ties of this agent available to meet the large demands of Canadian medical research could be obtained only from hog 'pituitaries in the United States, Previous opinion held that cattle pituitaries would not be a practical source. Despite this general impression the Horner lab- oratory showed that gland for gland the beef pituitary is just as good as the hog. ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hor- mone), although known to science for many years as one of the key agents in the pituitary, regarded as the master gland of the body, first came into prominence in medi- cine just over a year ago. It had been known previouscly that it acts as a chemical messenger between the pituitary and the adren- als, two tiny hat -shaped organs above the kidneys. It stimulates these glands to secrete other hor- mones which in turn affect such bodily functions as carbohydrate metabolism and -water balance. Through the work of such men as Montreal's renowned Dr. Hans Selye this pituitary -adrenal gland relationship has been established as a vital factor in the so-called "dis- eases of adaptation" which include high blood pressure, certain kidney disorders, and arthritis. Then early last year, the Mayo Clinic revealed the spectacular effect of ACTH in arresting arth- ritis. Since then there has been a succession of medical reports on the near -miraculous action of this hormone in controlling other form- erly unresponsive human ailments. The material is potentially so ci0,ngerous in the wrong hands and the available supply so small, that the National Research Council keeps a strict control over its dis- tribution. Because its chief ,value is that of a research tool to study these various disorders, ACTH is used chiefly by medical investigators and is not generally available as a cure for private patients. "At first," continues the Horner research director, "ACTH was con- sidered to be a protein, perhaps as complicated as insulin, which after almost thirty years of use' still must be prepared from animal glands. But recent studies suggest that the activity of ACTH as it is isolated from the pituitary is concentrated in a small fraction of the product. And there is, therefore, the possi- bility that this simpler active portion or portions may be prepared chemically some day." Countless thousands of arthritis sufferers in Canada and throughout the world are hoping and praying for that day, JITTER By, Arthur Pointer TNERE, M V SttIP MODEI3S.ALL DONE AND See's A BEAUTY! NOW'm SNOW it TO suslw T'LL YOU SEG IT, BITS WAIT, NW ' Irwlas FIRsO RRIZE 114THE MODEL SHOW 1'1"� GONEf •, JUDY, DIn1K)uTANE -, - ABOM'FROMMY woRNEENGNI ,, Wi. ©` . L • r' . _ WENT DOWNIE:WARE THE PARKW fI'N ONE. Boy.... SHE'S A NONEY! ) l+. .er • ;%� .. a'Be,t,rs, �r min• � ... .. ° L ���°�° %o: "e-. ® YIril /7 ' KitTov .3V t' i Jig � 0 .. �a-.: _.- 17:6 eTOW sro osyop o oto 4— Dr. Leonard Mitchell (right), research director of Frank W. Homer Limited, Montreal, who recently announced the first isolation of ACTH from cattle glands, watches Dr. I,ucien Delcourt, an assistant, carry out one of the many steps in the preparation of ACTH on an experimental scale in the Horner laboratories. Dr. Leonard Mitchell (right), research director of l'railk W.. Horner Limited, Montreal, who recently annppnced the first isolation of ACTTrT from cattle glands, confers with this assistant„ Dr. Lucien Delcourt.