"Stinking"

Franklin Roosevelt, who has a long nasal memory, last week remembered an odor he had smelled 24 years ago when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The odor was Philadelphia.

He was in the city in 1917 on a visit to the Navy Yard, said the President, and he had to hold his nose the whole time. What stirred this olfactory reminiscence was the confession of a Philadelphia newsman that the situation in his home town was "stinking."

To unhappy Philadelphians, sniffing the sewage-polluted Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, the President's 24-year-old smell was a daily experience. Brought to the verge of bankruptcy by years of mismanagement, the city was unable to finance a proposed $42,000,000 sewage-disposal plant (TIME, Oct.. 13). City water is practically undrinkable,* and Philadelphians face the constant hazard of fire with an inadequate water-supply system.

But now, because Philadelphia has $1,000,000,000 in defense projects, the President declared that he intended to do something about it. He had already instructed Federal Security Administrator Paul McNutt to go get a whiff of Philadelphia, see whether the Government could "cooperate with the local authorities to insure that national as well as local interests will be insured and safeguarded."

Republicans, who have been entrenched in Philadelphia for 10 years, croaked that Mr. Roosevelt was just playing politics in the middle of Philadelphia's municipal election campaign. Most Philadelphians, whose long-suffering noses have almost lost their sense of political smell, hardly cared.

* A drink of water, called "a Schuylkill cocktail," is taken only as a last resort. All Philadelphians who can afford to drink bottled water.

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