The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 19

Nineteen SPILLING THE BEANS Kathleen Moore Knight Pictured Corpses THE WASHINGTON SCENE Hoover Back and Burned Up All Over Martha's Vineyard Then Wrote It's Hard Work to Get Pistol Toting Permit in Boston By Joseph F. Dinneen By Paul F. Knecland BETWEEN MURDER MYSTERIES, and en route from Mexico to Martha's Vineyard, Kathleen -Moore Knight stopped off in Boston one morning last week long enough to have breakfast at the Copley Plaza and reveal that her next Crime Club book would be conceived July 10. Ir- i By Doris Fleeson WASHINGTON, June 20 Nobody is going to make administration propaganda out of Herbert Hoover, by heck. Washington has seen burned-up people, including Presidents, in its day, but it was agreed following Hoover's homecoming that the only living ex-President was one of the toastiest browns ever hung in the capital gallery.

THERE ARE 2839 persons with permits to carry pistols in the city of Boston, although that figure does not by any means account for the number of firearms in the hands or homes of people in the city. A number of unlicensed weapons have beeft brought back from overseas, and every week mothers and wives of servicemen turn up at Police Headquarters asking to have someone come to their homes to remove them. FLEESON DINNEEN I I A 1 Cv'i i'c. A request like this poses a problem for the Police Commissioner. The trouble is that the weapon belongs to a man in the house and not the woman who wants it taken out.

If police discover that it is Army or Navy property, they confiscate it right away and turn it back to the Army or Navy. If it's a foreign piece, brought back from a battlefield, they take it to police headquarters, mark it for future identification and hold it for safe-keeping. If the owner demands his property and has a right to it and to a permit for it, it is returned to him. MRS. KATHLEEN MOORE KNIGHT tells a Breakfast how she came to start writing detective stories.

"I believe it will be my 20th" she paused to screw a cigarette into a holder "or perhaps my 21st. People always ask me how many books I have written and I never seem to be able to give them the latest correct figure." If appearance means anything, then Miss Knight ought to be able to remember, looking, as she does, very much like an efficient and statistically-minded business woman. She was one, too a YWCA executive secretary. That rigidity of a social worker vanishes, however, once she appraises a humorous situation; it is then that she relaxes completely and her teeth flash strong and white frequent outbursts of laughter. "There was nothing very funny about the weekly train ride I used to take to Boston," Miss Knight said with a smile.

"From the time I was 12 years old until I was graduated from high school I was dismissed at noon every Friday in order to hear the Boston Symphony Orchester play. Of course, quite a few classmates envied my excursions if they only knew that I HAD to go!" The dauhgter of George Knight, wealthy Brockton shoe machinery inventor. Miss Knight turned down college for Lasell Seminary, and after a fling at public relations days are best I went to work promoting funds in New York for intrepid explorers, aviators, and adventurers who made headlines won't name after Lindbergh's solo hop across the Atlantic. With the crash and '29 depression, she fled to Martha's Vineyard and there, actually from sheer boredom and want of something better to do, wrote her first murder mystery. "One day I happened to be looking out of the window and wondering what it would be like if the island homes around me housed murderers; in my own imagination I scattered the landscape with corpses and before I knew it.

a detective story was born," Miss Knight recalled. "That was in March six months later the book was completed and with one revision, accepted as a Crime Club selection by Doubleday Doran. They've published everything I've written ever since." Miss Knight attributes her success critics for years now have been raving about her deftly constructed, cleverly carpentered murder mysteries to the fact that she has inherited some of her father's inventive genius. "He designs new machinery, I try to devise fresh plots," she said. Although she never was a crime story fan, and had only the average reader's en passant page-turning acquaintance with Sherlock Holmes and his ilk, Miss Knight is a severe critic of detective fiction including her own.

Here's what she thinks about a best-selling author of whom she is a best-selling contemporary: "His first six books were good, but afjer you've read the same story in six different volumes, that same story becomes rather tiresome "in the next six books." She also has no use for the old and now unreliable "whodunits" of the locked door, "had-I-but-known," secret room, and "the butler did it" schools of sleuthing. "I avoid those hackneyed, threadbare situations along with the death by unusual-secret-weapon sort of thing because smart editors just won't stand for them," she added. "And I have long since learned that it takes more than a puzzle, the pieces of which must be fitted together by the reader, before a detective story writer can boast that he is having a wonderful crime." Back of the immediate tempest lies State Department coolness toward the whole Hoover journey south. As previously reported here the State Department rebuffed efforts by UNRRA and others to make him a special ambassador to the inauguration of the hemispheric problem child, President Peron of Argentina. The State Department feels and offers statistics to prove it that Argentina makes fine propaganda with food promises which, in part, get lost in the shuffle.

They charge also, with supporting figures, that Argentina is extracting the last possible ounce of political and economic advantage over the hungry world from her favorable food position. T. R. Ybarra, in Buenos Aires, recently wrote "in Argentina one finds a shortage only of shortages." Hoover was so briefed. He now" reports new promises of aid from Argentina and praised her efforts.

Under the circumstances this amounts almost to a repudiation of State Department policy and will not endear him to its author, bluff Assistant Secretary Spruille Braden. Braden still has the Administration with him. This week Dean Acheson, acting Secretary of State, again told an unofficial Argentina envoy. Gen. Carlos von Der Becke, that Buenos Aires must fulfill her international obligations by suppressing Nazi activities.

To emphasize the point, Acheson had Braden sit with him during the interview. P. S. There are some hardened cynics in the capital who think that perhaps Hoover's ill temper was not lessened by the fact that when he rushed from the airport to the White House to see the President, he was told by press secretary Ross that Truman hadn't finished lunch, please come back in the The controversy arose from reports that Hoover was rushing back from his food mission in South America to help save OPA. He was said to have assured Assistant Secretary of State William L.

Clayton via telephone from Brazil that he sympathized with the official view that the present bill would endanger the United States program of grain exports to famine areas abroad. Within a few hours after his return by air, however, it became entirely clear that what Hoover thinks of OPA and his supposed position as its defender cannot be printed in a family newspaper. He also said he did not talk to Clayton. Hoover did not duck, evade or sidestep. He merely threw the story down so hard it bounced.

Incredulous reporters who regard Clayton as a very substantial fellow indeed tried to execute various flanking movements to encompass the misunderstanding. But Hoover declined to cooperate and had not so much as a stingy platitude to lay on OPA's bier. The affable Clayton, who had personally vouched for the conversation with Hoover, bowed out of the controversy. He rested on an official statement that Ambassador Pawley called him from Rio, that Hoover came into the conversation, that Clayton explained the OPA situation and that both men expressed concern over it. (Later Hoover, according to the Associated Press, said that he had supposed he was talkink to William L.

Batt, chairman of the Rubber Reserve Office, when he apparently was talking with Clayton, but when "the party at the other end made some suggestions about legislation," he (Hoover) "handed the telephone back to Ambassador Pawley." He insists he was not "engaged in domestic problems.) number every chance he gets. Those unlicensed and unidentified firearms in homes throughout the city plague the police. They tre one of the by-products of the war that could not be controlled. Some of the weapons reported by mothers, sisters and wives are far more dangerous than the average revolver or automatic. Some of the botys managed to get machine guns and other rapid fire pieces home, and the police look upon their very existence in such hands as a menace.

They'd like to know all about them, and they'd like to have the owners themselves come forward with these souvenirs and turn them over for safe-keeping. Right and title to the weapons would remain in the owner, but the police would have possession until such time as an owner might want to exhibit his souvenir, or turn it over to a museum. Presence of a gun in the average home is never necessary anyway. It's the cause of a succession of tragic "I didn't know it was loaded" accidents. If it is hidden away, children come across it.

In an emergency it is usually quicker to reach for a telephone than to reach for a gun, and in 99 cases out of a hundred, far safer. There is more security in a telephone at the bedside than in a pistol under a pillow, and it is on that theory that most applications are turned down. If there is shooting to be done, the police are better prepared and equipped for it Brown and Philo Vance. They're both at work in her four latest books published during the past 18 months "Design in Diamonds," "Intrigue for Empire," "Stream Sinister," and "The Trouble at Turkey Hill." "I've been thinking seriously about doing a straight novel in-cidently, detective fiction is fast becoming high calibre literature but I don't get much encouragement from my agent," she went on. 'If you want sales to drop off for about two years, go ahead," he tells me." Miss Knight prepared her holder for about the sixth cigarette of the morning and accepted a light from an attentive waiter who was quicker on the draw with a book of matches than the writer with his lighter.

"What I should do though," she said, inhaling deeply, "is buy a recording instrument. Then I could dictate my little stories in an even greater ahmm 'record' time." Of course she has had some wonderful crimes, and sales, too. The Kathleen Moore Knight output has not only sold big in original Crime Club editions, but the reprints at a dollar down have been coming off the presses by the hundred thousand. And to top it all, the other day one of the 25-cent pocket-book publishers snapped up nearly a dozen of her thriller-diller-chillers which go into an even 1,000,000 copies for a starter that's not mentioning the British editions and the new French market just opened since the war ended. "It pleases me very much, but I'm not much for publicity," she revealed.

"This is my first interview in ages." Miss Knight prefers writing the intrigue story to the murder mystery and has created a couple of detective characters. Blair Margot and Elisha Macomber, who are becoming as popular as Father It is not easy to get a permit to carry a pistol in Boston. Today's 2839 is far less than the number issued during the war when special guards were hired to protect war-plants and were authorized to carry them. Police Commissioner Sullivan acknowledges only four reasons for carrying a pistol: Self-protection for persons carrying large sums of money: protection of property and valuables; target practice; and as weapons for special police. A thorough and painstaking investigation is made of every applicant for a permit, and any blemish on his record will block it.

He must be recommended by police officers and captains along the line, and when the application reaches the Commissioner's desk, he decides. Very often he vetoes all recommendations and refuses to grant one because he is not satisfied about the necessity for it. He doesn't like firearms lying around the city and reduces the 13 Years of F. Congress Wants Its Turn Now COLUMN FOR TEENS Matter of FACT By Joseph and Stewart Alsop Don't Chase Tim's Mother After Your Is Ended omance HOW TO WIN SCHOLARSHIPS Ulrich Kruse Started Doing Home Work in Kindergarten By Joan McPartlin GREATER BOSTON'S NO. 1 high school graduate of 1946 plans to spend a restful Summer in preparation for a year of mathematics, physics, chemistry and English the freshman's bungaboo at Harvard.

What he calls rest will be two months of caring for a swarm of small fry at a camp for boys at Newfound Lake, N. H. By Elizabeth Woodward IT WAS WHILE you were laid up with a broken leg that you had your heart broken. You'd been going steady for months, and all the time you were out of commission Tim came to see you regularly. He never let on that anything was wrong that his feelings had changed that he'd become interested in another girl.

Several people tried to warn you but you wouldn't believe them. But when you got back to school, you saw Tim's ring on an--other girl's finger. That did it. While you were going with Tim to his room. Tim was in the Very S.

ALSOP two or three most influential members of the Republican-conservative Democratic coalition. This man admitted pleasure at the coali-ion's success in repeatedly beating the Administration. But he also admitted that the coalition could not offer a constructive program of its own. This, he added, was extremely dangerous. "You know," he concluded reflectively, "this is the first time I've wondered whether the British system might not be better than ours." But such remedies will not be feasible without an acute constitutional crisis (such as may well be caused, indeed, by election of a Republican House this Fall).

A suggestion as to what can be done now is to be found in the excellent Executive-Legislative relationship in one isolated field that of foreign policy. In part, the relationship is good here, although it is bad everywhere else because Senators Connally and Vandenberg have actually participated in making foreign policy. But it is more important still that they have been given day-to-day information about the facts on which policy must be based. Members of the House and Senate are considering issues of deep national import, and their disagreements are rarely irreconcilable if they know all the facts. An extension of the present system has been urged upon Secretary of State James F.

Byrnes, in memoranda from his subordinates. If he accepts this advice, he will establish as a permanent organ of the State Department a body similiar to the committee headed by Under Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson, which had such success in winning Congressional assent to the trade agreements and Bretton Woods bill. The body would be headed by a very high official to give it authority. It would be charged with keeping key members of both Houses of Congress in constant touch with the impelling facts on which American foreign policy is founded.

Furthermore, several of the President's wisest advisers, including the astute and disinterested Secretary of the Senate, Leslie Biffle, have urged that Truman employ the same technique to secure greater unanimity on national policy, as a whole. It would be more difficult when the issues were domestic. It would probably be impossible to do a full-scale job until creation of an Executive Secretariat to co-ordinate all Executive activity had secured something like unanimity of policy within the Executive branch. But it would be another long step in the right direction. (Copyright, 1946, Boston Globe and New York Tribune, Inc.) J.

ALSOP This is the third of a series of articles by the Alsop brothers on basic problems of the Federal government. WASHINGTON, June 20 The relations between the Executive and Legislative branches have reached a condition of almost total breakdown in the last six months. And at no time in history have vaster peacetime problems confronted the United States, or more urgently demanded positive solutions. And at no time in history has it been less easy to place a positive solution of any problem on the statute books. This is the third of the great difficulties which have bedeviled the unlucky President Truman.

The breakdown has three main causes. First, the founding fathers, by separating the Legislative and Executive branches, in effect, condemned the Congress to irresponsibility. Since members of Congress are not responsible for administering national policy, they do not suffer from the consequences of their own action or inaction. Second, the founding fathers also failed to provide any means by which a political divergence between the Legislative and Executive branches could be corrected. Third, Franklin Roosevelt gave the country 13 years of strong Executive leadership, which always generates Congressional irritation, and, therefore, Congressional obstinacy.

But while it is easy to delineate the causes of the difficulty and to estimate its seriousness, providing a corrective is not so simple. Many leaders of the Executive branch privately incline toward the remedy proposed by Thomas Finletter, in his remarkable Study of the American Government. Finletter would give the President a whiphand over an obstinate and uncooperative Congress, by giving him the right to declare a Legislative dissolution. The President would thus send the issue between himself and Congress to the people for settlement at the polls. No member of Congress likes elections, and this expedient would confine Congressional dissents from the Executive to basic differences of principle.

Leanings in this direction are not entirely absent in Congress. Perhaps the most astonishing single experience of your correspondents, in the last six months, was a conversation with one of the work in science with post-graduate courses, probably at the University of Chicago. Eventually he hopes to teach in a college. He has a second ambition, meanwhile, so far as Harvard is concerned to row on the varsity crew. He says he has no hobbies, but he built airplane and ship models when he was a lad, and has conducted minor experiments in chemistry and physics in a cellar workroom.

Ha played on the Belmont High tennis team and his 280 classmates voted him "nost likely to succeed. When Ulrich came to America with his parents, Prof, and Mrs. Alfred J. Kruse Prof. Kruse is at M.

I. he was astonished at the students' attitude toward their schools. "The idea seemed to be not how much home work you could do, but how much you could get out of," he says. "I had been doing homework ever since I was in kindergarten." Newspapers readers must know how often Belmont students win college scholarships. Ulrich credits his and others' success to the alertness of George Higginbottom, the headmaster, and the guidance of Elizabeth Hanf, dean of girls and scholarship counsellor.

Ulrich was a member of the National Honor Society, at Belmont High, and was of course graduated with all kinds of honors. But says theN Belmont High yearbook on page 29 "don't let that report card fool you. It would be hard to find a more genuinely friendly and genial person than Uli." Greater Boston's No. 1 high school graduate is Ulrich Kruse of 39 Watson road, Belmont, who just received his diploma from Belmont High. Having won last Winter the Pepsi-Cola scholarship for Massachusetts boys full tuition, fees, traveling expenses and $25 a month toward living costs, he has recently been notified that he is also a winner of a Harvard freshman scholarship.

His only peer in Massachusetts seems to be Grace Esther Rawson of Oxford High School, who won the girls' Pepsi-Cola scholarship in this state. Ulrich calls himself "one-sided" because he is interested mainly in mathematics and physics. Yet he won his scholarships on the basis of his general knowledge, plus high scores in English. German, social sciences and only one part of mathematics. This was his experience in the College Entrance Board examinations which he took in April: "I didn't find them too bad," he said, of tests which leave most students feeling that they'll never get into college.

The cal sections were easy for him, but he was dismayed when the bell rang before he had completed the very last problem of all. As for the German exam, Ulrich is a native of Germany and lived there until 1938. "Of course it was a snap for me," he said. "Eng-. lish wasn't too hard.

Social sciences proved to be "slightly perplexing in places." Either mathematics or physics will be his major study at Harvard. Later he plans to continue air you breathed when you went to call on his mother. That's what gave you the big bang. And Tim's mother liked having a chance to talk to the girl Tim liked best. She's interested in his friends she wanted to see what you were all about.

And she wanted an interested audience when she talked about her son. You were that, all right Now there's no more Tim in your life. If you go to his house, it would look as though you were hankering to see him. Even if you figure out his schedule to be sure he'll be out it would still look as though you wanted a dose of the air Tim breathes. Let Tim's mother be the judge of whether your friendship should continue.

She'll be interested in Tim's new girl now. She may find it awkward trying to talk to you about Tim. Besides, she's older. If she's interested in seeing you she'll make the moves in your direction. She'll come over to your house or she'll call you up.

Let her keep the reins in her hands don't you chase after her. Consider her along with Tim as part of your past! you got well acquainted with his family, especially his mother. Whenever she was in your neighborhood she'd stop in to see you, and you visited her "often. You enjoyed each other's company and the fact that you were going with Tim just made it that much pleasanter. Now that you aren't going with Tim any more, you're wondering if you have to stop seeing his mother.

You've taken Tim's new girl in your stride but you do hate to think of breaking up your friendship with his mother. She still comes to see you occasionally. And if you stop going over to see her, she may think it's strange, you say to yourself. Well, the big thing you two ladies had in common was Tim. And it's really because she is Tim's mother that you are so fond of her.

Dollars to doughnuts you spent most of your time together talking of Tim. And you got the biggest kick out of visiting her because it was Tim's house. There were the chairs he sits in, and the pictures he looks at, the dining room table where he eats, the stairs he climbs Nena Beats Tactical Retreat Before Gas Attack, Lifting Everett School Siege STUBBORN RESISTANCE meets Lt Eugene O. Tobin's tear CAPITULATION Nena, holding her nose, walks (back- IMPRISONMENT Nena mediates her fate. Al Morris of REFLECTIONS "What a campaign!" bomb.

Nena, carnival monkey had been lodging in Everett ward) into trap after wily father of three school pupils looses Animal Rescue League passes sentence. school ventilator for three days. charge of sulphur dioxide. photos by Charles f. MoCbrmick.

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