Americana

P: Proud citizens of The Bronx offered gifts of food, clothing, scales, cribs and even a house after 27-year-old Mrs. Ethel Collins, wife of a $72-a-week statistician, gave birth to quadruplets (two boys, two girls) at New York's Lebanon Hospital.

P: An investigator for the House Appropriations Committee traced the bureaucratic travels of an order of dehydrated onions for the Army. It was date-stamped, time-stamped, examined, routed, copied, receipted, underlined, described, key-punched, card-punched, coded, abstracted, indexed; inspected, noted and vouchered through 288 separate steps--and it took a month to get the onions.

P: Ogden, Utah celebrated the 80th anniversary of the day California's Governor Leland Stanford helped drive a golden spike into newly laid tracks at nearby Promontory Point, thus completing the nation's first transcontinental railroad.

P: Los Angeles cops had to sweat to unravel traffic jams when two neighboring drugstores got involved in a furious price war. The store managers kept each other under surveillance with "price spies," set up sidewalk blackboards to notify street crowds of new price cuts, drew mobs of customers by selling pie a la mode for a penny, women's panties for 25-c-, steak dinners for 65-c-.

P: Phi Theta Upsilon Fraternity pledges at Northern Illinois College of Optometry got even with Senior John Santarelli after he put them through an initiation "Hell Week." After dressing him in misfit shoes and clothes, they gave him a nickel spending money, put him on a plane at Chicago, and sent him off to Kansas City.

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