To Each His Own

This week, each in his own way, the people of the U.S. would celebrate Christmas.

For many a man, as for a tanned National Park Ranger named Bill Butler, it would be a rare day of rest, warmth and comfort. The odds had favored Bill Butler's spending Christmas high on glacier-scarred Mount Rainier. For four days he had been battling Arctic cold, avalanches and the dead-white swirl of alpine blizzards in a search for a lost Marine Corps transport plane. But a fall on rock-fanged ice had finally sent him skiing painfully back to his snug cottage in a timber-bordered Government camp. With his torn ribs healing he would idle before a snapping log fire, listen to the faint roar of the Nisqually River, and watch his pretty wife, Martie, cooking a 19-pound turkey.

Things would be much, much more complicated for Hollywood's Lana Turner. She was giving away 500 presents. There were the two dozen cashmere sweaters (at $35 apiece) for her young men friends; and wallets with engraved gold plates ("Eddie from Lana") for her older men friends. There were jackets, purses, gloves and jewelry for her women friends. There was a diamond and sapphire clip for her mother, an ermine coat for her 3 1/2 year-old daughter. There were cases of bonded bourbon (at $120 a case) for the boys on the lot. The whole thing would simply be a production.

Banana Pie. To husky, 17-year-old Richard C. Rowe of Denver, as to thousands of other U.S. college freshmen, the holiday held the feel of freedom, the warmth and excitement of homecoming. His mother had waited tip the night he got home from Park College at Parkville, Mo., and fed him banana cream pie. He had slept late, hurried off to meet other malted-milk topers at the Purity Creamery, and angle for holiday dates. On Christmas he would go to church, plough through a huge dinner, drive to a mountain cabin with his family to toast marshmallows over an open fire.

Many a money-heavy citizen would spend the holidays in jammed, glittering Florida resorts. To Cartoonist Ham Fisher, creator of Joe Palooka, Christmas in Miami Beach would be sun-kissed and expensive. He would sleep late in his Roney Plaza room, golf at the swank La Gorce Country Club, be host at an eggnog party at the Lord Tarleton Hotel. In the evening he would invite a crowd of cronies to a dinner party at the Copacabana Club.

It would also be a big day, though in a different way, for redheaded Walter Reuther, the combustible president of the C.I.O.'s United Automobile Workers. He had a huge surprise for his four-year-old daughter Linda--a tiny electric phonograph with two albums of miniature records. And he was due for a surprise himself. His wife, May, would have sour cream pancakes for breakfast in their neat, white Detroit home.

In Manhattan, one-legged, whiskery, 62-year-old Charlie Miller would engage in a different sort of enterprise; he would try to shut the sound of carols from his mind. They reminded him too painfully of his happy boyhood in Germany. Charlie would spend Christmas where he spent every other day--in the grim, Lysol-haunted Municipal Lodging House. He would pass the morning reading tattered newspapers. At eleven, he would pick up his crutches (to which his spare shoes and a bundle of other belongings were lashed) and get a chicken fricassee dinner. Then, slowly, he would go back to the heap of limp newspapers.

But in the U.S. of 1946 the Charlie Millers would be comparatively few. On Christmas Day, William George Dampier, a 48-year-old Indianapolis milk delivery man, would watch a heart-warming scene: |iis five children, exclaiming happily over presents in the front room of his warm, frame house. Like millions of other U.S. families, the Dampiers would eat a vast and savory dinner, look forward to the long holiday before the New Year.

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