Americana

MANNERS & MORALS

P: The lights of outdoor Christmas trees--from the 65-ft. Norway spruce in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center (see cut) to front-yard evergreens in ten thousand U.S. cities and towns--began to glow and glimmer brightly in the night.

P:The Freedom Train (TIME, Sept. 22) with its display of historical documents began a tour of six Georgia cities--after dutifully coupling on a "Heritage Train" (one Central of Georgia Railway baggage car) in which local patriots had proudly deposited the original manuscripts of the Constitution of the Confederate States and of Gone With the Wind.

P:Pullman Porter Fred Wright, 67, who went to work for the New York, New Haven, & Hartford Railroad as a water boy when he was twelve ("I had a can, and went through the cars hollering 'water!' "), was awarded a gold pin for 55 years' service. His favorite car is the Lightning. "I use to talk to that car during the depression when sometimes there wouldn't be a passenger on the whole trip. I'd say: 'Lightning, old girl, we got to do better.' And now we're doing lots better."

P:In Los Angeles, police booked baldish Edward T. Calver, branch manager of the Keeley Institute (for alcoholics), on a charge of drunkenness. Released on bail, he explained what had driven him to the bottle--nine long years of trying to keep lushes away from whiskey.

P:At Cox's Ledge, off the Rhode Island coast, fishermen caught bottles of 20-year-old Scotch whiskey in their nets. They had found an area where prohibition rum runners had dumped their cargo when hard pressed by the Coast Guard.

P:The American Red Cross, concerned over food conservation, advised housewives to stop using old cheese to bait mousetraps. Sprinkle it in the soup or pop it in the biscuits, instead, it advised.

P:Chicago had its noisiest night since the 1929 St. Valentine's Day massacre. It began when a blue-jawed ex-convict named Tom Daley marched into a South Side garage with two pals and killed an old friend who had turned stool pigeon. The trio then loaded four witnesses into a car. Daley broke the monotony of a long drive along icy roads by shooting them and shoving them out. When the last target was gone he went calmly to bed. The cops woke him up and mowed him down. too. The score: four dead, two wounded.

P:The famed Emporia Gazette ladled Christmas bonuses to its employees out of a wheelbarrow full of silver dollars.

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