RUSSIA: Unhappy Hooliganism

In the days before Pogo, Li'l Abner and the cold war, one of the best-loved characters in U.S. comic strips was Fred Opper's amiable tramp, Happy Hooligan. Today the grim commissars of Russia use Happy's name to describe a crime they regard as the essence of capitalist decadence. Last week the wife of a U.S. embassy employee in Moscow was officially accused of "hooliganism" and asked to leave the country. According to accounts blared out over Radio Moscow, pert and pretty Mrs. Betty Sommerlatte, whose husband Karl is an embassy second secretary, had viciously punched...

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