Americana

MANNERS & MORALS

P:Chicago stickup gangs were equipping their getaway cars with rockets which enabled them to accelerate to 90 miles an hour in a city block.

P:San Francisco's Chinese girls, oxidized by Occidentalism, celebrated the Fourth of July by wearing skimpy bathing suits in the first American-style beauty contest ever held in Chinatown.

P:St. Louis drugstores began selling a ten-scoop, multiflavored ice cream sundae called "Forever Ample."

P:On order of the 80th Congress, postal authorities prepared designs of 15 new stamp issues memorializing, among other things, the U.S. poultry industry, the 50th anniversary of the incorporation of New York City, volunteer firemen and the five "civilized" Indian tribes of Oklahoma.

P:The U.S. Board on Geographical Names agreed to change the name of Warm Pond, near Willsboro, N.Y. to Highlands Forge Lake after local residents complained that it was very cold and a mile long.

P:Fortunato Ornelar Anguiano, a 52-year-old dishwasher, walked out on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, borrowed a cigarette from a passerby, lit it, took one drag, leaped up on the bridge rail, flipped the cigarette away and jumped. He was the 100th to die by jumping in the eleven years since the bridge was built.

P:George Fyler, a Chicago engineer, installed a taxicab television set.

P:A horde of mechanics charged into New York's 520 subway and elevated stations, changed the coin slots of 3,390 turnstiles and simultaneously ended an era. After 44 years of riding the subways for a nickel, New Yorkers started paying a dime.

P:Sniffing out numbers racketeers in Ford's sprawling Rouge plant, Dearborn's Police Chief Ralph Guy found himself on the scent of a $5,000,000-a-year gambling ring, employing over 600 Ford workers as writers, pickup men and runners. His prize catch: a plant committeeman of the C.I.O. United Auto Workers, who, Guy reported, offered him $50,000 a year to lay off. Said Guy: "We know of some workers who frequently gamble away their entire week's pay without ever leaving the foundry."

P:Saks Fifth Avenue display windows featured a new fabric shade--"good grey."

P:New York customs guards, alerted by a tip from a reformed dope peddler, spent five days sifting the reeking cargo of a garbage scow, finally found a million dollars worth of morphine and heroin thrown there for temporary hiding by smugglers.

P:The FBI announced that it now had over 109 million sets of fingerprints in its files.

P:The American Machinist predicted that U.S. citizens would wear fewer political campaign buttons in 1948. Reason: the cost of manufacture is now 2-c- per button as compared to 3/4-c- in 1940.

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