Americana

P: In Chicago, frugal Anna Cox, 74, a street-corner peddler of notions, disclosed that her address for the past seven years has been the Chicago Transit Authority. When room rents went up, Anna Cox took to the streetcars at night. "A trolley's got a rooming house beat a mile for comfort," she said, "and it's a sight cheaper." She kept a change of clothes in a warehouse, freshened up in public toilets, lived on vegetables and fruit, always paid her full fare ($7.14 a week). "I don't sleep as well in a bed," she explained. "The rolling motion of a streetcar is very conducive to sleep."

In San Francisco, Warden Edwin Swope brought up a housing problem of another sort. The average cost of rooming & boarding an inmate of Alcatraz, he announced, is now $8 a day--more than twice the rate of other federal prisons, and about the same as a single room in a good San Francisco hotel.

P: In Providence, Rhode Island's Governor Dennis J. Roberts signed a proclamation gratefully accepting 14,000 cherry-tree seeds from the Japanese government in commemoration of Rhode Islander Oliver Hazard Perry's historic trip to Japan 100 years ago. Then the embarrassed Statehouse was briefed on a few facts that every schoolboy should know: 1) Oliver, hero of the Battle of Lake Erie, was already dead 100 years ago; 2) his brother, Commodore Matthew Perry, made the historic trip! 3) Matthew went ashore on July 14, 1853, not Feb. 11, 1853.

P: In North Dakota, the legislature pondered three bills which would ban 1) the practice of an individual's buying a round of drinks, 2) the sale of candy cigarettes, clearly a menace to young Dakotans, and 3) dancing in the dark (it enables people to drink unseen).

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