Americana

P: Struck dumb in 1943 by an emotional disorder, Emilio Franco, a 35-year-old coal miner, took a ride on a Coney Island roller coaster, began screaming on the second dip. Back on solid ground, his first coherent words in five years were: "I feel sick."

P: Bartenders, a notably abstemious race, are drinking more than they used to. The Keeley ("Drunkenness Is a Disease") Institute reported that the number of bartenders treated had risen from three in 1940 to 28 last year. Said Director James H. Oughton Jr.: "Perhaps it is . . . the chaotic condition of world politics and economics. A bartender must listen to constant discussion of these topics."

P: Departing for a European vacation, Manhattan's District Attorney Frank S. Hogan said: "Anyone who commits a crime while I'm away is an ill-mannered person."

If A contingent of U.S. delegates headed for the world assembly of the International Council of Christian Churches in Amsterdam stopped off at Orly Airport in Paris to denounce the "day of mourning" called for Aug. 22 by a group of Protestant ministers (TIME, Aug. 16). Said the group: "The position taken is unbiblical, unpatriotic, and un-American ... To teach youth to be conscientious objectors, to defy lawful civil authority ... is to use the church as a fifth column."

P: Citizens of Glendale, Calif, voted 11,109 to 8,211 to recall their mayor and three councilmen because they had installed parking meters.

P: U.S. smokers used up 345 billion cigarettes in the year ending last June 30--an alltime record and the equivalent of 119 packs a year for every man, woman and child in the country.

P: Detroiters witnessed what they thought was the first religious skywriting since the invention of the airplane:* a plane which inscribed an eleven-mile-long JESUS SAVES in white smoke. The stunt was the brain child of the Rev. Bert Turner, 36, an itinerant evangelist. The skywriting company reduced its usual rate to $10 a word, threw in a free cross between the two words and a couple more at the end, "if the pilot had any smoke left."

P: In sleek and streamlined cars that bore little resemblance to the homely soap-box-on-wheels, 149 helmeted youngsters crouched over their steering wheels and rolled earnestly downhill in the eleventh annual Ail-American Soap Box Derby before 65,000 spectators at Akron. Young Donald Strub, 13, rolled the fastest, won a four-year college scholarship.

* According to the historian Eusebius, in 312 A.D. the Emperor Constantine saw a flaming cross and the legend, in Greek, "By this conquer," in the noonday sky near Rome. It is said to have led to his conversion to Christianity.

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