Americana

MANNERS & MORALS

P: Ten inmates of the Iowa State Penitentiary joined Alcoholics Anonymous.

P: After a year in England, Mrs. Sarah Blakely, 90, changed her mind about dying in her native land and returned to Detroit. Said she: "I didn't want to die on an empty stomach."

P: Carl C. Countryman of New York, who is campaigning for President on the slogan: "Countryman for his countrymen, his countrymen for Countryman," suffered the loss of a gold-plated musical saw he had played for 25 years. "My heart is busted," said the 74-year-old poet-teacher-lecturer.

P: Disaster struck the soo-ft. Mississippi towboat Natchez, namesake of the steamboat which raced the Robert E. Lee. The swollen river's current smashed the vessel into a bridge pier near Greenville, Miss. She rolled over and sank in 30 seconds. Thirteen of her crew were saved; another 13 drowned.

P: An estimated 3,910,000 babies were born in the U.S. in 1947, the Federal Security Agency reported--an alltime high and 440,000 more than in 1946, the previous peak year.

P:For the first time since 1912, the U.S. Army altered the shape of its shoes, added 1/8-in. greater clearance over the little toe for "improved foot health."

P: Women no longer work just for "pin money" or "something to do." Secretary of Labor Lewis B. Schwellenbach reported that 84 out of 100 women now work "to support themselves or others."

P: Kansas City police rounded up a gang of teen-agers who had kept motorists in a state of nerves for two months by I) driving slowly along downtown streets knocking windows out of parked cars with hammers, and 2) stealing machines and using them for "automobile jousts." Jousts were fought at a school ground by youths who drove two stolen cars at each other with the hand throttles open, leaped out seconds before the machines collided.

P: One night last week Betty Jane Kroeger, 17, killed her mother. She confessed later: "Mother refused to let me go tb St. Louis, so I shot her." Next morning she drove to her father's store in Eminence, Mo., where he had been spending nights because of a series of robberies, and shot him while he slept. Then she drove to St. Louis, and just "shopped around."

P: Jay T. Barnsdall Jr., a lawyer of Buffalo, lent a policeman a pencil to write, out a parking ticket, later got off on the ground that the ticket was not written in ink or indelible pencil.

P: In Atlanta, Maud Ethel Pope, 38, who married her husband when she was 11 and he was 12 because he was the "prettiest thing I ever saw," was expecting her 22nd child. Nine children are living.

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