Americana

Notes on U.S. customs, habits, manners & morals:

P: A worried reader of Denver's Rocky Mountain News wrote to Lovelorn Columnist Molly Mayfield that she and her husband quarreled because he was a Democrat and she a Republican. What should she do? Advised Columnist Mayfield: find a Henry Wallace man and invite him over. "You both could join in heaping coals on the Wallace follower. In this way you and your husband might be closely drawn together."

P: In St. Louis, Circuit Judge Eugene J. Sartorius ruled that a wife has a legal as well as a moral right to rifle her husband's pants when he is asleep.

P: Eleven-year-old Rita Bamford of Los Angeles listened to the Vatican Choir on the radio, and liked it. Next day she picked up a phone and asked the operator for the Pope. Put through to Rome, she was told by a Vatican City spokesman that the Pope could not speak English (he can) and would not be able to talk to her. To a papal aide she explained: "I'm an American girl who heard your choir and I just thought someone ought to tell you how good it is." The bill: $35.60.

P: In Chicago, Chauffeur James Mattalina, 53, who had driven for one family for 25 years, heard that his late employer had left him $300,000 in cash, securities and other properties. Said Mattalina, who also runs a grocery: "We've gotta have a banquet for all my family and all my fine friends, and I can watch them eat & eat."

P: From the pulpit of Washington's All Souls Unitarian Church, the Rev. A. Powell Davies denounced longer skirts. Long skirts are "immoral," he declared, because they "will deprive the shivering people of Europe of the wool they need to keep them warm in a coal-less winter."

P: Aspiring to follow in the footsteps of Brooklyn-born Matador Sidney Franklin, young Julian Faria, also of Brooklyn, made his debut as a bullfighter in Reynosa, Mexico. As his first bull charged, a horn caught in the buttons of his pink, skintight pants, ripped them open. The crowd laughed. Commented an aficionado: "Ay! Esos tipos de Brooklyn."*

* Rough translation: "Ah, them bums."

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