Thirsty & Thrifty

P: In El Campo, Tex, nine Negroes were jailed, and nearly lynched, for ending a wild Bonus celebration by fatally stabbing and slashing a white deputy sheriff.

P: In Chicago 220 Veterans at Hines Memorial Hospital got out of bed, went home to collect their bonds.

P: When in Manhattan a postman handed Bonus bonds through the securities windows of sedate J. P. Morgan & Co. to a group of joyous employes, a frosty executive barked: "We can't have all this uproar here," dispatched the postman to the tradesman's entrance.

P: In a Manhattan saloon, thirsty Peter Gallagher borrowed $10 from the bartender, left $450 of Bonus bonds as collateral, woke up in a hallway next morning, his mind a total blank.

P: Steve Harvey of Dallas who enlisted in the Canadian forces at 13, transferred to a U. S. division later on, collected $782 as the youngest soldier to fight for the Allies.

Despite the many newspaper tales of sots and suicides arising last week from the Bonus payment of $1,900,000,000 in black & green $50 bonds, the average Veteran played a watchful, waiting game. American Legion questionnaires had estimated that the 3,500,000 recipients would spend 30% of the money toward payment of debts and old bills, 7% for housing repairs, 6% for automobiles, 7% for clothing, the rest in a free & easy manner. Of the same opinion, merchants of every variety had flooded the mails with circulars, kept their stores wide open at night. Get-rich-quick promoters lay anxiously in wait for what Frank Brock of the New York Better Business Bureau described as "the biggest potential sucker list of all times."

But only ones to feel immediately the sudden huge flood of purchasing power were low-priced suit-&-cloaksters, department stores. Apparently about half the Veterans deposited all their bonds intact, many intending to collect 3% interest until 1945. Others, accompanied by watchful wives, cashed their bonds, opened savings accounts.

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