MANNERS & MORALS: Americana, Dec. 23, 1946

MANNERS & MORALS

Notes on U.S. customs, habits, manners & morals, as reported in the U.S. press last week:

¶ In Des Moines, Iowa, the Welcome Wagon Service—which gives newcomers to the city sample products from local merchants and manufacturers—tried but hastily abandoned a subsidiary service: the delivery of six bottles of beer to newcomers, brides and mothers of newborn babies.

¶ In traffic-clogged Boston, the fire department voiced a shrill complaint: its modern motorized equipment couldn’t get to fires as fast as horse-drawn pump carts did a half-century ago.

¶ In the South, revenooers were still catching moonshiners. The haul for October: 477 stills, 491 woodshed distillers. North Carolina yielded the best hunting: 86 stills, 86 moonshiners.

¶ In Cleveland, a landlord named Arthur Clark hit on a novel way of evicting tenants who refused to pay more than OPA rents. He hired a gang of thugs, equipped them with pistols, blackjacks, clubs and a baseball bat, sicked them on his tenants. One tenant died of a cracked skull. Last week Clark and one thug were convicted of second-degree murder, sentenced to life imprisonment.

¶ In Manhattan, Altman’s department store advertised a new wrinkle for the pampered housewife: a collection of sequin-trimmed aprons ($35 each), with matching sequinned potholders ($5).

¶ In Michigan, the Supreme Court decreed that women may not be employed as bartenders. In Cincinnati, the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that husbands cannot deduct from their income tax any sums paid to their wives for housework.

¶ The Commerce Department, in a helpful little guidebook for veterans in search of a job, pointed out that it is risky to start a restaurant, because 80% fail or are sold out within five years. But it hastily added that running a restaurant can be good business and that the habit of eating will continue to grow.

¶ Ensign David Flohr of Banana River, Fla., passed along a current idiom. In a letter to LIFE, praising a picture of Rita Hayworth in a sheer nightgown, he cried: “She’s really Mello-Rooney, Viddle-de-vop!”

¶ New York City’s Board of Transportation reported that during 1946, while United Nations delegates met in the city, subway turnstiles had absorbed 101,200 foreign coins.