A Season for Hope

Snow still lay in the Rockies, New England, and a tier of states across the northern border. But sap was rising early to branch and bud; despite flurries of wintry weather, there had already been days of sun in the coldest states, when gutters tinkled musically to streams from melting drifts. Many Vermont farmers had buckets out in their maple-sugar groves. Though Lake Erie is normally frozen solid far into March, the Nicholson Transit Co. freighter James Watt made a trial run from Detroit to Toledo last week, and found only one insignificant patch of drifting ice.

Bright, green, genuine spring warmed the South. Atlanta was abloom with narcissus, forsythia and bridal wreath. Pitchers sweated in baseball training camps from Florida to California. And Mobile held its annual Azalea Trail Parade.

The plants and the birds (many a migrant didn't even bother to go south this year) were not alone in their response to earth's premature warmth. College and high-school basketball tournaments were just beginning--in Indiana, no fewer than 755 high-school teams were playing off for the state championship--but youth was acting as though winter was already gone. In Omaha, for instance, high-school girls were strapping dog collars around their ankles--the right ankle if they were "slaves to love," the left if they were merely hopeful.

Many of their elders showed similar reactions. In Beverly Hills, Mathews, an expensive women's shop, moved into a new store with silk-lined walls, and sent out 1,000 charge plates made of 14-carat gold. In Galveston, one Joe Grasso flew into a swivet over the fact that two Texas pelicans died recently in the London zoo. "They were double-tough Texas pelicans--the toughest birds in the world," he cried, and were the victims of a "Communist plot to discredit Texas in particular and America in general."

The odd season--too warm to be winter, too early to be spring--was immensely cheering even to insulated city folk. If nature thought well enough of prospects for 1953 to distribute an early bonus, there didn't seem to be much reason not to hang up the automobile chains, get out the seed catalogue, and anticipate that illusion of well-being which modern man derives from an early coat of sunburn.

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