Americana

Notes on U.S. customs, habits, manners and morals:

P: During 1946, the Department of Commerce reported, Americans spent a record $8,700,000,000 on liquor.

P: In Pasadena, Calif., 33 white-haired members of the W.C.T.U., led by one Mrs. Jessie Lee Cowie, 87, marched right into the town's bars with a hymn-singing, placard-waving appeal to the "better natures" .of drinkers. The customers paid little heed.

P: Vogue assembled the twelve most photographed models of the last decade, called the resultant group portrait "an Omnibus of Beauty" (see cut). As current replacements of the Ziegfeld and Gibson girls, said Vogue, "these twelve share a look of non-adolescence."

P: In Whitehaven, Tenn. (pop. 2,000), eight marriages of high-school students since September were too many for Principal Fred Elliott. He announced that hereafter students who got married would be dismissed from school. He also forbade the boys & girls to lunch or stroll together, or to hold hands.

P: In Boston, Beacon Hill matrons sat themselves down on their historic redbrick sidewalks, in a last-ditch fight to prevent city workers from ripping them up, replacing them with concrete.

P:Kansas adopted Home on the Range as its official state song.

P: In San Francisco, Dr. Margaret Mead, ethnologist of the American Museum of Natural History, told a conference of social workers that romantic love, with its "whole myth-laden aura," is wrecking the institution of marriage.

P: In Manhattan, the hero's tale of the man who jumped for the bit to stop a runaway horse was re-enacted in modern terms by a motorist named Hugh Kelly. Seeing a taxicab out of control with its driver slumped over the wheel, Kelly swung his own car in front of the cab, eased it to a stop. The cabdriver, victim of a heart attack, was dead by the time an ambulance arrived.

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