SPOTLIGHTER These Names Make News

THIS month two aging American bards, alumni of neighboring Illinois colleges, took up their ruggedly-strung lyres again: Carl Sandburg, 58, Lombard College '02, with The People, Yes; Edgar Lee Masters, 67, Knox College, with Poems of the People.

In 1899 Sandburg came back to hometown Galesburg wearing the blue of a private who had seen service with the 6th Illinois Volunteers in Porto Rico. Hero Sandburg resumed his poverty-ridden studies at Lombard College. Edgar Lee Masters came to Knox College from Kansas, stayed several years, and prepared for life in a law office.

After aimless years as a humble laborer and newspaper man, Sandburg startled American letters with his Chicago Poems in 1915. Edgar Lee Masters discovered the emptiness of small town middle western life in Spoon River Anthology in 1922 after he had ceased to practice law. To Lombard's Carl Sandburg, Knox College has given an honorary Litt. D. To its own son Edgar Lee Masters, Knox has awarded no similar honor.

IN 1919 Stephen Cartright returned from Siberia a hero and re-entered Carnegie Tech. He was resuming the study of metallurgical engineering which he had abandoned to join the army. He carried a lump on his head where a pistol butt wielded by a Bolshevik had landed. Vacationing from College three years later, Veteran Cartright collapsed. On recovering consciousness he learned that he was incurably blind and deaf.

Cartright did not return to Carnegie Tech. By the process of painfully rehabilitating himself to a silent world he could never again see, he traveled through Europe and the Orient. Today he appears before the microphones of radio stations KFAB and KOIL, Omaha, Neb., twice daily to interpret international affairs, though he cannot see to read or hear his voice. He keeps abreast of the news by reading with one finger the lips of his secretary. On the air he talks from Braille notes, speaks clearly and without hesitation, and stops when his fifteen minutes are up by feeling the hands of a glassless watch.