Simplified tax bill submitted
Most of aid goes to wage-earners
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GOP in state taken to task
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (UP) –
The failure of the Pennsylvania Republican nomination to name its ablest men for governor and for the U.S. Senate was cited by Chief Justice George W. Maxey of the State Supreme Court as one reason why the party has never nominated a Pennsylvanian for President.
Judge Maxey, speaking at the annual banquet of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick last night, said the GOP party leadership in Pennsylvania “too often refused to place in the conspicuous positions of governor or U.S. Senator Pennsylvania’s ablest public men.”
On the national political front, he charged the “rights of several states are rapidly being destroyed by the federal government.”
U.S. Senator James J. Davis told the banquet America must not repeat mistakes of the past when the present war is over. Senator Davis added he will “never vote to give any nation the power to dominate the destiny and fate of the United States.”
Judge Clare G. Fenerty succeeded Barry Hayes Hepburn as president of the organization.
Americans take key Jap airfield
Gains in conquest of Manus Island
By Don Caswell, United Press staff writer
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WLB gets cold feet on strike penalty plan
Order punishing individuals reversed
By Fred W. Perkins, Pittsburgh Press staff writer
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Woolf: Sky’s the limit for Yank gunners
Ack-ack blasts Nazi raiding London
By S. J. Woolf, NEA staff writer
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
One of the most fabulous characters in this war theater is Lt. Rudolph Charles von Ripper. He is so fabulous you might be justified in thinking him a phony until you got to know him.
I’ve known him since last summer in Algeria. Most of the other correspondents know him. One whole fighting infantry division knows him. He’s no phony.
Von Ripper is the kind they write books about. He was born in Austria. His father was a general in the Imperial Austrian Army, his mother a baroness. They had money. He could have had a rich, formal, royal type of existence.
Instead, he ran away from home at 15, worked in the sawmills, collected garbage, was a coalminer for a while, and then a clown in a small traveling circus.
At 19, he went into the French Foreign Legion, served two years, and was wounded in action. After that, he went back to Europe and studied art. He is fundamentally an artist.
He traveled continuously. He lived in London and Paris. He lived in Shanghai during 1928. Then he returned to Berlin, joined liberal groups, and did occasional cartoons. Because he helped friends hiding from the Nazis, he was arrested in 1933, accused of high treason, and sent to a concentration camp.
A life of extremes
Dollfuss of Austria got him out after seven months. Then he went to the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain and hibernated for a year, doing political, satirical drawing.
All his life has been a fluctuation between these violent extremes of saloon intellectualism and the hard, steady reality of personal participation in war. You don’t think of an artist as being tough or worldly, yet Von Ripper has been shot in battle more than 20 times.
In 1936, he went to Spain as an aerial gunner in the Loyalist Air Force. He got 16 slugs in his leg during that adventure, and barely came out alive.
Back in Austria in 1938, he saw there was no possibility of organizing even a token resistance against Hitler, so he left for America. He became an American citizen five years later. By that time, he was a private in the United States Army.
His Army career has been a curious one. At first, he was a hospital laboratory technician. Then he was transferred to the newly-formed Army Arts Corps, and left for North Africa last May to paint battle pictures for the War Department.
Doesn’t mind being shot at
I happened to meet him a few days after he arrived on this side. He had hardly got started on his artwork when Congress abolished the whole program. So, he went back to being a regular soldier again, this time an infantryman. He was transferred to the 34th Division.
Last fall, he was put in a frontline regiment, and in October, he was wounded by shell splinters. He doesn’t seem to mind being shot at all. A month later, while leading a night patrol, he got four machine-pistol slugs in him.
All this time overseas, he had been a sergeant, but after his November wounding, he was given a battlefield commission as second lieutenant, and transferred to the division’s engineers. Later, it was possible for him to resume his artwork in his spare time.
Right now, Lt. Von Ripper has a nice little room on the top floor of an apartment building in Naples taken over by the Army. Here he works at a huge drawing board, doing watercolors and pen-and-ink sketches of war. He sleeps on a cot in the same room. Around the walls are tacked dozens of his sketches.
Now and then he returns to the front with his old outfit. Whenever he does, he’s out in front getting shot at before you can say scat. He’s quite a guy.