It Was Certainly Hot

In Dallas, one blistering afternoon last week, a wilted and red-faced businessman walked into Little Brother Runnells' outdoor watermelon garden and sank down on a chair. He ordered a slice of cold watermelon and stared at it with a kind of torpid cunning. He made it last a long time. He built a juicy suspension bridge by excavating delicately at the center of the slice, then wrecked it slowly, sadly, and with infinite care. He counted the black seeds on his plate before he dragged himself back to the unthinkable horrors of his desk, his telephone and his electric fan.

The heat was the news most of the week almost everywhere in the U.S. It was hot in the South, hot in the Southwest, hot in the Midwest, hot and humid as a Finnish bathhouse along the Eastern Seaboard.

Other headlines caused only a stir. California had its eighth sex murder since the unsolved Black Dahlia killing. Manhattan's East Side had three Prohibition-style street-shootings in two days, and one victim spoke in a manner worthy of radio's "Gangbusters" before cashing in his chips. When the hated cops asked him his name, he said: "Joe Bananas, the second." When they asked who had done the foul deed, he responded: "Me mother."

Memories. Outside of the heat, the biggest single topic of conversation was so old last week that it hardly got into the headlines at all. That was the price of things. People did talk about prices in astonished and belligerent tones, like a New Yorker reporting that his pocket had been picked in Kalamazoo, Mich. Many swore they had done better on lower wages before the war.

People took a kind of revenge. There was a substantial buyer resistance. Liquor sales were down. People shopped for clothes, furniture, housing, and even entertainment, and stalked out if they didn't think the price was right. Las Vegas' luxurious gambling hells lost trade. So did the nation's movie theaters. Top pictures like The Yearling and The Hucksters had to be well-ballyhooed, or audiences were thin. Because of the expense, both marriages and divorces had fallen off since the summer of 1946. In the heat, thousands of citizens everywhere thriftily painted and repaired their own houses.

But despite their dulled protests, few U.S. citizens were pinched and most were living better, housing shortage and all, than in any other era. The national hunger for new automobiles was insatiable; in every city in the land people were paying secondhand dealers from $300 to $800 over list prices for cars which had been made "secondhand" by being driven around the block. Housewives kept on buying expensive cuts of meat. Baseball was having its biggest season.

$84,000 for Flax. The nation was enormously rich, enormously productive. Employment was at a record 60 million level. U.S. farmers paid off their mortgages, rolled in money and contemplated more fine crops, more high profits. In Dutton, Mont., a farmer outbid professional buyers for $93,000 in municipal bonds. In California's Imperial Valley, a flax farmer bragged of a profit of $84,000 on his last crop.

U.S. business, except for some struggling new ventures, was more vigorous than ever before in its history. Last week economists suggested that the nation might not be able to endure the stresses & strains inherent in this high velocity performance. Talk like this was something to which the nation usually listened uneasily. Many a citizen remembered the Great Depression as a more brutal experience than the Great War. But in last week's shade-tree-and-hammock weather, nobody was willing to believe that things were going to blow up, either at home or abroad, the day after tomorrow.

The nation was not doing much worrying. This did not mean that the average citizens agreed with Sears, Roebuck's General Robert E. Wood, pre-Pearl Harbor leader of the America First Committee, who concluded that Europe was finished, who suggested that 20 to 30 million Britons, Belgians and Hollanders should move elsewhere, and proposed to write Europe off except for some "charity." There was endless grumbling, particularly in the Midwest, about U.S. exports of goods and foodstuffs. But millions in the U.S. were resigned to the idea that something had to be done in Europe--and that the U.S. seemed to be elected. There was a surprising willingness to support any plan that Secretary of State George Marshall might draw up--simply because he was George Marshall.

U.S. citizens were aware of the tensions in U.S.-Russian relations. But the nation had absorbed all kinds of world-shaking news in the last decade and simply refused to get excited because some Greeks had started shooting at each other. Last week the U.S. was saving its worrying for the fall. It was just too hot for it, brother, just too hot.

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