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"Exhaustion" put Office of Defense Transportation Boss Joseph Eastman into a Washington hospital last week. His deputy, Brigadier General Charles D. Young, could not have been in much better shape. As the week wore on he struggled with Government bureaus, railroads and labormen to meet a manpower shortage estimated at 100,000 workers; ODT had to suspend 68 Central Railroad of New Jersey commuter trains to ease the manpower pinch on essential freight traffic. But the General also had to cope with the biggest glut of strictly nonessential Florida sun worshipers in history.

Nobody except the vacationers would have cared much if they had been left to crawl home on their tanned hands & knees. But their pressure on Florida's railroads, hotels and natives was getting dangerous. The railroads estimated that the 150,000-odd civilians trying for Pullman space would take three months to move unless precious extra trains were put on. Meanwhile, those-who-sacrificed-least jammed Miami and Palm Beach hotels, refusing to move out for new comers. The newcomers spilled over into private houses, used up precious gas and tires chartering cabs to nearby cities not quite so overrun.

Besides patronizing a flourishing black market ($20 extra for a ticket to New York), stranded tourists tried fantastic gags to get railroad space home. Typical: one woman told an overworked ticket clerk last week that she had to get to a dying daughter in Philadelphia. When he found a canceled space for her the same day, she said "Oh, but I didn't want to go until March 6" (right after the Hialeah race track closes). The Florida East Coast sold out all the seats they had in 32 minutes one morning last week.

The pressure is not all from race fans: there are soldiers' families trying to get home from Florida debarkation camps, soldiers crowding North for brief furloughs. While civilian experts for the Army & Navy cooled their heels in Miami, the Miami Herald's society columns blossomed with items about debutantes shuttling North for a week at the Waldorf and then South again for such matters of state as "parties preceding the marriage of a college roommate." ODT finally could no longer ignore the mess, ordered two extra trains daily from Florida to New York. They will be ancient, all-coach, no-reservation jobs -- and they pot be permitted to take any Southbound business.

But there was still no word of any ODT ban on civilian North-South travel on the regular passenger runs. Said Miami hotelman Andrew G. O'Rourke: "If the Government doesn't want to have the tourists here, why does it let them come South?"

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