Americana

P: Just before the payoff in Philadelphia, some brave experts made their final prophecies. Of 815 newspaper editors polled by the U.S. News, 417 expected Senator Arthur Vandenberg to get the nomination, 271 hoped he would. Jim Farley predicted "a deadlock between Dewey and Taft. If they get together, one of them will be the nominee. If they don't, you'll see Vandenberg in there."

P: Gallup pollsters asked ordinary U.S. citizens what they would do if they were President. Most had a simple platform: "I would help people and try to make them happy." The people's concept of the U.S. President, Gallup reported, was of a benevolent father, a helper and protector of the common man.

P: U.S. consumption of meat was 155.2 pounds per person in 1947--the highest in 39 years, the American Meat Institute reported.

P: Mrs. Lou Brooks Thomas, 73, ordered a well sealed with concrete when drillers struck oil on her Fristoe, Mo. farm. "All I want is good drinking water," she said, "and you can't get that from an oil well."

P: Operators of Manhattan's garish and financially hard-pressed Monte Carlo nightclub decided to close up after employees went out on strike for higher wages. But to show they had no hard feelings they threw a big farewell party; before the night was over, the headwaiter danced spryly with the hatcheck girl.

P: The Army's judge advocate general announced that the U.S. had spent $10,000,000 paying for damage done by G.I.s in foreign countries since the end of World War II.

P: Holding a 50-year-old pistol in both hands to steady it, Ezekiel Brown, 74, of Colorado Springs, Colo. fired two slugs into a neighbor (after a back-fence quarrel) but failed to kill him. In jail the creaky gunman bitterly told police: "My eyesight ain't what it used to be."

P: Thirty-eight-year-old Mrs. Maud Ethel Pope went to an Atlanta hospital complaining of a backache, explained that she was expecting her 22nd child and had overexerted herself digging a 25-ft. well and building a house.

P: Mrs. Dorothy Lawlor, still willing to marry for $10,000 if things were right, flew in to La Guardia Field from Ciudad Trujillo, where she had been looking over one Albert Alna as a suitor. She had definitely crossed off Danny Wicker, Daytona Beach, Fla. bar owner. "We're both of too nervous a temperament to make a go of it," she explained. Though still unwed and unbespoken, Mrs. Lawlor had quit work as a hatcheck girl. "After all, there's nothing to check in the summer," she said.

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