Miscellany, May 27, 1935

Healthy

In Oklahoma City, the girl chosen as Webster Junior High School’s Healthiest Girl was discovered in bed with scarlet fever, her runner-up in bed with mumps.

Typical

In Chicago, Norma Thursen, chosen as Wisconsin’s Typical Outdoor Girl at the National Boat and Sports Show, turned out to be a manicurist in a Chicago Loop barber shop.

Diapers

In Chicago, the management of a Better Homes Exhibit ran a competition for pinning diapers on babies. The judges asked contestants to use four pins, handicapped two pin mothers, preferred the square to the triangle diaper. Winning time: 29 seconds by Mrs. Joseph Pieprznik (four pins).

Caesarean

In Chicago, Dentist Leonard S. Klein noticed that a female in his fish bowl of guppies was transparently pregnant and overdue. He lifted her out, pricked her with a lancet. Out drained 20 nearly invisible guppies. The 1½-in. mother survived what ichthyologists called the first Caesarean section of a guppy.

Ghost

In Middlesboro, Ky., passing a graveyard late at night, Slim Jaggers whirled at a rustling noise, saw a big white shape, whipped out a pistol and fired pointblank. The bullet hit a big white tombstone, knocked off a marble chip which flew into Jaggers’ eye, blinded him.

Return

Leaving California’s Death Valley, Richard H. Benvington, 58, approached the soft spot in the road where his car had overturned on the way in. At the same spot it rolled over again, killed Driver Benvington.

Fingers

In Brooklyn, two Negro bandits, balked by the refusal of Harry Ohlandt, manager of an Atlantic & Pacific store, to open the safe, chopped off two of his fingers with a cheese knife.

Vehicle

In Waltham, Mass., police arrested David T. Dickinson, a paralytic who travels in a three-wheeled chair run by a storage battery, for “driving an unlicensed vehicle.”

Pride

In Nashville, Tenn., Lecturer Ralph Pearson inadvertently included in a lantern slide lecture of the world’s artistic monstrosities a slide of Nashville’s own replica of the Parthenon. The audience, socialite young women of the Ward-Belmont School, stanchly applauded.