Uniforms

Prides of Atlantic City, N. J. are its seven-mile boardwalk along the ocean front and the special force of 24 patrolmen whose chief duty it is to see that visiting couples keep their more wayward ideas to the privacy of hotel rooms, that male bathers keep their shirts on. Perhaps even more of a civic monument is Mayor Harry Bacharach, who attracted considerable attention two years ago when he moved his office to a space on an amusement pier between a chimpanzee and a hermaphrodite so that job-seeking visitors must pay 25-c- apiece to get to him.

Among other business to reach the Mayor's desk last week was a photograph of a new summer uniform. It showed a gangling rawboned constable smiling toothily in a pith helmet, a light shirt trimmed with dark collar, cuffs and tie, shorts, golf stockings, and black and white sport shoes. A huge gun hung half way down to his knees.

"Terrible!" cried Mayor Bacharach. "It looks like a Frank Buck, like a 'Bring-em-back-alive.' Atlantic City is not a Zulu town."

Word was promptly forthcoming that a commission to design a new and less spectacular uniform had been sent to Earl Carroll, at present producing a show in a Miami Beach nightclub. Last month when the Hauptmann trial commenced in Flemington, it was stated that the gaudy sky blue and yellow uniforms of the New Jersey State troopers, now familiar to all the U. S., had been designed by Producer Carroll six years ago. Reprinted many times, the statement was never challenged until last week when the constabulary, perhaps embarrassed by being so closely connected with a gentleman once jailed for presenting a nude chorus girl in a bathtub of wine, insisted that their gaudy jackets had really been designed by none other than their commandant, bristle-haired Col. Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf himself.

In general, uniform designers are almost as anonymous a lot as postage stamp engravers. Most famed uniforms are a gradual outgrowth of ancient traditions. Thus the sailors of Britain still wear round their necks a black silk scarf, in perpetual mourning for Admiral Lord Nelson. A few famed uniform designers are known. Michelangelo designed the uniform of the Swiss papal guard exactly as it is still worn. The Potsdam Grenadier Guards' uniform was designed by Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia. Cadet James Abbott McNeill Whistler, whose military career ended when he was under the delusion that silicon was a gas, designed the buttons that still grace the coatees of West Point Cadets. Most of the innumerable Nazi uniforms sprang from the fertile brain of Hermann Wilhelm Goring. Lieut-General Sir Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden- Powell, authority on pig-sticking and defender of Mafeking, designed the uniforms of the Boy Scouts.

At the last minute last week, however, Atlantic City's Mayor Bacharach blasted the rumor that he had commissioned Earl Carroll to uniform his police.

"Atlantic City policemen," came his latest ukase, "are not putting on a burlesque show. The designing will be done by conventional uniform tailors and not by theatrical producers, Paris designers, or bathtub decorators."

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