Sore Feet & Too Many Noses

Neither wind nor rain nor flagpole-sitters stopped most of the nation's 140,000 census enumerators last week, but the biggest nosecount in U.S. history was not without its moments of travail.

Nearly 500 enumerators in the metropolitan New York area threw away their pencils and quit after the first few days. "They couldn't take it," explained their boss. One enumerator reported that she had become too depressed by the squalor she saw on Manhattan's lower East Side; another explained that her feet were killing her. The majority found the pay too small ( 7-c- a name), the work too dull or the insults too biting. Another Manhattan census taker was fired for filching a $202 check from a mailbox--but the Government had other plans for him.

An Atlanta enumerator rode 60 feet into the air on a block & tackle to get the dope from Flagpole-Sitter Odell Smith (address: Cloud No. 65), and one in Detroit obligingly returned three times to set down the facts about a housewife who refused to talk to him while her husband was at home. "I don't tell him anything," she explained. Another housewife urged the census taker to help her discover how much her husband earned. The man who set out to get the count in View Ridge, Wash, (wartime pop. 4,000) suffered a deep shock. Not a soul lived in View Ridge any more.

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