Americana

MANNERS & MORALS

Notes on U.S. customs, habits, manners and morals as reported in the U.S. press:

P: After 16 years of grinding through Bronx traffic, Busdriver William Cimillo was seized with a desire to change the scene. Switching the destination sign on his employer's new $18,000 bus from "Subway" to "Special," he lit out for New Jersey, kept going for 1,350 miles to Hollywood, Fla., ended up at the race track and in need of money--for which he wired his boss. But the boss wouldn't even let him drive the bus back.

P: Floods and rainy weather were the top sorrows of the U.S. Easter weekend. But there was another: in areas where they appeared at all, jelly beans were selling for as high as $1 a pound.

P: In Boston, 79-year-old Dickinson S. Miller, an ex-Harvard professor of philosophy, fought eviction from his one room apartment with new fervor. When his landlady snitched his key some months ago, he had made the window his doorway. But when "a sudden incursion of people" swept away his bed, the lights and most of the furniture while he was in the bath, Professor Miller went to law. He wanted his bed back.

P: In Hollywood, a manufacturer decided to publicize a system of perfuming shower baths, got Starlet Joan Barton--recently voted among the 13 best-dressed U.S. women--to take off her clothes and stand in an aromatic spray.

P: In Providence, R. I., citizens who had been run out of Roger Williams Park at 10 p.m. by the cops had a kick coming. An investigation revealed that some of the cops had been trysting for two years with local girls in the park barn--after 10 p.m.

P: In New York, officials at the International Beauty Show figured that the U.S. woman's face depreciates at an $85-a-year clip, reasoned that she should be able to deduct facial repair costs from her income tax.

P: The average U.S. woman, announced the National Institute for Human Relations, talks slower than she used to. Her rate before the war: 175 words a minute. Her current rate: 160.

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