Americana

MANNERS & MORALS

P: After two years of labor, Denver's Red Cross Braille Corps completed a 24-volume Braille edition of Forever Amber.

P: In the State of Washington's Walla Walla penitentiary, Negro Jake Bird, 46, about to die on the gallows for the ax-murder of a Tacoma woman, won a 60-day reprieve by confessing that he could "clear up" 44 other murders.

P: Offhand, the picture looked like good news: two men, one a policeman, appeared to have rescued a small boy from an icy stream (see cut). But when newspaper readers looked at the caption, they learned that three-year-old Peter Shoukimas of Cranford, N.J. was dead. He had drowned in the Rahway River. His mother said that he was always slipping away to watch the river. "It utterly fascinated him," she said.

P: Philadelphia announced plans to spend $500,000 tidying itself up for the Republican and Democratic Conventions in June and July.

P: At Stovepipe Wells in California's Death Valley, where many a forty-niner died of thirst before he could get to the gold fields, two resort operators sank a 200-ft. shaft, brought in a well producing 40 gallons of water a minute.

P: While instructing a grand jury at Columbia, S.C., Circuit Judge J. Henry Johnson declared: "I am ... thoroughly convinced that no man who lives north of the Mason-Dixon line, be he Democrat or Republican, is a genuine friend of the South."

P: In Hollywood, Actress Martha Vickers (see cut) displayed knee-length stockings to be worn with the New Look. Except for being held up with elastic instead of by a roll, they were much like the "roll-your-own" stockings U.S. women wore back in the roaring, short-skirted '20s.

P: In Indianapolis, the Greenback Party, established in 1874 to fight for "a sound money system," announced its 1948 nominees: for President, John G. Scott, 69, a farmer of Craryville, N.Y.; for Vice President, Granville B. Leeke, 58, a maintenance man in a South Bend, Ind. lathe factory.

P: Citizens of Monterey, Calif, were off on a new gold hunt. In a week of digging with hands, rakes, shovels and a bulldozer, they recovered upwards of $4,000 in gold pieces from a vacant lot which was once owned by a wealthy farmer who distrusted banks.

P: In Birmingham, 21-year-old Mrs. Alec E. Fitzhugh said she strangled her three-year-old son with a diaper in order to collect $1,000 insurance to pay off three $50 loans and the $75 interest.

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