Americana

MANNERS & MORALS

P: Campaigning for Congress in Baltimore, Democratic candidate Paul Burke set up a television set in a roped-off street, tuned in a basketball game, waited for the crowd to gather, delivered his political speech between the halves.

P: Four straight days of heavy rains brimmed over the Ohio River, drove 31,000 people from their homes, cost, seven lives. The flood was one of the highest in Ohio River history, but it was no disaster. Thanks to control dams, Cincinnati's flood was confined mostly to its downtown riverfront lowlands. Other river towns--Marietta and Pomeroy, Ohio, Wheeling and Parkersburg, W.Va.--weren't so lucky.

P: Detroit Police Commissioner Harry S. Toy ordered copies of all comic books on sale brought to his desk because he had discovered, he said, that some comics were "loaded with Communist teachings, sex, and racial discrimination."

P: The Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. reported that U.S. divorces in 1947 were down 25% from 1946's alltime peak.

P: In Atlanta, the American Legion Post No. 1 expelled Homer B. Chase, former paratrooper, state organizer for the Communist Party. Reason: conduct unbecoming a Legionnaire.

P: Manhattan police rounded up four members of a gang which staged phony automobile accidents to swindle insurance companies. The gang had a "flop man" who would throw himself under the wheels of a car, simulate serious injury, give a false name at the hospital. Later another member of the gang, picked because he had permanent scars or fractures, would go to the insurance company, say he was the victim, show his scars and collect.

P: When a tall, heavily built man wearing a sombrero and packing a .45 pistol strode into the White Plains (N.Y.) County Trust Co., timid customers hastily summoned police, sheepishly apologized when he was identified as Frank M. Ward, an assistant manager of the local airport, calling for the weekly payroll. Ward is from Texas.

P: David Hotelling, 10, of Napa, Calif., realized a child's dream. He had saved enough pennies (selling Christmas cards and doing chores) to make a bid of $25 at an auction of outmoded fire equipment, drove off in a red 1926 fire engine all his own.

P: Near Atlanta, a group of Ku Klux Klansmen tied a young construction worker named Joseph Berry to a tree, flogged him with a leather strap until blood vessels burst.

P: Albert Hibbs and Roy Walford, University of Chicago graduates who last year won $7,500 at Reno with a roulette system of their own devising (TIME, Dec. 1), turned up at the Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas. They played No. 9 for 53 hours, ran their $300 stake up to $1,200, began to lose, switched to 1 and 0. After three days they were still $700 ahead.

P: At Cudahy's Kansas City plant, women packinghouse workers walked the picket line wearing grease-smeared raincoats--thereby hoping to keep the white-collar office workers, who had walked through their lines before, from doing it again.

P: There was a new tourist attraction at San Francisco's famed Seal Rocks. One of the sea lions had a white toilet seat (horseshoe type) firmly stuck around his neck, apparently could not get it off.

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