Americana

MANNERS & MORALS

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

P: San Francisco had an uproar over Mayor Roger Lapham's proposal to scuttle the famed cable cars which have clanged up & down the city's steep hills since 1873. Riders, jolting on the hard, wooden seats, clinging perilously to the outside steps, voted 9-to-1 to save their wornout conveyances. The Women's Chamber of Commerce called an "emergency" meeting. Mayor Lapham, who had already ordered ten specially powered buses, grunted: "Sentimentalists do not have to pay the bills."

P: In Seattle, police noted a sign of deflation: brothels had cut prices from $10 to the prewar $3.

P: In Walton, Ind., two boys, one ten years old, the other twelve, admitted that they had rolled a 175-lb. bale of fence wire onto the Pennsylvania R.R. track "to see what would happen." What happened: five coaches derailed, four killed.

P: The Long Island Railroad put a serious restriction on the card-playing commuter. It ordered its employees to forbid card players to hold places for a foursome when other passengers had no seats. That just about meant the end of rush-hour bridge and pinochle.

P: A New York judge, resurrecting a 37-year-old law, visited the sins of a son upon his mother. After her divorce in 1943, Genevieve Rivera had dumped her two children on her stepmother. She lived from one drink to another, in one apartment or another, with one man or another. Son Robert ran wild, took to playing hooky, slept in cellars and warehouses. Last month he was arrested for wounding three people with a .22 rifle he had stolen from a pawnbroker. Haled into court last week, 33-year-old Genevieve Rivera was sentenced to one year in prison for contributing to the delinquency of her 14-year-old son.

P: A rebellion of New York's charwomen showed that a once-indispensable utensil was not outmoded. No longer, they declared, would they clean cuspidors.

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