Pilgrim's Progress

As it must to all reformers, a severe trial of patience came last week to New York City's busybody Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. The Mayor was determined to be wartime guardian of his voters' morals--no matter how unappreciative the voters might be. The results were discouraging.

When the fiery little Mayor ran bookmakers out of Times Square, they simply moved across the Hudson River to New Jersey, kept their Manhattan phone numbers, hired special trunk lines so that their patrons could still call them for a nickel. Last week the Mayor finally got the telephone company to discontinue the lines. The only noticeable result, as noted by cynical New York Mirror Sportswriter Dan Parker: "Bookmakers' clerks . . . [have] writer's cramp from notifying their clients by mail every day what the new telephone number is."

On the theater front, Mayor LaGuardia's police hauled off to court, on indecency charges, the management of a dismal burlesque-revue called Wine, Women & Song. Said the Mayor: "The title is very misleading. The public thought it was Viennese music." The public, its misapprehensions cleared up, promptly took a new interest in Wine, Women & Song. The managers,who had expected to fold in a week for lack of customers, gleefully hauled down the closing notice. If the court case dragged on long enough, the show might be a hit.

One ray of sunshine warmed the Mayor's crusade last week. When he heard that the Parent-Teacher Association of Public Schoo! 99 was conducting a raffle for a $25 war bond, he quickly stopped it. The Parent-Teacher Association was loth to move to New Jersey or get a court order, so his ruling stuck.

But at week's end the Mayor again felt the stings of ingratitude. With the best intentions in the world, he posed for a news picture showing him about to plunge a knife into a rubber dragon which Macy's department store once used for Thanksgiving Day parades and is now donating to the scrap pile. Some Manhattan ingrates suggested that this was not the first rubber dragon their Mayor had slain.

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