Americana

MANNERS & MORALS

P:The Retail Bookseller confidently predicted that a new novel, Parris Mitchell of Kings Row, would be a bestseller. "It has everything in it that made its predecessor [Kings Row] sell: horror, sex, madness and depravity--all handled with dignity and restraint."

P:Daisy, a Salt Lake City zoo tigress, gave birth to the first known liger (offspring of a female tiger, a male lion) ever born in the U.S.*

P:Dr. Luther Evans, Librarian of Congress, announced that the original manuscript of Alice in Wonderland would be sent back to England as a gift from Americans. Dr. Evans spent $50,000 to buy the manuscript at auction in New York in 1946, later got all but $5,000 back from anonymous donors who also wanted the script returned "as an expression of thanks to the British ... for holding off the enemies of freedom."

P:A Manhattan dress designer named Wilma announced a new specialty--wedding dresses for divorcees. She suggested a pink silk shantung suit for the second marriage, a black silk faille suit with a crystal embroidered lace blouse for the third. Said Wilma: "The bride's sophistication should increase in direct ratio to the marriage multiple."

P:The American Bar Association denounced U.S. divorce laws as "rotten" and "disgraceful," urged that the nation cease warring on the institution of divorce and begin trying to improve it. Some of its suggestions: uniformity of state divorce laws, a new type of divorce hearing, establishment of courts equipped to diagnose and treat failing marriages.

P:Manhattan's Borough President Hugo Rogers decided that New York lamp posts were cluttered with too many signs. He drew up plans for a more beautiful lamp post on which signs too cluttered to read would be replaced by simple initials which almost nobody would understand (samples: NTB for No Trucks or Busses, MT for Merging Traffic, ERD for East River Drive and QMT for Queens Midtown Tunnel).

P:The morals of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis were secure, after midshipmen had given one performance of Boy Meets Girl. The play, a faintly risque farce, was obviously too much for the superintendent's wife--she swept out at the end of the second act. The superintendent, Rear Admiral James L. Holloway Jr., followed. Next day the rest of the play's three-day run was abruptly canceled.

P:Mississippi's Governor Fielding L. Wright gave Negroes some advice on achieving social equality: "If any of you have become so deluded as to want to enter our white schools, patronize our hotels, enjoy social equality with whites [I] advise you to make your home in some state other than Mississippi."

P:After investigating U.S. occupation troops in Germany for the Secretary of War, Chicago Attorney Orville J. Taylor reported on their affairs with German women: "It would be disingenuous not to concede that such liaisons do exist and on a very broad scale. However, many of the persons involved are entirely capable of performing their professional duties . . ."

*Not to be confused with the tiglon (offspring of a male tiger, a female lion) at Manhattan's Central Park Zoo.

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