MANNERS & MORALS: Americana, Feb. 21, 1949

MANNERS MORALS

¶ The Bureau of the Census reported that the U.S spent $148 million, or approximately $1 a head, for chewing gum in 1948.

¶ The Bethlehem Pacific Coast Steel Corp. was importing scrap metal from a country that once bought a lot of it from the U.S.: Japan.

¶ Gaunt, good-looking William Walter Remington got back his $10,330-a-year job with the Commerce Department. The nation’s top loyalty board had rejected ex-Red Spy Elizabeth Bentley’s testimony that he was a dues-paying comrade, decided he was not disloyal.

¶ The Rev. Willis P. Miller, 28, pastor of the Disciples of Christ First Christian Church at Lynn, Mass., shared his pulpit with a new “assistant”—a ventriloquist’s dummy named Victor who interrupts his sermons and Bible stories with questions, and, occasionally, quips.

¶ The Bartlett Tree Research Laboratories of Stamford, Conn, cautioned teenagers against carving initials on trees, explaining that fungus and insects used them as invasion points.

¶ Washington’s Smithsonian Institution planned to make room for the Swoose, famed World War II b17, after the city of Los Angeles bought it for $300 at a war surplus sale.

¶ The Boy Scouts of America (membership: 2,221,157) celebrated their 39th anniversary with a report to the nation: during 1948 the Scouts collected 500,000 pounds of food for the Friendship Train, gathered 781,396,000 pounds of paper and planted 1,137,856 trees.

¶ Western Union engineers finally perfected a rubber insulator for telegraph poles, which is impervious to damage from hunters’ bullets or small boys’ rocks.