MANNERS & MORALS: Americana, Aug. 18, 1947

Notes on U.S. customs, habits, manners & morals:

¶ In Jackson, Tenn., old (73) Locomotive-Fireman Sim T. Webb recalled what Casey Jones really said before he took his “trip into the promised land” in the early morning of April 30, 1900. Casey, highballing south from Durant, Miss, at the throttle of the Illinois Central Railroad’s locomotive No. 638, yelled across the cab at Webb: “Oh, Sim! The old girl’s got her high-heeled slippers on tonight!” The occasion for this reminiscence: the unveiling of a monument on Casey’s grave, for 47 years marked only by a wooden cross.

¶ In Richmond, Va., litigation brought to light a sentimental bequest which sounded as though it had been copied straight from a Civil War ballad. Valentine Browne Lawless, a soldier killed in Europe in 1944, had left $3,000 to provide “one perfect rose of any color to be sent each Saturday morning to the girl I love very dearly and whom I will love for the rest of my life.”

¶ New York Times Book Critic Charles Poore described station wagons: “. . . half-timbered, like Elizabethan houses (what you might call the Stratford-upon-Detroit-River school of automobile design).”

¶ In Albuquerque, Dr. T. M. Pearce of the University of New Mexico predicted that the atomic age would make English a language of acronyms—words formed from the initial letters of other words. Samples: snafu (and variations), UNESCO, AWOL.

<¶ In San Francisco, 60-year-old Francis Van Wie asked the Superior Court to remove him from a fruit ranch to which he was paroled after being convicted of bigamy two years ago. Van Wie, an ex-streetcar conductor who married 13 wives before the law caught up with him, wept as he explained his request: college boys, working on the ranch during the summer, kept calling him the “Ding Dong Daddy of the D-Car Line.”

¶ Trapped in Hollywood by New York Post Columnist Earl Wilson, Producer Harry Kurnitz detailed “standard equipment” needed by a screenwriter: “A Capehart, a Utrillo, a French poodle, a sun lamp, an exwife, a lawyer (for the ex-wife), an antique Chippendale gag file, some cashmere underdrawers, an empty box at the Hollywood Bowl (it doesn’t count if anybody ever sits in it), one friend (preferably getting the same salary he gets).” “A typewriter?” suggested Wilson. Kurnitz shuddered, explained that a writer always dictates.