Americana

MANNERS & MORALS

P: The once unrefusable March of Dimes was refused permission to raise $40,000 in Oklahoma City.

P: Elevator operators in Los Angeles' City Hall were told to stop calling out. "War Department!" for the floor on which Divorces are granted, "Flatfoot Alley!" for police headquarters, and "Ball & Chain!" for the city attorney's criminal division.

P: Detroit police gathered disturbing statistics on juvenile delinquents. Eighty percent of 10,000 teen-age lads who had had trouble with the law in Detroit last year came from families with adequate or above-average incomes.

P: A Manhattan store advertised the "bottoms-up tumbler," a 2-oz. glass with a nude female figurine across its base. It was guaranteed to tip over immediately if placed on a flat surface. Said the ad: "You can't put it down until you drink it down--and the result is, of course, gaiety galore."

P: Internal Revenue Bureau officials in Newark, N.J., began re-checking 800,000 income tax returns. Reason: two women clerks had been flushing returns down restroom toilets to avoid work.

P: Patrolman Christopher Aspall of the Springfield, Mass, police claimed the world's record for handing out parking tickets: 30,000 in eleven months, or an average of 114 a day.

P: The Air Force got ready to spend $124,875,000 on new, blue-grey uniforms.

P: Kids of Glen Cove, L.I. gave a Chamber of Commerce Santa Claus a drubbing when his candy gave out and they discovered that the packages on his sleigh were nothing but dummies. Muttered one departing youngster: "Santa Claus is a liar."

P: Charged with refusing to cut the hair of a Negro student at the University of Michigan, Barber Dominic Dascola pleaded that he did not have the "special tools" needed for Negro hair.

P: The tugboat Sprague, known for 45 years from one end of the Mississippi to the other as "Big Mamma," the "shovingest" boat on the river, was on the banks and waiting for the wrecker. One of the last of the sternwheelers, she could handle 19 oil barges--the equivalent of a tank-car train ten miles long.

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