Smart Citizens

A joyous banquet was given, last week, by certain smart, shrewd citizens of Paris. All are telephone subscribers. Three years ago they formed an association to threaten and intimidate the Ministry of Commerce (posts & telegraphs) into providing better, faster telephone connections.

At first ungallant Telephone Bureaucrats merely shrugged and spoke of women, clumsy women, lazy women. The Ministry of Commerce put the matter very delicately in a statement that since funds were not available to hire more efficient telephone-persons, continued delays would have to be expected.

Soon afterward, however, the wrathful telephone-women of Paris united to defend their nimbleness and honor, and hurled the counter charge that they could not make quick connections with antiquated equipment.

When the grumbling and spatting climaxed, who should be appointed Minister of Commerce but that suave barrister M. Maurice Bokanowski. He knows the nimbleness of U. S. telephone girls from personal experience. He gets things done in Herbert Hoover fashion (TIME, March 19). Furthermore funds wherewith to buy new telephone equipment were now becoming available through the sound but dazzling financial wizardry of Prime Minister Raymond Poincare, the savior of the franc (TIME, Aug. 16, 1926).

Result: much new and efficient telephone equipment has been Hoovered into service by dynamic, persuasive M. Bokanowski.* Last week he presided with dancing eyes over the banquet given at Paris by those smart, shrewd telephone subscribers who instigated the whole reform. They, pleased by the recent marked acceleration of service, gallantly tendered the banquet, last week, to 100 telephone-women chosen by lot to represent their Nimble Sisterhood.

Rising to a toast, M. Bokanowski fervently assured them in the name of France that their professional honor stands wholly vindicated, and hastened to add his conviction that they are excelled in no respect by foreign telephonists. Scandinavians and U. S. citizens who used Paris telephones, last week, were not so sure, still think the service in the homelands quickest.

*The contracts were let to the world potent International Telephone & Telegraph Company, of which U. S. financier and Morgan associate Sosthenes Behn is President. The I. T. & T. is now in process of absorbing the Postal Telegraph and other companies of famed Clarence H. Mackay (TIME, April 2).