Americana

P: In the county jail at Lawton, Okla., a man charged with embezzlement passed the time by hacking away his wooden leg with a razor. To questioners, he retorted shortly: "It's mine, isn't it?"

P: Split 20 to 20 between Democrats and Republicans, the Massachusetts Senate was deadlocked for 22 days and 114 ballots over the election of a presiding officer, finally compromised by electing a Democrat for 1949, a Republican for 1950.

P: Confessing that she beat her sick seven-month-old son to death because she "couldn't stand his crying," pudgy Georgette Brucks, 21, was sentenced to from one to ten years in jail. She offered to submit to sterilization if granted probation. Los Angeles' Judge Thomas Ambrose so ordered it. Georgette also agreed to have one surviving child, and one yet unborn, put up for adoption.

P: Oregon's State Senator Dean Walker prepared a bill banning the sale of popcorn in movie theaters.

P: Tom Fioretti, bartender at Manhattan's Stork Club, got a tip from a steady customer--a 1948 Cadillac. The customer was an out-of-town auto dealer, and Tom had always been able to fix him up with a hotel room whenever he came to town.

P: Landlords in Tulsa, Chicago, Denver and Kansas City threatened to evict tenants and take more than 100,000 apartments off the market if rent control is extended. In Kansas City, the Rev. R. Lester Mondale indignantly notified a group of rebel property owners gathered in his church's meeting hall that he had increased their rent for the hall from $10 to $100 a meeting.

P: Florida's Governor Fuller Warren reacted briskly to a 43-car parade of Ku Klux Klansmen through Tallahassee. He said he would demand a law preventing "hooded hoodlums and sheeted jerks . . . from parading in Florida."

P: In Akron, an 80-year-old recluse named Frances Louise Butler died, leaving in her hotel room a hoard of $300,000 in Government bonds wrapped up in old newspapers, and a "small fortune" in diamonds, rubies and pearls in a sugar sack. A man who came to the funeral remembered one thing about her: she had sung Oh Promise Me at the bier of President McKinley in 1901.

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