Americana

Notes on U.S. customs, habits, manners & morals:

P: In Cleveland, five of the nation's 67 surviving G.A.R. veterans turned up at their 81st annual encampment, elected one of their younger members, 102-year-old Robert W. Rownd of Ripley, N.Y., as commander in chief, prepared to look around for next year's camp site. EURJ In Alaska, after a look at Fairbanks' ili-famed row of brothels known as "the line," Dr. W. T. Harrison, a district director of the U.S. Public Health Service, said: "I did not think there was any place under the American flag where prostitution is as flagrant."

P: The Boston Braves, in an all-out public-relations effort, offered night baseball fans a dinner at Boston's staid Somerset Hotel, a seat at the game and cab rides to and from the ball park--all for $4.50. The corporation counsel for the District of Columbia said that it is legal for a minor to drink in capital bars so long as he does not order the drink, pay for it, or have it set in front of him by a tavern owner or waiter. He added: "For a child to drink with his parents is the greatest safeguard against drunkenness that I know of."

Cf In Tennessee, some 150 members of the Dolly Pond Church gleefully sang, chanted, passed rattlers and copperheads around in defiance of a six-month-old state law against handling snakes at public gatherings. When deputy sheriffs hauled nine of the snake-handlers off to jail, some of the others followed, tried, like Joshua, to shake the jail walls down (with hymns and prayer), declared they would not stop their rituals because "We take our law from God."

P: The House Committee on Foreign Aid, which had drawn $125,000 and bought space on the Cunard Line's Queen Mary for its forthcoming trip abroad, lived through a bad few hours when the C.I.O. Maritime Committee accused committee members of breaking an eleven-year-old law. The law: Government officials or employees on Government business must travel on U.S. ships, or be denied travel expenses by the Comptroller General. After hasty research, the committee found that the Comptroller has no authority over money Congress appropriates for itself. The committee kept its Queen Mary reservations.

P: On U.S. Highway 40, west of Denver, the Colorado State Highway Department put up a regulation bull's-eye target next to a curve sign, planned to put up more if the first one diverted the "chowderheads with guns" who shoot up 3,000 road signs annually.

P: Before dinner at Queens Seaplane Base on Long Island, Editor Elmer H. Holmes of the magazine Contact was elected president of the newly formed Aviation Suckers Society, an association of men who have lost money in aviation ventures. Holmes, who claimed to have dropped $600,000 in trying to operate a private airport, narrowly defeated Planemaker Howard Hughes (who lost millions) for the presidency. Reason: Hughes "still has a tremendous amount of money."

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