Americana

P: Mayor William O'Dwyer of New York, faced with the prospect of boosting subway fares, told an audience: "[It] isn't my fault that the nickel got grey-headed and bald. It has lost its teeth and hair ... it can't buy anything any more."

P: Reuben P. Snodgrass, pilot of the Flying Automobile (TIME, Nov. 4), ran out of gas over Chula Vista, Calif, and landed in a mud flat. Snodgrass was unhurt, but the newfangled contraption was wrecked.

P: In San Francisco, two gunmen, loaded with $5,230 they had just lifted from a department-store watchman, obligingly held open a door on their way out for four store employees, who had been working late. "Aren't you new here?" asked one of the employees. "Yes," said one,of the robbers. "What's your name?" "Morgenthau." "Oh, that's a good name. You must have lots of money." "I have, replied the thug.

P: Sixty-five-year-old Charles Davis, who had paced nervously below his children at every performance of their high-wire balancing act, was ready when it happened in a Miami circus tent. As his son and daughter lost their balance and toppled, Davis hurled himself forward and cushioned their fall with his body. His children survived with back injuries; he suffered only bruises.

P: "Turn your head and count ten," said Washington Socialite Mrs. Augusta Trimble Fletcher, as she greeted a guest in her library. The guest obeyed, then whirled at the sound of a shot. His hostess had killed herself.

P: In Manhattan, the Home for Incurables changed its name to St. Barnabas Hospital for Chronic Diseases.

P: The Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, pastor of Manhattan's Marble Collegiate Reformed Church, had a solution for traffic tie-ups: "Stop for a moment of prayer when the light changes at an intersection instead of nervously honking [your] horn."

P: In Seattle, Dean Rothrock took his five-year-old daughter for a walk with her aunt. The child was between them, holding both their hands, but it was a dark, rainy night, and neither saw the open manhole. The child fell through, tearing a ring from her father's finger. Eight miles away, where the sewer empties into Puget Sound, her body was found in the sand.

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