MANNERS & MORALS: Americana, Jun. 2, 1947

MANNERS & MORALS

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

¶ In Brooklyn, the A.F.L. coffeemaker’s union wangled a contract which gives every worker in one plant a summer day off (with pay) to watch the Dodgers play.

¶ After years of trying to discourage motorists who chase their trucks. Tipton (Iowa) firemen got even. A fire engine with siren screaming led 100 hot-eyed drivers into the Cedar County fair grounds, kept them circling the track until it was packed hard enough for some midget automobile races the department had sponsored.

¶ Citizens of muddy, dingy Italy, Texas (pop. 1,258) prepared to set an example for the nation by shining up their town. They prepared so vehemently that Governor Beauford Jester proclaimed a special “Italy Day.” Last week 1,000 people turned to for the blitz against grime, in one day cleaned up vacant lots, hosed down streets, planted flowers, painted buildings in the drab business section a gleaming white.

¶ In Baltimore, a motorized column of University of Maryland students staged a night attack on Johns Hopkins University. Provocation: the kidnapping of a 400-lb. bronze terrapin from the University of Maryland campus. The invaders had to battle through barbed-wire entanglements and streams from fire hoses, were foiled when they got into the main dormitory—the defenders had covered the floors with a slippery mixture of soap chips and water.

¶ Five-year-old Marion Delgado, thinking over a problem he had set himself—how to break a 25-lb. concrete water-meter cover—showed a disastrous bent for physics. He wrestled the slab to the Western Pacific Railroad tracks near San Francisco, confident that the train would do it easily. The Feather River Express rattled down the main line and hit the concrete block, the locomotive and tender jumped the rails, the baggage car rolled over with a crash, and five people were hurt.

¶ There is no escape in Connecticut. Last week state police began clocking motorists with a radar device which automatically (and infallibly) recorded the speed of every passing automobile, could be concealed behind a bush.

¶ In Jackson, Miss., a 30-year-old waitress named Diana Guance spent days considering a fascinating question—what would happen if she hit her boss spang in the face with a chocolate meringue pie? At last she let fly, got fired, was charged with assault. Said she: “It was soul-satisfying.”

¶ In Manhattan, a group of comic-strip addicts formed the American Society for the Advancement of the Piebald Eyeball, solemnly pledged themselves always to pencil dots in the center of Little Orphan Annie’s eyes before turning to the sports page.