Americana

MANNERS & MORALS

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

P: In Manhattan, Local 802 of Jimmy Petrillo's musicians' union made public an unsettling manifestation of world revolution : in Manhattan's May Day parade--in which militant leftists carried signs reading "Workers Organize!"--five nonunion bands had furnished music.

P: In Brooklyn, three teen-age boys found a key which would unlock subway gum machines, began riding from station to station, emptying pennies into a bucket. They got 70 lbs. of coins ($112) before the cops overtook them.

P: In Washington, the Census Bureau reported that the nation's median income (half the country's 40,075,000 family units got more, half less) was $2,378. Additional data: one-third of U.S. families earned between $2,500 and $5,000; one in ten: from $5,000 to $10,000; 13 in 1,000: over $10,000.

P: In Washington, the Public Roads Administration announced that the number of motor vehicles in the U.S. increased 10.8% in 1946--from 30,638,429 to 33,945,817; PRA predicted that the 1941 record of 34,427,145 would be broken in 1947.

P: In Houston the Texas Prison Board granted a hospitalized convict's request for less-trying prison duty. He was being used as a human decoy by guards who were training bloodhounds. He complained that the dogs kept biting him when he didn't beat them to the nearest tree.

P: In New York, employees of the Arthur Murray Dance Studio, on a picket line, startled cops by starting a sidewalk conga line.

P: In Washington, 31 months after Kathleen Winsor's 971-page Forever Amber was published, postal inspectors presumably finished reading it, banned it from the mails as obscene.

P: The Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Co. and Robert R. Young, its board chairman and idea man, were faced with a problem in customs. Since the railroad has abolished tipping on its trains, neither dining-car waiters nor customers had been able to cure themselves of the habit.

P: In Pawtucket, R.I., Police Chief Leonard Mills warned one Samuel Hyder to stop his incessant, loud, high-pitched and raucous laughter, particularly at times when there was nothing to laugh about. Hyder went right on guffawing. He got pinched, was found guilty of violating an ordinance against "reveling" and was fined.

P: In New York, Mrs. Frederick G. Murray of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was "installed" as the American Mother of 1947. Mrs. Murray is white-haired, bespectacled, 72, has five grown-up children, and wears a hearing aid.

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