Americana

P: A private investigator tracked Mrs. William Pratt, 37, mother of three, to a dingy $14-a-month shack in Binghamton, N.Y., notified her and her unemployed husband that oil had been discovered on an Illinois farm which her grandfather" had once owned. She could expect an income that might run to $18,000 a year. Grandfather had sold the farm but kept the mineral rights, and willed them to his heirs.

P: A genial Santa Claus paraded in front of the Denver Dry Goods Co., carrying a placard: "Please Don't Shop Here. Help Santa Bring a Christmas Pay Raise to Denver Dry Employees." He was a picket for the A.F.L. Retail Clerks Union. Muttered the Rocky Mountain News: "Isn't anything sacred any more?"

P: In admiration for Mrs. Marie Baker, who for 18 years had cooked, washed and ironed clothes, and raised a family of four while confined to a wheel chair by infantile paralysis, her Harrisonville, Mo. neighbors chipped in, bought her a new electrically operated wheel chair at a cost of $460.

P: Headed for a New York honeymoon, Mr. & Mrs. David Fromal of Newport News, Va. parked their car in the wrong place in Baltimore, were held up for four days and had their car impounded because Fromal had forgotten the registration card. To make amends, Baltimore's Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro gave them the key to the city, paid their fine, saw that they got their car back. The Baltimore News-Post wined & dined them, gave them theater tickets. The Fromals decided to finish their honeymoon in Baltimore.

P: In New York, where the only ground for divorce is adultery, Manhattan's District Attorney Frank Hogan officially discovered what every judge, lawyer and common citizen had known for years--the existence of "divorce rings" which systematically fake evidence of adultery. His chief witness was a 20-year-old mother of three named Sara Ellis, whose fee for being "discovered" in a hotel room with a divorce-seeking husband was $10.

P: Dr. Henry Pratt Fairchild, professor emeritus of sociology at New York University and a proponent of birth control, declared that "for the next few decades," a stationary world population "would do more for the cause of lasting peace than any other specific measure." Added Dr. Fairchild: "War cannot be counted on to keep population within bounds."

P: Mayor George Baker of Decorah, Iowa, who says young men aren't what they used to be, offered $50 to anyone who could match his grandfather's feat of carrying a 60-lb. sack of wheat nine miles from Conover to Decorah in one hour and 55 minutes. Ten tried. Six made it, through a snowstorm. Two of them bettered grandfather's time-- by 15 and 14 minutes, respectively.

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