Americana

P:Four hundred men's clothing manufacturers, meeting in Boston, optimistically announced that they would dress U.S. males in gay plumage in 1949. Proposed innovations: nylon socks in rainbow colors, jackets with big patch pockets and matching belts, pastel shirts and two-tone belts with big "bold look" buckles.

P:Union carpenters in Springfield, Mo., offered to cut their own pay from $1.87 1/2 to $1.50 an hour to help lower the high cost of building houses. They hoped other building trades unions would do the same.

P:Mr. & Mrs. Melvin F. Jones of Tampa proudly announced that they had completed a two-story house with their own hands after nine years of hard work. Both are blind.

P:Clergymen at Reno, Nev. (which had 24,354 marriages as compared to 6,464 divorce actions last year) adopted a new code of ethics: "No minister should commercialize the performance of weddings by making deals with taxi drivers, courthouse employees, or any other individuals who may act as solicitors."

P:Eighty-year-old Scott Pillsbury took advantage of mild weather at Scarborough, Me., hurried to a public cemetery to dig his grave before the ground froze. He explained that he expected to die soon, and disapproved of the local custom of storing bodies through winter months and burying them in the spring.

P:A Chicago publicity man named James Mangan announced that he had founded a new "sovereign power . . . known as the nation of Celestial Space." He presented a fancy document to the Cook County Recorder, staking out a claim to "space in all directions . . . specifically exempting . . . every celestial body, whether star, planet, satellite or comet . . ." Then he debated selling chunks of space as big as the earth, for a dollar each.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.