MANNERS & MORALS: Americana, Jun. 30, 1947

MANNERS & MORALS

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

¶Chicago celebrated “Rat Extermination Week,” hoped to wipe out 2,000,000 rats. Aldermen toured the city in sound trucks urging everybody to pitch in.

¶In Oregon, the logging town of Shevlin (pop. 600), complete with houses, offices, stores, post office, was moved to a new location for the fifth time in 26 years. Everything was hoisted onto railroad cars, hauled 40 miles to a new timber stand.

¶Hobo King Jeff Davis, arriving in Atlanta as a paying passenger on a train, announced that hoboes had stopped riding the rods. He explained: “There are plenty of jobs now, and all of us are needed. If kids see us riding the freights, they might try to imitate us and this would further weaken the nation’s manpower.”

¶Census estimates for 1946 showed that the number of U.S. families in which both husband and wife are employed had jumped 66% since 1940, now totaled 5,070,000, or nearly one-fifth of all U.S. families.

¶In Washington, park officials announced that they had succeeded in ridding the White House lawn of wild onions.

¶Between 1910 and 1945, said the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, the “female rate of chronic alcoholism” dropped from 384 to 242 per 100,000.

¶Manhattan’s Chinatown held a baby contest, chose a king, a queen, a prince, a princess, a cutest, a best-costumed entrant. But the prize for the “cryingest baby” went begging Not one of the button-eyed contestants would let out so much as a whimper.