Americana

MANNERS & MORALS

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

P: In Hartford, Conn., owners of 80 antique automobiles donned linen dusters, set out on a 500-mile drive through New England in a revival of the Glidden Tour (an annual road race for horseless carriages which Financier Charles Glidden established in 1905 to popularize automobiling). The driver most in need of a horse: William E. Swigart Jr. of Huntingdon, Pa., whose 1908 Ford blew a piston head, broke a timing gear, contracted radiator leaks and collapse of the spark coil, and had seven flat tires before he got to the Hartford starting line.

P: The Census Bureau reported that the number of private households in the U.S. has increased 12% to a total of 39,138,000 in the last seven years. But the practice of doubling up has increased, too--2,764,000 married couples were living with other families.

P:| Hollywood Producer Dore Schary blasted the new long dresses, announced that actresses in his pictures "will continue to wear clothes which become them." Daily Variety offered a clue to his agitation: millions of dollars of pictures in the film backlogs of U.S. studios are in danger of being irrevocably dated by the change in fashions.

P: Grant Jackson, 6, a second-grader, bagged the vacation reading championship of Hobart, Okla. by plugging through 120 books (104 of them read aloud to his brother, Mike). Among the books: The Lady Bug Who Couldn't Fly Home, Scatter the Chipmunk, Eagle Jack and Indian Pete.

P: In Chicago, South State Street's Pacific Garden Mission, where in 1886 a Chicago ballplayer named Billy Sunday was "saved" and thus given his start as the most famed of U.S. evangelists, celebrated its 70th anniversary. "Ma" Sunday, 79, Billy's widow, was on hand for the celebration. Said she: "Billy would have liked to have been here tonight. He loved this place and always came back to it. That's his old piano, and that's the old pulpit. But I know he's Up There pitching ball for the mission."

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