--— -CQ* FRIMLi_-FEBRUARY £8. IQ?,a L.T. i GOOD EVEiNING EVERYBODY: If I ever came here to Cincinnati without a yarn with Dave Bowman, Ohio’s foremost political orator, I mean oracle, my visit wouldn’t be complete. He not only can talk faster than Floyd Gibbons, but he can, I believe, talk even faster than Floyd can think. Well, a few7 minutes ago Political Oracle Bowman, who Is one of the editors of the TIMES-STAL, came in to see me here at the Netherland Plaza, siaidE studio of W.L.W., and I said, nDave, I see the Ohio Republicans have just picked Robert Taft as favorite sop. What does that mean?" To which ye oracle replied:- ’’He’d make a fine president,” and then he went on lickety split.- A favoiite son is a rock to hide behind until you decide which way to jump. Harding is the only one who ever drew to that pair of deuces - and filled l ” taxes . Ao tnritj-^ia the end of -%&..artfr -tm^ea porno ^^4.«ng -ooaaey dbA* i^ssnra»^9*m^- Y^O^jlTliat *3 always an unpleasant word in politics, especially during an election year, kany dignitaries of the Administration would like to see the theme of taxation soft-pedalled and kept in a corner. They tried to persuade the president not to x utter the unmentionable word. But today President Roosevelt spoke to Congress, and he enmoiated the word right out loud>- taxes. Ha told the lawmakers they'd have to get busy and provide the money to finanoe the expenditures that have been made into law. The figure mentioned by the voice from th Unite House is one Billion, one hundred and tnirty-seven million dollarsJ itennzed^nisi way*. „ »—•* -‘i““ "u"r- " ”'1*" the triple A processing taxes which the Supreme Court threw out. TAXiSS rnat Dioney J^as already been guaranteed to the farmers. 1'hen another five hundred million to finance the new farm program, the Soil Conservation bill which was passed the other day to take the place of the Triple A. Mord^over, there is the bonus-- - that hundred and twenty million dollars to redeem batches of those bonus baby bonds, as they are cashed in. Where is the money coming from? What kind of taxes? The inflation boys have a ready answer. They say don't tax, print •Inflationists declare they are going to put up a fight to have the bonus money paid with new cash off the presses. The conservative elements are thinking in terms of-income tax„ -t-nose' smaH -ineome-s-give a t h<»- senate leaders -the income- sor-t—o The lawmakers are in the bad position of a man who is A given a choice of cutting off the dog's tail with either an axe or a pair of scissors, whan-ae^ afraid of the aog. railrculs . a s»--a -to^-ntng ■# ■ 11 Va - no^Jaa.az- Tife S»#®effle!=^^fc3?tsJta^han4 down^a Interstate Commerce Commission, which consists through a decree wnieh effects the dollars and cents of all who travel on railroads. And that's everybody, to the number of four hundred and fifty million fares# That's how many railroad passengers there were last year--according to James Fitzgerald, information man for the Eastern Kailrpads# three and six-tenths cents a mile* Slasn that to two cents e r.iile, commands the I G 0* Pullman travel costs four cents a mile# that's to be trimmed down to three cents. Meaning that a two hundred mile ride in a Pullman now costs eight dollars. It will cost six dollars, after June second, rhai: ^-^he-dste-«n©n-th«“ of nine members. They took a vote and put The ICC has cut the passenger rate. Right now we pay passenger rate etrfc goes into effeet-. railroads . i.‘hat isn't such hot news to a lot of folks in the West and the South. A year ago Western ihd Southern railroads tried an experiment—a rate reduction experiment. The Eastern roads did not follow suit* fhey said they'd been losing so much money for a long time that they couldn’t afford to cut farest The IOC proceeded to watch the Western and Southern test. !hey noticed that on the cut fare railroad passenger travel took a jump. So now for months they've been holding hearings, gathering figures and plotting charts—to decide whether out fares wouldn't be a good thing for all the railroads in the country. l1he idea being—if you make riding cheaper, you'll sell more rides. Today's decision says--yest we think that's the way it will work out. Hence the edict*— Jower passenger fares after June se c and. The—e ffe lose a teh^d^^wiyfc-h he e ‘IT ’and OE03a-afl*o*-»f the Today’s decision nay dictate railroau price policy for a long time to come. -Ln a vMk Anyway^7it wilf cost less to ride^ h^eh^c^tral^ JAP AH Thera’s one entertaining feature about the news from Japan these days. Whatever you say the night before, turns out to be wrong the next day, Uight before last I had the revolt in 'Tokyo suppressed. That was wrong. So last night I had a comproinise agreement all fixed up between the Army chiefs and the young military fanatics who had raised the storm of assassinations and rebellion. Today that turned out to be wrong. So tonight we have something else again. But don’t blame A look through a wall, and it's a high wall of censorship that surrounds the island empire . What I said last night was wrong to this extent- the compromise surrender which Tokyo -re.rorted was*; as I described tb it-only the reoels didn’t agree it. They were offered tne privilege of committing hari karlMaybe that’s wnat the young officers didn't like about the arrangement. Tonight's news sounds just as odd, and maybe not any more correct. It relates the army chiefs h^ve called upon the insurgents to surrender-in the name oi the Bmporoi . JAPAN. That’s a sacred summons, so they instantly complied. They said; "Yes, we’ll surrender,-’ merely adding that they would hold their positions in the heart of Tokyo until satisfactory terms for their surrender had been negotiated. So theoretically they have submit ted, the only question being, when and how? All of which has that quaint oriental flavor. Other reports give us a proclamation by Oeneral Kashii, in command of the government troops. He declares that he is prepared to take "appropriate measures against the reoels." But what measures are appropriate , when a small army group has assassinates five heads of the government, including the premier, and is holding out in public buildings? We do Kara know what measure would be appropriate in a European capital. There would be a swift attack with rifle and. cannon fira, iu > nothing like that has happened in Tokyo. Everything has bean extraordinar­ ily quiet, not a finger lifted against the insurgents-merely the most courteous of negotiations* So the surmise becomes stronger and stronger that the JAPAN. Japanese war lords are in sympathy with j© assassinating young hot heads, anu are reluctant to deal harshly with them. This in turn expands the surmise—that the result of the terrorist stroke will oe just what the terrorists want, a government more dedicated to military imperialism. 3'i'HIOl IA. There's one Italian word familiar to,the v.'orld the expressive word-vendetta. Italian lore is studded with dark tales of the quest for vengeance, the.life-long pursuit to wipe out an injury. ’.Yell, the word vendette comes vividly to mind when we read a brief war dispatch today. Brief is right- that's the way iltirshal Badoglio has been sending his reports from Ethiopia, terse, a few Words. Badoglio's dispatch today read^s this way: The troopo jf the the IPirst Army Corps," ne radios,"have conquered Amba Ala^i. From eleven oclock this morning, the flag waves on the summit of the mountain which saw the historic sacrifice of Toselli and his men." The phrase "Toselli ana his men" gives the cue, it goes back to that historic defeat which the Italians suffered in Aoysinia forty years ago. Their army, pushing on, Oot as far as the mountain stronghold of Amba Alaji. ihera tre reverses oegan. Hosts of the warrior imperor Menelik, surged to tn- attack VENDETTA The army retreated - only to be wiped out on the battlefield of Adowa. But meanwhile one detachment had been trapped at Amba Alaji. It was commanded by Tosselli. He asked for reinforcements but instead a message was sent to him saying Letreat. He never got the message. He held a position in a gorge, through which he expected the reinforcements to arrive - the help that never came. He had eighteen hundred men against thirty thousand. Only a handful of his native Askari troops escaped. 73HDi2i’TA. i%e army '« tea- rml y tu liu wi#«4 ta»t rm thn 'Of anwki-i©T'- one &^..tanhiiMainiT T-^ni trappod at ^tgen^iol-a, aurBLi undo d~tty the • 'bax 'bairir'»-^y4-eT~ Wi:an the present trouble began, *^Mus soil ini made it a national point-to avenge those disasters of forty years ago* The first objective was the capture of Adowa, scene of great defeat. But that didn't complete the Fascist vendetta. They were out to avenge not merely the lost battle, bpt the entire losing campaign.* So the ulitmafe goal O'f pride and sentiment was Amba Alaji-the furthereat point of that former ill-fated advance, where Toselli and his men fought to tne end. S& Today the national vendetta was complete, and all the Italians now intend to do is-conctuer the rest of Ethiopia. P. S.yThe Ethiopians deny that Amba Alaji has been captured. scorn. Tonight there are stories to tell-stories about Antonio Sootti, He is deah-at seventy-one, Scotti, the baritone, who for so many years trod the stage in the glory at Hew Yor^s Metropolitan Opera House. He became a legend, specializing in dark and sinister operatic characters. He was surrounded by a wealth of anecdote, one of those people whose requiem might bei— tell a story about him. So let's tell about the furniture in La fosca. It goes back to the days, a few years ago, when Sootti and Jeritza played hair-raising drama in that sombre old thriller of music, I have the story from Carlo Edwards, long an Assistant Conductor at the Met, He relates that Scotti was always finicky and— -parta-aui-sHr about the furniture on the stage in ■nefr—n# La To sea. ‘That-1 a—where- he -pa-fr onh4-s- great ere-t—burst-n^ niatronics, “as the villainous oni«jf of police^.—Se $very time, be foie the second act, he would go on the stage and carefully arrange the chairs, table ana couch-to suites But Jeritza, the soprano, had her own notions^ou**^*. -She SCOTTI - 2 would only have to wait. For ocotti had one invariable custom. Just before strutting on the stage to sing, he would, go to his dressing room and kiss his mother's picture. It was a superstition with him. Jeritza would wait until he had gone to pay his devotions to the maternal photograph, then she would rearrange the furniture to suit herself. At the time Scotti got back, the music would begin and there was nothing he could do. The furniture stayed as she had fixed it. To his last moment, the great Scotti upheld his reputation as a man about whom stories are to be told, he died yesterday in Naples, but that was kept secret. Scotti wanted no headlines. It was his wish that the news of his passing should be broken in the humblest way - by a bought and paid for notice of a few lines in the obijftuary column of a Meopolitan newspaper. That appeared today - a last gesture of humility. H2ID3L3J:Rff. One Ola fellow saya to the other-no, I won't go to your birthuey party. One is Six h.mdred and elghty-saren years old. The other, celebrating an anniversary--fiVQ hundred and years old. They're universities, tne one Oxford, the other Heidelberg, Oxford, I believe, is the third oldest university in the world. Heidelberg is a little more than a hundred years younger. There will be big anniversuiy doings in that renowned i old haunt of beer-drinking and student duelling. They'll sing "old Heidelberg" with ringing echoes through the medeival town on the River Ueckar and le historic castle, older than /! A the university itself. Sister universities the world over have been irvited to attend, including, Oxford. But Oxford says "no," The Oxonians point out that under the Hitler regime forty- four professors have been expelled from Heidelberg, because they didn't gibe with Uazi ideas. Moreover—the ceremonies are timed to ’oincide with the Uazi blood-purge of 1934, that orgy of Political killings, this seems a little sinister to the secluded ftSIDELBSRGr goxiolars of Britain’s ancient university. But Oxford has still another reason for declining. It’s learned historians declare that according to musty records ir the British Museum, it isn't the five hundred and fiftieth birthday of Heidelberg. It’s only the five hundred and forty-ninth. But, never mind—it's still old Heidelberg. laRRIAG-S. International romance certainly does take us over the international map today. Maybe that's to be expected, when the bride is a diplomat, and speaks 7-languages, including Russian. Helen Doherty is a fabulous>heiress, adopted daughter of Henry L. Doherty, the multi-millionaire oil man. But she has also been assistant to Ruth Bryari Owen--American Minister to Denmark. The itinerary of romance goes this way. In 1933 Helen Doherty went to Denmark, to her diplomatic job. Last August She sailed on a visit to entirely different latitudes, Central America, Hicaragua. Ever since then she has been a guest of the daughter of the Hicaraguan President. Today in the president­ ial residence at Managua, she was married to a bridegroom from Denmark. He is Theodore William Weasel, a Danish sportsman. She met him in Denmark, and he went all the way to Nicaragua to marry her. This romance reminds us of that other golden American heiress, Barbara Hutton--wedded to a Danish nobleman. And j&RBlAGiS obvious remark isr’There is something romantic in the state of ¥ Denmark/' Helen mohorty was in the headlines back in 1930-but that was a controversial affair. She made, her debut in Washington and it was faoulous. The guests brought by private trains and planes, with ten of the debutante's best friends receiving an automooile as a souvenir. Gossipy dame Rumor put the cost at anywhere from naif a million to a million dollars. It was in the deep dark aepressi >n, aiA there was a lot of hostile talk aboutsfiuandering hundreds of thousands. But the cold figures snowed—twenty-five thousand dollars as the cost of the coming- out party— 1,-EAP YEAR There1s fear and trembling in Aurora, Illinois. Fear for tomorrow. The bachelors are pale and shaky, because tomorrow is February twenty-ninth. And that's the day when Aurora goes leap year in a big way. The town government will be taken over from Mayor to Bog-Catcher by young unmarried womea. The roster tomorrow v/ill run like this: Mayor, Margaret Esser, twenty-four; Chief of Police, Helen Thompson, twenty-one; Magistrate, Jean Harrison, twenty-one; City Judge, Katherine James, twenty-two. Fire uhief, Rosalie Smith, twenty. I suppose Fire Chief Rosalie will go after an old flame. And after that — SOLOMG UNTIL MONDAY