Americana

P: Detroit housing officials ruled that residents of its low-cost housing projects could not own television sets. The tenants instead should be saving their money towards buying their own homes, explained Housing Director James H. Inglis.

P: Dayton, Ohio began a work-relief program, the first since WPA days. Already 50 people were being paid $1 an hour for leaf-raking and weed-cutting in the city's parks, and applications were coming in at the rate of ten a day. City Welfare Director E. V. Stoecklein blamed it all on factory layoffs of unskilled labor.

P: Duval County, Fla. added up its 1948 records, found that it had 1,346 marriages and 1,442 divorces.

P: The Federal Works Agency reported that U.S. motorists last year traveled 395 billion miles in their 41 million cars. In Manhattan, Mrs. Emory J. Barnes, president of the Women's City Club, thought that the traffic tangle in New York was stunting the cultural growth of the city's youngsters. Many parents, she explained, would not permit their children to visit libraries, museums, and art galleries until they were old enough to dodge cars.

P: Tuskegee Institute reported only two lynchings in the U.S. during 1948, both in Georgia. One other death was listed as "borderline" because only two men participated in the slaying. By Tuskegee's rule, it takes three to make a lynching.

P: Oscar Widmer, U.S. Weather Observer in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., was sure that he could report a record 48-hour rainfall. But when he checked his rain gauge he found it contained only an inch of water: it had sprung a leak.

P: In St. Louis, trust officers wondered what to do with $250,000 left by Physician Francis L. Stuever "to promote the cause of prohibition in the United States, Germany and Austria." Said one worried banker: "An organization in Washington, the International Reform Federation, claims it is ready to start working for prohibition in Germany and Austria. We don't know if they can even get in."

P: The champion liar of the world, for the first time since 1929, was not an American. The Burlington Liars Club awarded its yearly title to L. W. Tupper of Patricia, Alberta. His story: a northwester blew away every one of the 2,000 pestholes an Alberta rancher had dug last summer and carried them clear out of the country. After bouncing over 125 miles of cactus they were useless--so full of holes they wouldn't hold dirt any more.

P: In Long Beach, Calif., the Rev. Marjoe Gortner married Sailor Raymond Miller, 23, and Alma Brown, 21. Master Gortner, who was ordained last October in the Old Time Faith Church, is four years old. His father, who is a minister in the same sect, assured everybody concerned that the marriage ceremony was perfectly legal.

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