Gossip Friday: Causing an Uproar

Since tomorrow is Veterans Day, here is an item that appeared in October 1943:

Clark Gable Throws Pentagon Into Uproar As He Talks War

It was colossal!

The army may have thought it could keep a press conference with Clark Gable confined to a decorous discussion of the man-sized job he’s doing, but it knows better today.

He’s a captain in the air forces, an aerial gunner and a cameraman in a Flying Fortress, shot at, and missed.

Back from a European assignment in the Air Force, Gable threw the Pentagon building into a furor as he walked to his first press conference.

The former movie actor told of his last six months in England, photographing everything a bomber squadron does–at rest, working its base, fighting its way to a target and back. he has 50,000 feet of color film, and in another 10 days will take it to Hollywood to boil it down into a training film.

He has flown on six bombing missions over Europe, and “of course I was scared!” He never was in a particularly tight spot, but he had taken pictures of bombers being shot in his formation.

There was as much interest in Gable the actor as in Gable the soldier. In addition to the women stenographers who work in the War Department, there was a goodly crowd of other women who never had set foot in the Pentagon before–with their new hats! And smart dresses! The furs, and orchids!

The army kept Gable under wraps for a long time. They wouldn’t even announce his return to this country until they called his press conference. And there, better than they realized, they took him out from under cover. And how!