MANNERS & MORALS: Americana, Jul. 19, 1948

¶ From the pulpit of Boston’s South Baptist Church, the Rev. Louis W. West offered his congregation some political advice: “Most of us in this church are Republicans and the male members have a grand opportunity to show their party loyalty. I suggest they should all grow a Governor Thomas E. Dewey mustache.”

¶ A news picture from Phoenix, Ariz, (see cut) gave many a U.S. citizen a fascinated sense of peeking into a neighbor’s photograph album. It showed Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt and daughter Anna Roosevelt Boettiger helping granddaughter Anna Eleanor Boettiger dress for her wedding last week to her college sweetheart, 25-year-old Van H. Seagraves.

¶ A rush of teen-agers and women to vacation and seasonal jobs sent the Census Bureau’s figures for June employment to 61,296,000—over 1,000,000 above the previous record set in July, 1947.

¶ Reno, which had dutifully outlawed prostitution during the war at the Army’s request, authorized brothels to reopen once more with the full protection of the law.

¶ In Washington, Federal Communications Commission agents tracked down two teen-agers who had been sending false radio distress signals over airplane frequencies, once had ten planes and four crash boats out looking for a fictitious ditched plane.

¶ Albert (“Blabbermouth”) Bates, 57, serving a life sentence for the 1933 kidnaping of Oklahoma Oilman Charles Urschel, died in Alcatraz prison without ever blabbing where he had hidden his $100,000 in ransom money.