Americana

MANNERS & MORALS

P:When he ran short of cheap "sugarhead" moonshine to fill a big order consigned to Atlanta's Negro slums, 360-lb. Bootlegger John R. ("Fat") Hardy whipped up a substitute. Police said that he bought a 54-gallon drum of poisonous methyl alcohol, often used for hot-rod fuel, and mixed it with well water, peach flavoring, regular moonshine and a "beading oil" calculated to make it foam when shaken. Seventyseven gallons were delivered. Within hours Atlanta's Grady Negro Clinic began to fill with men & women who panted, frothed at the mouth and writhed in horrible convulsions. Three hundred and fifty people (among them a ten-year-old boy) were hospitalized. Dozens were partially blinded. Two lost all sight. Thirty-seven died.

P:| While hundreds of Montana hunters were slogging around the hills getting lost, bruised, hungry-and occasionally punctured by bullets-one Harry Holcomb of Trail Creek took it easy at home. He was rewarded. A 250-lb. bear ambled into his parlor at 4 a.m.; Holcomb leaped out of bed, grabbed his rifle, firedand dropped the bear right where he wanted a rug.

P: Joseph F.Gastright of Newport, Ky. was judged to be sound of mind after a lunacy hearing before a circuit court jury--a decision which not only gave him his freedom, but pleased 36,000 people who voted for him as Kentucky's secretary of state while he was in a mental hospital. P: FBI agents discovered that an excuse which 14-year-old Patsy Whiting of Green Bay, Wis. brought to school to explain a day's absence was incorrect. Patsy hadn't had a cold at all; she had ridden to Laona (pop. 1,113), Wis. with her 41-year-old mother and her half brother, 24-year-old Charles French Jr., and, after all had pulled on masks, she had helped them rob the Laona State Bank of $11,000.

P: Lloyd Reisner, whom the American Trucking Associations chose as "truck driver of the year" in 1949 on the basis of his skill and safety record, was convicted in Indianapolis of drunken driving.

P: New York police arrested 55-year-old Mrs. Beatrice Kam for possession of narcotics, and then jailed her son, Herbert, 33, despite her protests. "Herbert," said his mother, "is a good son. He never brought me anything but the pure stuff."

P: After getting a $12,000 federal grant to study "the unconscious factors in courtship and mate selection," Dr. Robert F. Winch, a 40-year-old Northwestern University sociologist, explained what he meant. He had a hunch that love sometimes tricked people into marrying the wrong types and said that he proposed to study 25 wedded couples to ascertain their "hidden needs"--unconscious demands that must be satisfied if marriage is to succeed. The doctor, a married man himself, hoped to report in 18 months.

P: While appealing a five-year conviction for perjury before the Kefauver committee, and awaiting trial on charges of engineering a $500,000-a-year Fire Department shakedown racket, New York's ex-Water Commissioner James J. Moran is studying at St. John's University in Brooklyn. His two courses: Principles of Ethics and Introduction to Christian Theology.

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