Americana

MANNERS & MORALS

P: Miniature golf courses, the rage of the depression, were springing up all around Chicago again.

P: Citizens of Tulare, Calif, lined the streets for nine miles to welcome 17-year-old Bob Mathias, home from his decathlon victory in the Olympic Games. After hours of cheers, band music, speeches and photographs, Bob decided he'd had enough. He drank a quart of milk, locked himself in his room, played phonograph records and waited for the crowds to go away.

P: A severe daylight thunderstorm over western Wisconsin caught a two-engine Northwest Airlines transport plane, shot lightning around it, crippled it, brought it down against a bluff of the Mississippi River near Winona, Minn. The dead: 37 (there were no survivors). Total fatalities in airline and chartered passenger planes in 1948 to date: 180.

P: Onetime Indianapolis Speedway Driver Cliff Bergere drove a 15-block course in Colorado Springs, Colo., carefully adhering to traffic rules, finished in 9 minutes and 35.1 seconds. Then, with police permission, he went around again at illegal speeds; he broke 52 traffic rules but, he said, was able to cut only 3.9 seconds off his previous mark.

P: Dr. W. Ralph Singleton, senior geneticist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, announced that he had "redesigned" the field corn plant, and had reduced its height from 14 to 6 feet to make it easier for a man to reach its top ears.

P: In Red Bluff, Calif., a crowd hurried to the United States Brewing Corp. plant with pitchers and jugs. Because the company was in receivership, a federal judge had ordered 124,000 gallons of beer drained off into the Sacramento River.

P: While hunting near San Diego, Ronald Earnest, 16, accidentally shot & killed his 14-year-old brother Ralph Jr. Wild with grief, he put the muzzle of his rifle to his own head, pulled the trigger, fell dead a few feet away.

P: For the 110th time this year, police haled David Douglas Davenport into court, charged him, as usual, with illegally selling liquor in Washington's Union Station, saw him, as usual, prepare to beat the rap. Davenport keeps his liquor in station lockers, sells the key--not the liquor--to his customers. To avoid charges of loitering, he always carries a ticket to Baltimore in his pocket.

P: Two Swiss dentists reported their impressions of Los Angeles. Said Dr. Georges Lebet: "Everything here is automatic. Automatic machines toast your bread, pour your soft drinks, change your phonograph records, even shave your face." Said Dr. P. H. Lugeon: "Your beer is nearly frozen. Your beefsteak, vegetables, milk, are frozen nearly hard. Everything is refrigerated, even your young ladies."

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