Something To Do

From millions of U.S. kitchens, attics, cellars, industrial nooks & crannies poured millions of pots & pans, kettles, hair curlers, meat cutters, ice-cream dippers, anything and everything made of aluminum. Just how much usable aluminum-for-defense was collected will not be known until the mountains of donated scrap are melted down. (None of it can be used in defense industry, but this scrap will release virgin aluminum that can be so used.) But long before the last pot had clattered into the last community bin, the drive had shown what happens when the U.S. citizenry is given something specific, useful, understandable to do for defense.

> A Washington housewife rushed out of her house, retrieved a coffee pot which her child had thrown into a collection truck, withdrew $300 in bills, tossed the pot back. Said the housewife: "My life's savings."

> New York City's five boroughs produced aluminum pieces by the hundred thousands. Biggest: a two-ton duralumin gate (damaged) from the Triborough Bridge. One of the smallest: an aluminum girdle, previously worn by an electric eel at the Aquarium.

> Said the chairman of the Long Beach (Calif.) collection committee: "Next thing I expect to see is an aluminum leg." Next thing he saw was an aluminum leg, donated by a one-legged veteran of World War I.

> A New Yorker wrote to Mayor LaGuardia: "Help me find the reason my husband can't get no work. We got aluminum pots, but nothing to put in them. So send a truck to pick up same."

> One Edward Strysko, at Suffern, N.Y., contributed 200 muffin-sized ingots of pure aluminum. He said that his hobby was moulding aluminum into muffin-sized ingots.

> Dr. Eugene Wylie, a Boston physician, turned in an ancient electric automobile. He said that the 1,000-odd pounds of aluminum in its body and mechanism would be an excellent memorial to the late Mrs. Wylie.

> So that University of Maryland could contribute a large aluminum kettle, Governor Herbert Romulus O'Conor suspended a regulation which forbids State departments to give away public property.

> Aluminum relics of the Navy's late dirigible Shenandoah turned up in Ohio where the airship crashed 16 years ago. Into a collection bin at Point Pleasant, N.J., went a fragment of the German Zeppelin Hindenburg, which burned at Lakehurst in 1937.

> Julian Maria Gomez, a Spanish citizen who lives in El Paso and owns a distillery in Juarez, Mexico, donated 38,000 whiskey bottle caps.

> In New York City, Bundles for Britain turned in parts of a German Messerschmitt fighter.

> Chicago's 400,000 Polish-Americans whipped up a fervid campaign with drum-&-bugle corps, peasant songs, shouted refrains from Poland's national anthem (Poland's Not Yet Dead). From a Polish family in Manhattan came a pot with this message pasted inside: "Lots of luck to this bomber. Hope it gets Hitler."

> Dumped into a Seattle depository was an aluminum plaque of Adolf Hitler. A Philadelphia trophy was inscribed: "Given by the German-American Bund; quoit tournament, 1937." In Kansas City: a miniature hatchet, bearing the profile of George Washington.

> Patrolman John Keany, supervising collections at a Manhattan police station, reported the following incident to the New York Times: "Funny thing happened. A woman come up with a big pot that was black as your hat. Couple of other women saw her put it on the pile and jumped all over her. Said that was no way to give aluminum to the Government, and she must keep some house if her pots were that black. The woman didn't answer back, but just got in a taxi and rode away."

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