Bathing Suit

With another bathing-suit season at hand, local lawmakers are aiming their ordinances at males on the score of topless suits* rather than at underclad females. A five-year-old male bathing lawsuit came to trial last week in Chicago but an alleged lower exposure, not an upper, had started it. And though the fight was between two-lawyers, the only persons hurt were three policemen.

One Sunday in August 1932, Lawyer Timothy D. Hurley was sunning himself in his swimsuit on a public beach on the Michigan lakefront in Evanston. Lawyer Lynn A. Williams, one of several property holders whose beach joined the public sands, was passing out little printed cards inviting people to move off the private onto the public part of the beach. He had just handed cards to two pretty young women when he noticed Lawyer Hurley. "I was shocked. I told him he couldn't lie there like that. But he kept lying with his head on the sand looking at the sky. So I called the police." Three policemen marched protesting Lawyer Hurley to the station, booked him on charges of indecent exposure. He was acquitted.

Last week Lawyer Hurley, suing Lawyer Williams and the three policemen for $25,000 damages for his arrest, put on his 1932 bathing suit, sploshed water on it, sprawled on the floor in Judge William J. Lindsay's Superior Courtroom in Chicago. The jury giggled and gaped, deliberated 95 minutes, decided in favor of Lawyer Williams but assessed $100 damages against the three policemen who had defaulted by not appearing.

*Police will arrest for topless suits in Atlantic City, St. Louis, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Syracuse, N. Y., Toledo, Galveston, El Paso, Springfield, Mass., Birmingham, Evansville, Ind., Baltimore.

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