Americana

Notes on U.S. customs, manners & morals as reported in the U.S. press: P:Said Seattle's Fire Chief William Fitzgerald: no man can face a crisis with his pants off, but a woman forgets about modesty if the fire is hot enough. Nevertheless he warned firemen not to be crude when rescuing ladies from bathtubs. "Don't just break down the door. Knock first and say, 'Ma'am, this is the fire department.' Then break down the door."

P: The appellate term of New York's Supreme Court denied a Manhattan apartment operator the right to evict one Leon Mahler simply because Miss Bernice Zvelechovski had been living with him without benefit of clergy for six years.

P:Linguaphone Institute ventured to pick the ten U.S. cities whose citizens use the "most perfect American speech,"* made the mistake of omitting Baltimore, the home of Lexicographer H. L. Mencken. Cried he: "Anyone who advances such buncombe should be put to death immediately."

P:In Manhattan, women were offered a new piece of boudoir equipment--a transparent, zippered hood which covered the entire head, looked like something designed to be worn in the rarefied atmosphere of the planet Venus. It was supposed to protect them from the horrors of "messy makeup" when they slipped their dresses on.

P:At Iowa State College a professor of chemical engineering predicted the self-dusting chair--a plastic product with a slight negative charge of electricity which would repel dust particles.

P:In Denver, Mrs. Lavada Ann Sneed, a 42-year-old grandmother, who had packed 3,600 parachutes for the Army during the war, hired a pilot to take her to 4,000 feet and bailed out, to see what it was like. It was all right.

-Washington, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Providence, Los Angeles, Montclair (N.J.), Mason City (Iowa) and Ashtabula (Ohio).

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