Americana

MANNERS & MORALS

P: Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus lion named Jackie put on one of the most sensational animal acts in Manhattan's history. Jackie leaped out of his cage, in the basement of Madison Square Garden while it was being cleaned, strolled forth, spied one Joseph Knapp, a truck driver, chased him up a flight of stairs and treed his prey atop a telephone booth. Foiled for the moment, Jackie lay down beside the lobby's Eighth Avenue doors, put his head on his paws and spent an hour staring moodily at horrified passers-by on the sidewalk outside before he allowed trainers to chase him back to his cage.

P: Daylight saving time began (in 23 out of 48 states) making train schedules more incomprehensible than usual, and keeping children awake--wriggling, crying for glasses of water or sneaking peeks at comic books--for an extra hour nightly.

P: The Health Department of Minneapolis, Minn, threatened to close those hallowed Scandinavian institutions, help-yourself smoergasbords, because of the danger of dust and germs, unless proprietors equipped their tables with glass or plastic "sneeze guards."

P: New York's smoke-control bureau irascibly haled authorities of the French Line into municipal court on a complaint that the Ile de France was violating the city anti-smoke ordinance. "The Ile de France" said Bureau Director William G. Christy, "smokes every time it comes here."

P: Police of Carteret, N.J., notified that four steel-enclosed radium pellets worth $200,000 had vanished from a flatcar at a local boiler works, wasted no time hunting down the criminals. Observing a kids' shack near by, they checked schools and churches, found that three boys had lifted the valuable pellets, thinking they were fishing sinkers. To the cops' relief, the boys had hidden the boodle under a sidewalk almost immediately, thus escaping possible lethal radiation burns.

P: An unemployed Air Force veteran named Joseph Saccomano climbed to the belfry of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church in The Bronx, and balanced there for an hour threatening to commit suicide. He ignored the pleas of priests, police and relatives. Then a photographer named Vincent Riccio looked upward and bellowed: "You're a chicken-livered, yellow phony . . . come on down and fight!" Snorting with rage, the would-be suicide scrambled down, was grabbed by the cops and toted off to have his head examined.

P: The Duluth City Council received a letter postmarked Athens, Greece, from one Jack Brockway, an Air Force lieutenant. In order to remain an upright local citizen, the young warrior wrote, he was enclosing 30,000 drachma (about $2) to pay for an old Duluth parking ticket. Safety Commissioner Ralph G. Fiskett announced that the ticket would be "on the house" and mailed the lieutenant a refund--in drachma.

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