The Other 99.4%

The U.S. was full of people who had never been secret agents, movie starlets, U.S. Senators, atomic scientists or stock manipulators. Millions of them had never sat on a flagpole, made the headlines in a love-nest raid or lost a $14,000 Russian sable stole; almost as many had yet to sniff cocaine, snap at a waiter in the Stork Club, sue somebody for libel, own a Jaguar 3 1/2-liter convertible, or pour a champagne cocktail over a blonde's shoulder blades.

It was a good thing that they hadn't--not that they were all upstanding citizens or that they were all devoted to work and family. But last week, as the headlines crackled with more sensational affairs, they were free to keep the country going--to iron its shirts, milk its cows, erect its steel and keep it generally on course.

On Their Knees. Some of them had a pretty exciting time. The crew of the Sinclair Refining Co.'s 17,229-ton tanker Sinco spent three wild days keeping their vessel afloat after sea water accidentally flooded her hull and stopped her engines off the stormy Carolina capes. A tug finally towed the foundering vessel safely into Charleston, S.C., where the crew knelt thankfully on her deck--and shot craps until the cook got a hot meal together.

Thousands of landlubbers had to contend with nature, too; the eastern slope of the Rockies, usually as dry as a bowl of corn flakes during a milk strike, was wet down by torrential rains. Streets were flooded, cows marooned and rivers pushed over their banks in Colorado, Wyoming and Kansas. Almost everywhere else the weather was hot; beer and bathing-suit sales boomed and female sunbathers went to the office looking as though they had been parboiled. The sun was almost the undoing of people near Wilmington, Del., where a dead whale washed ashore and stank up the countryside.

It was a big week for the young. The school year was over almost everywhere; armies of cherub-like little fiends immediately began skinning knees, wading through poison ivy and falling out of trees. The 1949 crop of high school and college graduates walked out into a world that was getting colder for job-hunters all the time.

Canned Gold. A Manhattan firm, Bache & Co., was doing a good business selling 100-oz. cans of gold dust to investors at $3,945 a can. If the buyer then wanted to sell it to the U.S. Treasury he would lose money on it. The advantage in buying canned gold dust, to hard-shelled citizens who aren't sure that paper money is here to stay, is that it is the only form of gold that the Government lets them hoard. Another hoarder, Alf Ringen, the postmaster of Kindred, N.Dak., rebelled at a 15-year-old government order which directed postal employees to save string; he had a 100-lb. ball of the stuff and it was getting in his way.

Though they sometimes snorted in the process, almost all these people, and a hundred million more, read the headlines and eyed the newsreels with a sense of gratitude. It was comforting to know that the rest of the news, most of it fairly grim and overpowering, was happening to someone else.

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