Americana

MANNERS & MORALS

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

P: For seven days the U.S. was gripped by World Series fever. It was pretty hard for anybody to get any work done. Almost every office had a radio going; in New York and Philadelphia, taverns with television did a Klondike business. And many of those who saw the games, like William J. Corrigan of Louisville, seemed to think there was nothing more important in the world.

P: After its third biennial "good looks" survey, the Woman's Home Companion reported that 93% of its women readers now use lipstick (v. only 85% in 1945), that 93% use "antiperspirants and deodorants" (v. 88% in 1945).

P: In Colorado Springs, Harry Galbraith of the Colorado Historical Society settled an old controversy over the proper way to make a pioneer drink variously known as "pizen," "popskull" and "panther milk." The recipe: "To a five-gallon keg of Taos Lightning [whiskey] add a one-pound plug of chopped chewing tobacco, two pounds of burnt dried peaches and 20 charges of gunpowder; stir the mixture well and drink in a tin cup."

P: After a trip to Mexico City and a weekend of sitting in Manhattan nightclubs, Barbara Jo Walker, 21-year-old "Miss America of 1947," finally got back home. Memphis' welcome filled her eyes with tears. There was a big parade, a luncheon with the mayor, a fashion show, a ball at which she danced with her fiance, Intern John Hummel. Then Miss America went back to her studies at Memphis State College, her choir singing and her Methodist Sunday School class.

P: At Tarrytown, N.Y., the Hudson River mansion of Washington Irving, restored by John D. Rockefeller Jr. (at a cost of almost $1,000,000) to the approximate condition in which the author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow left it when he died in 1859, was opened as a public museum. Inside the quaint white pile, decked with crowstep gables, weathercocks and bronze finials, visitors found Irving's library intact, saw his shaving equipment, medicine bottles, pens and four-poster bed.

P: Gallup pollsters reported that U.S. parents consider boys easier to raise than girls. Reasons: boys require less attention and clothes, have fewer social problems, are apt to be less temperamental.

P: At Blytheville, Ark., Ed Anderson, 18, of Kennett, Mo., picked 99 lbs. of cotton in two hours to win the South's annual cotton-picking contest. His reward: $1,000.

P: Members of the National Funeral Directors Association met in Boston for their 66th annual convention. Some exhibits of new equipment for the trade: the "Jewel Box" ("a gem of a casket") with a semicircular peephole and well-padded velvet and satin interior; the "Blickens 4 in 1 Positioner," an elaborate arrangement of clamps and bars for forcing a rigid body into a suitable position of repose.

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