"Our country is like a boy walking a fence," mused Banker George Christie in Phoenix, Ariz. "After a while he gets so good at it that he quits worrying about falling."
In Phoenix or anywhere else in the U.S., it was hard to detect much worry about falling last week. The week's two long-awaited banner-headline events, Israel's pullback from Gaza and Sharm el Sheikh, and congressional approval of the Eisenhower Doctrine, brought no deep, nationwide sighs of relief because few Americans ever really got tensed up much about either issue. The economy showed scattered patches of anemia—layoffs in the home-appliances industry in Ohio, four-day weeks in West Coast plywood mills—but even people in the patches seemed confident of its basic health.
The U.S. seemed to feel that peace, however fitful, and prosperity, however spotted, would last. And with that mood prevailing, reported TIME correspondents across the nation, Americans were devoting their time, their energies and their conversation primarily to affairs domestic and local.
Peach Buds & Flu. In Banker Christie's Phoenix, spring had come three weeks early, bringing the fragrance of orange blossoms. The talk of the town was the upcoming Junior Chamber of Commerce rodeo, and the talk of the Junior C. of C. was the enterprise of Bright Young Man Lee Ackerman and his aide, Chuck Mueller, who are so convinced of the future growth of Phoenix that they are buying and selling nearby desert acreage that only a jack rabbit could call home.
Kansas City's Topic A was a 1% tax that the city government wanted to levy on earnings so that suburbanites can be forced to pay for the upkeep of the city they inhabit by day and shun by night. In Hollywood the swimming-pool set, thousands strong, responded to an unseasonable temperature in the 80s by flicking winter's debris off the water. Los Angeles and Brooklyn joined in the guessing about whether the Dodgers would really move West. Detroiters based buoyant hopes on the first signs of a heavy spring market for 1957 cars (see BUSINESS). Peebles, Ohio (pop. 4,000) was getting ready far in advance for the biggest event in its history: the World Plowing Contest to be held there next September.
Atlanta fretted about the dying winter's snowy last fling, which nipped peach buds and forsythia blooms brought forth early by a false spring. Wichita grumbled about its flurry of nonfatal but highly uncomfortable flu. Miami complained of nagging rain—but 23,026 racing fans braved it on Gulfstream Park's opening day to bet $1,863,447. Texas rejoiced in the recent soaking rains that brightened parched fields with blankets of green and stirred hopes that the seven-year drought might be ending at last.
Harding & Missiles. Underlying the U.S.'s local preoccupations was some real news of a different sort: after years on end of living with crisis and talk of crisis, the U.S. has settled into a New Normalcy, unhaunted by fears that twitches abroad mean another world war or that economic twinges at home mean another Great Depression.