MANNERS & MORALS: Americana, Feb. 23, 1948

¶ The Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph reported that 200 robins were sighted last week in a Colorado Springs backyard.

¶ In Georgia’s Jones County, Mrs. Pat Hungerford, 37, mother of two and a former county health nurse, was swept into office as county commissioner over eleven male opponents. Her campaign cry: “You kiss the babies. I change their diapers.”

¶ The Chamber of Commerce of Omak, Wash. (pop. 3,000), refused to sponsor the Okanogan County preliminaries for this gear’s Miss America beauty contest when it learned that, under the terms of the franchise, only white girls could compete. One-third of Omak lies in the Colville Indian reservation.

¶ New York’s Congressman Ellsworth B. Buck, after a visit to Bedloe Island, cried out that the Statue of Liberty “is disgraced and demeaned by the inexcusable neglect and squalor about her,” announced that he would seek a congressional appropriation of $750,000 to beautify the grimy grounds around the statue.

¶ The Kitty Hawk, famed first “aeroplane” of the Wright Brothers, might end up in the Smithsonian Institution after all. Twenty years ago, in a huff at the Smithsonian, Inventor Orville Wright gave the Kitty Hawk to London’s Science Museum. Last week Wright’s executors dug up a 1943 letter telling the British that he wanted it back. Any time, said the British.

¶ The Post Office announced that on April 7 it will issue a new 3¢ stamp commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Mississippi Territory. Part of the design will be the territory’s original seal, in which Mississippi is misspelled “Missisippi.”

¶ Health authorities at Farmington, Me. were disturbed to discover that Mrs. Rita Brown, to whom the body of her G.I. son (killed three years ago in the Battle of the Bulge) was returned by the Army last November, was still keeping it in her parlor. Mrs. Brown explained that the casket was hermetically sealed. She could not bear to see it lowered into the ground, she said, until the snow melts and the grass turns green.