MANNERS & MORALS: Americana, Feb. 14, 1949

MANNERS & MORALS

¶ The demand for Indian scouts being low, 93-year-old Ben Buffalo, who was with Custer before the Battle of the Little Big Horn, applied for unemployment compensation in Ohio.

¶ The S.P.C.A. hauled a cootch dancer known as Zorita into a Manhattan court for cruelty to animals. The charge: that she put Scotch Tape over the jaws of an 8-ft. python named Elmer before cavorting in the near-nude with the snake coiled around her torso.

¶ Blonde Mrs. Edith Maria Reuss Lord went into Manhattan supreme court with a tale of marital strife which sounded like a metropolitan replay of the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Her manufacturer husband, Robert P. Lord, had armed men to bar her from their apartment, she said, so she had gathered up a squad of private detectives, recaptured the place and held it with a crew of shotgun-packing guards for eleven weeks.

¶ The State of Georgia had to spend $400 for a special chair with a 32½-inch bottom before 300-lb. Legislator Compton O. (“Fat”) Baker could be seated, with any degree of freedom, in the House of Representatives.

¶ The average American wage earner now lives to be 67.16 years old—four months longer than the average life span in 1947 —the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. reported.

¶ Mrs. Rita Beane of Oak Park, Ill. was accidentally locked out of her house in freezing weather, hammered unavailingly for readmittance. Her father-in-law, a radio amateur, had his earphones clamped on tight, and was too busy talking with a ham in Johannesburg, South Africa to hear her. She stepped to a neighbor’s house, telephoned another ham, had him contact Station Z56KD in Johannesburg, which notified her father-in-law that she wanted to get back inside.

¶ The Alaska Railroad’s general manager reported that its best-kept stretch of track was maintained by a section gang composed of eight Indian women.

¶ New York’s Board of Education bought 135 pool tables, set them up in school community centers—to keep students out of poolrooms.