The Children's Hour

Mid-afternoon quiet had settled in the dining room of Manhattan's Midston House. Ten-year-old Cornelius Kaehane pushed in, walked to the cashier's desk, took two plastic toy pistols out of the pockets of his shabby lumberjacket. He stared at the young woman with his dirty face full of furious purpose. Nothing happened. Infuriated, he slammed one of his pistols down on the desk and cried, ''This is a stickup." A look of mild annoyance crossed the cashier's face. Cornelius stood on tiptoe, grabbed two ten-dollar and two one-dollar bills.

He wheeled wildly, found his avenue of retreat blocked by a waitress. She patted his head and asked the cashier, "Is this your little boy, ma'am?" Cornelius shrieked, "Cut that out. This is a stickup." He jammed one pistol into the waitress' starched uniform. A second later she was shaking him angrily. One of his guns fell to the floor and broke into four pieces. The police came, took the money away from him, hauled him off as a delinquent. He did not cry. "I made a mistake somewhere," he said, "I saw it all done in a movie on Fourteenth Street."

Things went wrong, last week, for many other little boys and girls in the U.S.

P: In San Diego, 13-year-old Lionel Dodson sat down and wrote a letter to a 12-year-old neighbor girl named Joan Lepper. "You will never know how much I love you ... I want you to have my bicycle. . . ." Then he killed himself by putting the muzzle of his .22 caliber rifle to his ear and pulling the trigger. P: In Denton, Texas, a 14-year-old Palo Pinto County farm girl named Eva Lee Knoop got into a taxicab, showed the driver a .22 revolver, ordered, "Get out of Texas." He headed for Oklahoma. Hours later, gun still in hand, she told him to stop, get out and buy her some candy. He called the cops, then drove her on into a police ambush at Madill, Okla. Eva surrendered meekly--the pistol was unloaded. "I was tired of school," she said, "and I decided to be an outlaw." P: At Bangor, Me., 14-year-old Francis Edwin Varney was charged with murdering his 12-year-old sister with a sharp kitchen knife. P: In The Bronx, three teen-age Negro girls, members of a gang known as the "Fivies," were charged with mugging a shopkeeper named Samuel Flamenbaum. Said he: one girl crooked an arm around his neck, choked and held him, while the other two stole a pair of shoes.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.