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By Root 522 0

of his columnists during the election, said that they had run away with him. “You know, I would not interfere with any man's freedom of expression,” he said solemnly, “but I thought they were very unfair to Franklin.” Among the columnists, Raymond Clapper, the WorldTelegram's accredited liberal, in a relative sense, remained almost neutral until near the end of the campaign. Finally he came out for Willkie, too, like the white horse in the circus chariot race who loafs along behind the others until the last lap. “When I looked in the paper and saw that Clapper had come over too,” Howard says, “I said, 'Oh, my God!' It made us look partisan.”

In his experience with public men, Howard has been betrayed so many times that he sometimes must feel like the cockney girl in the song “Once Again She Lorst 'Er Nime.” Last January, when the administration began to propose a lendlease bill, Howard telephoned to Willkie at his home, asked him to prepare a statement attacking the bill, and indicated that this was a chance to make up for the mistakes he had made during the campaign. “All the other boys are going to jump all over this bill, Wendell,” Howard said in effect, “and I don't want you to get left at the post. I have a reporter with Tom Dewey writing his statement for him now, and I'm having lunch with Hoover tomorrow.” (Howard has always had a tender spot for Hoover. He has given unlimited publicity to all the Hoover projects for sending food through the British blockade, despite the possibility of embarrassing the administration, which has tried to coordinate its foreign policy with Great Britain's.) Willkie told Howard that he could not decide until he had read the bill. The next day, after he read it, he said he would be for it if minor changes were made in it. The publisher and the ungrateful candidate had a resounding argument later at a dinner party given by John Erskine. It wound up by Howard's telling a blackface story to Willkie. The punch line of the story was “Wait till I get my razor on you tomorrow!” Willkie, more ingenuous than a LaGuardia or a Roosevelt, was astonished at such disrespect. “A man like that is too flippant to have so much power,” he told friends later. He has as large a capacity as Howard's for feeling that his affections have been trifled with. Immediately after Willkie's return from England, Howard sought a reconciliation. He succeeded in getting Willkie to come to dinner at his house, but their twanging wrangle continued all through the intended love feast. “To tell you the truth,” Howard afterward remarked to a friend, “as long as one of them had to be elected, I'm glad it was Roosevelt. Willkie is a fellow you can't depend on.”

• “Pull His Whiskers!” •

ew American industries have suffered so spectacular a decline as wrestling, which had its happiest days during the early years of the general depression. In the winter of 193132 ten wrestling shows were held at Madison Square Garden, and drew an average gate of twentyfour thousand dollars. These indoor shows merely served to prepare the wrestling public for outdoor bouts at the Yankee Stadium and the Garden Bowl, which occasionally drew sixty thousand dollars. The last match in the Garden was promoted on March 30, 1938, by an old acquaintance of mine named Jack Pfefer, and it attracted less than five thousand dollars' worth of patronage. If a promoter tried to rent the Yankee Stadium or even Ebbets Field for a wrestling show this summer, sporting people would think he had been overcome by the heat. Pfefer, however, is still conducting wrestling matches in a small way, and feels that from an artistic point of view they are superior to those of the great era. The trouble, according to him, is that the moneyed clientele has ceased to believe in wrestling as a sport and has not yet learned to appreciate it as a pure art form, like opera or classical dancing.

Pfefer holds shows in neighborhoods like Ridgewood, in Queens, and the region just south of the Bronx Zoo, and they draw fairly well at a general admission of a quarter or forty cents.