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College study shows clothes don’t make the man

Which would you pick up? Guess again

You’re driving along alone and the turnpike’s moving slowly. Be nice to have someone to talk to. There’s a kid at the roadside thumbing a ride—but he seems to come in four models. Let’s see. The first one’s well dressed. Surprised he’s not driving his own sports car. Fraternity man. Could even side with Spiro about campus radicals. The second fellow? A little sloppy, but looks safe. Probably cutting a class—got a girl in Ohio. At least he won’t talk politics. The third guy’s harder to figure. May have some ideas under that hair—and some pot in his pocket. Seen a few demonstrations. The fourth one? No problem. Communes. Canada. Pigs. He’ll keep the conversation flying. Looks will tell. Clothes make the man.

But try again. A new study at the University of Dayton indicates that if you try to judge a student’s attitudes by his appearance, you will be wrong almost exactly half the time.

Tie Dayton study was conducted by Anthropologist John Bregenzer, who began it when he joined the Dayton faculty in 1968. Bregenzer categorized more than 200 students like those at right according to four basic styles of college dress —ranging from well-dressed to hippie—and ran them through a battery of political and psychological tests. At first, his idea was just to “sound out” the campus. Then he got more involved in his project last summer when he went to the movie Easy Rider and watched the solid country folk slaughter two young motorcyclists just because they had far-out costumes and long hair. This goes to show, says Bregenzer, “how people are overpredicting—grabbing hold of the radical dress style and just assuming that whoever dresses that way will think radically. That’s just not valid.”

Bregenzer uses his statistics to prove his point. Hippies, as a group, he says, were indeed the most politically radical. But there were so many aberrations, such as hippie-haired right-wingers and screaming radicals in three-piece suits, that the chances are only slightly better than even money (54%) that one can predict a student’s politics by looking at him. What the student chooses to look like has far more to do with who his family, friends and heroes are—and he may not even share their values. Other variables weaken the parallel between the student’s looks and attitudes. Some can’t afford good clothes. Others use long hair and whiskers more to hide weak chins and elephant ears than to express political outlook.

The survey turned up other findings. Not surprisingly, the students from the best-dressed and the hippie groups were the least anxious to make money. No group was more nonviolent than another. Hippies tended to come from high-income and low-income rather than average-income families. And while students with college-educated fathers tended to be better dressed, students with college-educated mothers tended to be hippies.

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The Next Frontier?

Shape of things to come? Even as Apollo and orbiting Skylab recede into history, American scientists consider a more awesome enterprise—a permanent colony in space.

By ISAAC ASIMOV Paintings by PIERRE MION

I DID NOT REALLY UNDERSTAND what L-5 was like, on this July day in A.D. 2026, until I no longer saw it from my vantage point in space.

On the shuttle flight I had observed by telescope the torus that we all recognize, much like a bicycle wheel, gleaming in the direct light of the sun and in the light reflected from the large mirror floating free above. The six spokes and the central hub were visible too, of course.

The shuttle craft was built for durability, not comfort, and I welcomed the end of our journey—a three-day flight. As we moved in toward the docking module, L-5 stopped being a torus in space and became a habitat, a world with 10,000 people. The hub is a sphere 130 meters in diameter, which seemed huge when we were immediately above it. The six spokes led out to the torus proper, the nearer edge of which was 765 meters away. What it amounted to in older units of measurement was that L-5 was a little more than 1.1 miles across.

There were the usual complications of docking, establishing an airtight seal, and getting through an air lock. Then I underwent a brief medical examination. Finally George Fenton greeted me. The head of L-5 was a stocky man with a shock of brown hair and a swarthy complexion. He was dressed lightly and loosely, but not exotically. His personal attention, I gathered, was not unusual; a freelance writer for National Geographic was treated with the same courtesy as any arriving visitor.

Hub’s Low Gravity an Aid to Research

“The day will come, sir,” Fenton said, “when there will be colonies large enough to take in the shuttles whole. It will be much easier when that day comes.”

I protested that it had been no trouble and looked about. Somehow I had expected to get into the hub and see a cavernous vista. Instead, I found myself in a corridor very much like that in any large office building back on earth—except for the bars and handholds one requires at low gravity.

“There are no living quarters in the hub,” Fenton said. “There’s a small hospital here for cardiac cases and orthopedic problems. There are also research laboratories. Some of these are biological, studying the effect of low gravity on living systems; some are industrial and engineering….”

“You mean it’s here that you grow crystals and manufacture electronic components?”

Fenton smiled. “No, not here. Not enough room and, besides, we need a vacuum for that. Our manufacturing plants are out in near space, and are attached to the main body of L-5 by transport tubes.

“Of course we are not yet self-supporting. We depend on earth for much of our high technology as well as our culture, education, and medicine. However, we have already become an important part of earth’s computer industry and a source of many of the microminiature circuits it uses.”

“To say nothing of your manufacturing solar-energy stations?”

Fenton shrugged. “That’s an old story. The first solar power station was operative and sent into orbit around earth even before L-5 was entirely habitable.

“We will want to go out to the torus, and the third elevator bank is nearest. Do you mind starting there?”

He took my agreement for granted, for he seized the nearest handhold, pushed off, and went shooting along the corridor. I followed, but with far less expertise. There wasn’t quite the sensation of shooting upward that one gets in the zero gravity of a coasting shuttle. The weak gravity was enough to make the flight seem horizontal but to have me sinking slowly. I caught another handhold and brought myself to a yanking halt. I walked the last few meters, rubbing my shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” said Fenton. “I know you’ve had space experience, and I rather thought you were used to this.”

“I am,” I said. “Just not quite enough.”

Elevator Picks Up Speed — Sideways

The elevator door opened, and I stepped into a semicircular chamber about five meters deep and rather more than that across.

Fenton said, “This elevator car fills about one-third of the spoke, and there’s room for another one.”

Fenton hooked an arm around one of the six vertical bars spaced through the car, and I took another, assuming there was some purpose for that.

I said, after a time, “Aren’t we moving rather slowly?”

“Yes, we are. Two reasons. First, the gravity effect gets stronger as we move down, and the body adjusts more easily if the change isn’t too rapid. After all, we go from nearly nothing to full gravity in a matter of just about a kilometer. Second, there is the Coriolis force that results when you move from a region of one sideways speed to another that is much faster or much slower. You know about it?”

I nodded, a little abashed. “I know about it, but I tend to forget.”

One talks about gravity on L-5, but it’s a centrifugal effect and that’s not quite the same thing. The torus makes one revolution per minute. This means that the edge of the hub, which we had just left, sweeps out a circle of about 400 meters in that minute. The outer edge of the torus, making a much larger circle, moves 5,600 meters in that same minute, creating greater centrifugal force—a workable substitute for gravity. The elevator car moving downward is accelerated sideways—the Coriolis force—and I felt myself being pulled backward against the curved wall by my own inertia. I held on to the vertical bar and wished we were moving more slowly still.

Earthlike Vista Stuns a Newcomer

When the elevator came to a halt, I had regained full gravitational effect for the first time since I had left earth. That meant not only the three days spent in actual spaceflight, barring brief acceleration periods, but the two-day period of medical examination and quarantine while in low earth orbit. It was with only a faint nausea, however, that I stepped out, just a little unsteadily, into the sunlight streaming through the long line of windows above.

I stopped and stared. It was not just that the gravity was like that of earth. It was everything else as well. I had stepped into a compact American community with glass and aluminum buildings on every side.

My thoughts were easy to read, for Fenton said, “There are differences. No automobiles.”

“Not many pedestrians, either, I see.” The few that passed, all lightly clothed, greeted Fenton, and he lifted his arm, smiling. The greetings seemed to include me.

“Most of us know each other,” said Fenton.

“L-5 is a world, but it’s also a town of 10,000.

“The torus is divided into six separate sectors, alternating between residential and agricultural. More than half the population lives in this particular sector, so you might say this is our city.

“The next residential area in the direction of rotation has most of our cultural units— theater, movie house, sports areas. The third has our schools and our library.

“Sunlight is filtered and dispersed by a series of mirrors overhead. Without earthly atmosphere, we have to be particularly careful of radiation. We can produce an eight-hour night every 24 hours by tilting the mirrors. It’s part of making L-5 as earthlike as possible. The streets, you may see, curve a bit.”

“Why is that?”

“So that you don’t see to the end of any of them. If they were straight, they would end too soon, and you would have a claustrophobic feeling.”

I was watching the pedestrians. Most were men in early maturity. I said, “Do the women and children stay indoors?”

Fenton said, “No, there just aren’t many. We are still a pioneer community, you know, and our population is as yet unbalanced. Fewer than half of our more or less permanent residents are women. Nevertheless, there are families. We have nearly a thousand youngsters on L-5, some colony-born. My own daughter was born here five years ago.”

Goat-milk Shake and Hare of the Dog

“What do the single people do?” I asked.

“Some stay single. Some go back to earth to try to find a mate. Some stay on earth, and some bring a spouse to L-5. Of course, there are no jobs on L-5 that can’t be done equally well by either sex. Nevertheless, there are still old cultural habits that die hard, and we receive more male applicants than female. But as time goes by, we expect to have a normally distributed population.

“Come, let me take you to one of the sun-decks on top of this building.”

The whole atmosphere changed when we went inside. Now there was the bustle of people coming and going in the corridors. Fenton led me past what was obviously a schoolroom. There were children on L-5. I even saw an infant occasionally, in a thoroughly earthlike baby carriage.

There were shops on the building’s lower floors, small ones, but of considerable variety.

“Do you have department stores?”

“No,” he said. “We find that anything too large tends to dwarf the torus. Psychologically, it is better to work with many small units. Would you like something to eat?”

I wasn’t very hungry, but it seemed polite to have a frankfurter and milk shake. They were dispensed by token-operated machines.

“Did you like it?” asked Fenton.

“Oh, yes,” I said cautiously. (Good enough, but I was used to better on earth.)

“That frankfurter is what we call ‘Hare of the Dog.’ H-A-R-E. It’s made from rabbit meat. We are just establishing beef cattle on L-5 and haven’t slaughtered any yet.”

“And what about the milk shake?”

“Goat’s milk.”

We went up in a crowded elevator. Most of those on it got off at intermediate floors. Two men and a woman, scantily covered, stayed to the end. The area we entered was an unshaded terrace where about a dozen men and women were sunning themselves.

I followed Fenton to a railed edge and looked out over the rooftops.

“We’re about 65 meters up,” he said, “and gravitational pull is only 90 percent that at the surface. That’s not enough to be aware of. But there…,” he pointed outward, “is where you can see that you are not on earth.”

He was right. At that height I could see the curve of the torus from within. There was no horizon in the earthly sense. The line of buildings stretching out below me seemed to—no, did—curve upward. They came to an end and were replaced by greenery (the neighboring agricultural section) that continued the upward curve into a blur.

“Earth is different,” I said.

“I know,” said Fenton, reflectively. “I was born in Memphis; came to L-5 when I was 35.”

“Do you miss earth?”

“Sometimes, but not very often. We try to keep the colony like earth, you see, but actually it’s all moon dust. Almost everything you see was once on the moon. We’ve got L-5 people there right now, several hundred of them, mining moon material and sending it to the foundries in the neighborhood of L-5. We get endless quantities of aluminum, titanium, glass, iron, and oxygen from the lunar crust.

“Then, too, the soil in which we grow our plant life is moon soil, a little modified. In fact, the only raw materials of importance that we must still get from earth are light elements: hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon. The imported hydrogen combines with our own oxygen to give us our water supplies. Actually, we import only small quantities since we cycle very tightly. But come, I don’t want you up here too long.”

He said, when we were back in the comparative emptiness of the streets: “The shielding helps keep out cosmic rays, but perhaps not quite efficiently enough. There’s some controversy there. We have enough lunar slag built up outside the walls of the torus to give us safety, but the hub and spokes are less well protected.”

We were walking leisurely, and he said: “L-5 is a transitional world only. It probably has a lifetime of no more than fifty years. At this very moment we of L-5 are engaged in building a second colony, which will be larger and more elaborate than the first. Before it is ready, we will have begun a third. We expect many colonies to be built—in fact, aside from solar-energy stations, colony building will be the chief task of colonials for a long time to come.

“Larger colonies will afford even better protection against cosmic rays, give us a lower rate of gravitational change as we move up and down, a better horizon effect, more natural atmospheric phenomena—perhaps clouds and rainfall. Eventually, we will even have artificial hills and mountains.”

Colonies Won’t Ease Overcrowding

I said, “Could there ever be more colonists than earthmen?”

“That prospect is far in the future, if ever. For centuries at least, the number of colonists will be only a tiny fraction of earth’s population, so that the mother planet will have to continue efforts to control population…. Be careful now, we’re passing through one of the air locks.”

“Where?” I said involuntarily, as I walked up a flight of stairs and over a low barrier.

“The titanium seal is not drawn across right now,” Fenton said. “Each of the six sectors is cut off from its neighbors by an airtight seal. It reduces the problem in case of puncture by meteoroids or accidents within. Any vibration of the torus wall, any small drop in atmospheric pressure will sound an alarm and then automatically close all the locks. Of course, the locks close during the eight-hour night period to prevent light leaks from the agricultural sectors, some of which are under perpetual sunlight.”

“Has it ever happened? Accidents, I mean?”

“No. The probability is small, actually. Meteoroids large enough to penetrate the radiation shield are quite rare, and we offer a very small target. Even if we were punctured, air loss would be slow because of the large volume. Air pressure is only half that on earth though there’s just as much oxygen,” continued Fenton, “but we’ve cut down the nitrogen to slightly under half the earthly level. Visitors aren’t even aware of the difference, except to say that the air is clearer than on earth.”

Vision of a New Land of Plenty

I was walking on a catwalk, and on either side were closely planted tiers.

“This one is our diversified sector,” said Fenton. “Here we have vegetables, chickens, goats, as well as rabbit hutches and fish pools. We depend on recycled water, and this sector contains one of our chief cycling stations.”

He pointed to a windowless metal structure.

“You mean—wastes?”

“Yes, of course. We retrieve water from organic wastes. What’s left is fertilizer. Would you care to go inside?”

I shook my head, “Perhaps not.”

Fenton nodded. “Visitors rarely seem to want to. You understand, don’t you, that recycling proceeds on earth too? There it is a larger circle—less noticeable, but more dangerous. We exclude the pathogenic bacteria from L-5, as you must know from your own physical examination before you came. Frankly, there is far less odor in the cycling station than in the area with the chickens and goats.”

“Even so,” I said, smiling.

“All right. We’ll keep on walking. There are plenty of other things to see. The other agricultural sectors have our grainfields: wheat, rice, corn. Under uniform and controlled sunlight, with unfailing water and fertilizer, equable temperature, and a slightly higher carbon dioxide content in the air, the yields are many times what they are on earth.”

For the moment, I wasn’t listening. We were skirting a long fish pool, and there were small machines moving busily among rows of vegetables. L-5 might be just a pin-wheel in space when viewed from outside, but it was a world once one was inside.

It was the first of many others that would be larger—and better—and that might someday in the far future (who knows?) bear within their graceful bodies the major portion of mankind’s numbers.

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CONEY ISLAND — Which Way’s the Ocean?

BY MURRAY ROBINSON – ILLUSTRATED BY LOWELL HESS.

They call this beach The Poor Man’s Riviera, but on any hot Sunday substitute Bedlam-by-the-Sea. It’s also the only known habitat of certain species yet unclassified by science—like the knish bootlegger THE defendant in Coney Island Magistrates’ Court one muggy midsummer morning was a squat, balding man in a sport shirt. He listened impatiently as the charge against him was read: A startled policeman had found him on the jammed beach fetchingly attired in a woman’s ofF-the-shoulder dress, and had given him a summons for “causing a crowd to collect.”

“How do you plead?” asked the bridgeman, a court attendant who acts as liaison between judge and public. At that, the defendant leaped hoarsely into legal battle with four fighting words that are heard every day of the week at the seaside tribunal: “Guilty with an explanation.”

Magistrate Charles E. Ramsgate peered down at him from the bench. “All right,” he said, “let’s hear it.”

“I put on a dress, it was my wife’s,” the defendant explained, “because people shouldn’t see.”

“Shouldn’t see what?” the court prompted patiently.

“People shouldn’t see,” the defendant said, “I am taking off my bathing suit and putting on my pants under the dress. My suit was all wet.”

“So is your explanation,” the court said severely. “You have just admitted you were changing your clothes on the beach—and that’s another violation.”

The defendant fell into a clinch. “All right,” he said hastily, “so I just put on my wife’s dress for fun, and . . .”

“Five dollars,” the court said.

Thus, in typically piquant fashion, began another day in the enchanting history of Coney Island Magistrates’ Court, a tiny tribunal serving a resort which will have been visited by 40.000,000 persons from all over the world between May and October of this year, according to the estimate of its chamber of commerce.

On any hot Sunday, July Fourth or Labor Day, some 1,500,000 men, women, and children swarm all over the beach, boardwalk and amusement areas of The Poor Man’s Riviera. The New York City Park Department, which operates the beach and boardwalk, covering 7,000,000 square feet of sand and board, says every visitor to its domain on such days has just nine square feet of ground to call his own, figuring the crowd at around 750,000. The other 750,000 visitors to the Island jam Surf Avenue, the Bowery and the resort’s side streets.

Numbered among these visitors is a host of summer roomers who annually descend on the Island (which isn’t really an island, but a peninsula; a tidal creek separating it from Brooklyn was filled in years ago). The population leaps from a wintertime 95,000 to a summertime 250,000, through rentals of flats, bungalows, apartments, hotels and furnished rooms. And in Coney Island, even the roomers have roomers.

But it’s the antlike swarming on the beach and boardwalk—running up against a seemingly endless list of “Don’ts” promulgated by the Park Department—that furnishes most of the quaint business of the seaside court.

For instance, another guilty-with-an-explanation case enlivened the proceedings a few days after the man with his wife’s dress made his plea. A woman earned a summons cum laude by washing her little daughter and two bathing suits in a drinking fountain on the beach. This is frowned upon.

“Guilty with an explanation,” she chirped.

“All right. I’m listening,” the court said resignedly.

“I washed my little girl,” the defendant said, “because she was dirty, and I washed the bathing suits because they was full of sand.”

“Very good,” was the verdict. “Ten dollars.”

The court is hidden away on a dingy side street and is virtually unknown to the fun seekers who throng Surf Avenue, the Island’s ancient main stem, a few hundred feet away. Yet to a handful of cognoscenti who have discovered its charm, it rates as a Coney Island attraction on a par with Steeplechase Park, the three-mile beach, the 80-foot-wide boardwalk, salt-water taffy, the Cyclone and Thunderbolt thrill rides, the carrousels, Lane’s Irish House, Professor James Bostwick (“The Man You Will Eventually Ask”), Nathan’s frankfurters, and the World in Wax, where somebody is always stealing the fancy pants off Bing Crosby.

Coney Island Court is one flight up in a faded tan brick-and-sandstone building which has come to be known as the Little Brown Jug at Coney Island. Downstairs in the sixty-year-old edifice is the 60th Precinct police station. It also has four king-sized detention pens, and a large back room used to entertain the children who forever are getting lost at the Island.

In the long ago, the upstairs court, which has 160 seats, saw some pretty tough customers—like the late Frankie Yale, Brooklyn hood, who made his court debut as a punk nabbed for busting up a Surf Avenue poolroom with billiard balls.

But in 1936, according to Chief Clerk Matthew M. Fitzgerald, the court’s grimmer cases, including felonies, were transferred elsewhere. Now it specializes in more flavorsome matters, such as beach and boardwalk violations, tenant-landlord squabbles and neighborhood feuds.

Between 13,000 and 18,000 cases, depending on the weather, humidity and other unpredictable factors, pass through the court every year. Most of them are summer complaints of various kinds. Lawyers are comparatively rare before its bench, and most of its litigants do their own arguing. They are usually well versed in the three R’s—retort, rhetoric and rationalization— and generally try to make regular federal cases out of trivialities. Occasionally, friends and relatives come before the bar to toss in a few opinions. It is all very informal, since no one is sworn in unless a trial pops up, which is seldom. And some of the customers, making their bow before the bench, figure that something fancy is expected, which they deliver.

Candy Store Owner as Lawyer In this latter category was a Coney Island candy store owner who got out a summons for a lady customer. They had become involved in argument and she had splashed him right in the eyeglasses with a rich chocolate drink called an egg cream.

When his case was called, the complainant cleared his throat and began in a heavy, dignified voice: “The party of the first part, that’s her over there, comes into the store of the party of the second part, that’s me, and the party of the first part gives the party of the second part a clop in the eyeglasses with this here egg cream; so .. .”

The judge shook off a numbing fascination, held up his hand, and said: “Please, please. Talk like a candy store owner, not a lawyer.”

Because of the nature of its cases, Coney Island Magistrates’ Court furnishes a unique insight into the manners, customs and boiling points of the myriads who live, or come to play, in The Poor Man’s Riviera. A tolerant, understanding attitude on the part of the regular magistrate is helpful in keeping the little court from turning into a bedlam. But it’s hard for a newcomer.

A judge unfamiliar with the Coney Island spirit snapped, after a bunch of neighbor cases one morning: “People come in here just to improve their neighbors’ manners. I know my duty when a crime has been committed, but I can’t make ladies and gentlemen out of people who aren’t.”

On the other hand. Magistrate Ramsgate, who has presided in the upstairs courtroom for five summers with only brief breathers, recently summed up his views on handling the resort’s cases this way: “When you come to the Island, you’re in a different world. Values change. You have to bear that in mind when you’re judging people here.”

Captain Edward F. Fagan, who has been in charge of the station house on the lower floor of the’ Little Brown Jug since last March, agrees with Magistrate Ramsgate. Captain Fagan, who is forty-three years old and looks completely unlike a policeman, made a brilliant record as head of the New York City Police Laboratory before he went to the Island.

“I wanted to study people instead of clues,” he says, “and this is the place for it.”

Recently he went walking, in sport shirt and slacks, along Coney Island’s Bowery, a miniature carnival midway which is barred to vehicles. One of the Guess Boys, a phony crew who offer to guess your weight, name, occupation, age or anything else as long as you pay them in advance, tapped the captain on the arm.

“How about it, Mac?” the Guess Boy smirked. “I can guess your job.”

“Listen, you mug,” Captain Fagan said. “If you could guess my job, you wouldn’t have stopped me.”

Captain Fagan has a squad of 12 patrolmen in plain clothes, led by Sergeant Charles De Leo, plus a force of five policewomen, to hand out summonses for beach and boardwalk violations. These are called police summonses and like the court summonses obtained by warlike residents of the Island and two other Brooklyn precincts, are returnable in Coney Island Court.

In the seething beach crowds not penetrated by the handful of summons men, 92 lifeguards, eight guard lieutenants and six chiefs keep order as best they can, under the supervision of Charles Haverty of the Park Department. Their first duty is to keep their eyes on the water, which has its own complement of screwballs. But their whistles tweet-tweet almost constantly to warn the more flagrant rule breakers around them in the sand.

The vast majority of police summonses are issued on the beach, which is not so surprising if you’ve ever seen Coney Island on a broiling Sunday in August.

Chief lifeguard Marty Alma, in charge of three of the busiest of the 22 bays, or beach divisions, says the crowds are sometimes so dense that nappers in the middle of the sand get up dazedly and ask, “Which way’s the ocean?”

The way to get living space on the Coney Island Beach, experts say, is to get there early, pick out a spot, and grab it with a hook slide. You can’t go in standing up, because if you do, that’s all the space you’ll get, and it won’t be the nine square feet you’re entitled to. Every kid at Coney knows you take up more room lying down than standing up.

Family groups have a big edge in the competition for Lebensraum because everyone in the family sprawls out as soon as the old man gives the signal to hit the sand. Besides, each member carries something—a blanket, bags of food, folding chairs—with which to establish a land claim. Loners who don’t know the ropes often find themselves standing for hours in the blazing sun, hemmed in by happy, chomping families reclining at their banquets like ancient Romans. The loners can’t even sit down.

Whispering to the Wrong Girl Fights have been started because a lovesick swain thought he was whispering endearingly into the ear of his girl, only to discover he was talking into the ear of the girl next to her, and her boy friend don’t like it. That’s how closely the sand sardines are packed.

Peppered throughout the more well-behaved members of the throng are such prime regulation-busters as ballplayers, and the muscleheads who build human pyramids and go, “Hup!” before sailing through the air. Then there are the lover boys whose idea of courtship is to keep tossing their beloveds into the heavily populated surf. And the comics who think it’s fun to bury strangers’ clothes in the sand.

Add to these the canasta and klabash addicts with double orders of middle-age spread; the amateur musicians, including the players of bongo drums, castanets, guitars, tambourines; the adagio and tarantella dancers, and the wrestlers who often wind up mashing the hard-boiled eggs of an inoffensive family picnic group.

The lifeguard sits amidst this scene of chaos and tries to preserve some semblance of order. It isn’t easy.

Some of the problems are recurrent ones, like the dunkers and the pants-losers. The dunkers are a group of well-upholstered old ladies who take their dips daily between 8:00 and 9 a.m. Their name comes from the peculiar nature of their water exercises: They stand in water a couple of feet deep, hold hands, and bend in unison at the knees until they’re in a half-sitting position; then up again, down again. They do this with great dignity in slow rhythm. Only the lower rear portions of their voluminous bathing suits ever get wet.

Chief Alma, a handsome twenty-eight-year-old wintertime trumpet player and band leader, rates the dunkers among his favorite beach people. They need his assistance only occasionally, when a heavy wave knocks one of them off her feet. Unable to rise, she waits patiently until the lifeguard helps her up (the guards call these “bathtub cases,” because that’s about how deep the water is), then gratefully resumes her dunking with the other girls.

Lost-Pants Problem Is Solved The pants-losers are a mystery to the lifeguards, who don’t understand how they do it. Alma encountered his first case of this sort a few years ago; he heard a man calling for help from the water about 250 feet out, and swam out to see what the trbuble was.

“I lost my pants, that’s what’s the trouble,” the man said crossly. “How’m 1 gonna get in without no pants?”

Alma swam back in and returned with an extra pair of trunks for this victim of a cruel, watery fate. Ever since. Alma has worn a spare—and twice more he has been called on to save face for a pants-loser. Other lifeguards have had the same experience, but none can explain why.

That isn’t the only puzzle that confronts the guards. Alma reports, for example, that some of his constituents seem constitutionally incapable of calling a lifeguard a lifeguard. They call him “Mr. Life Preserver,” “Mr. Life Snatcher,” “Mr. Life Grabber,” or “Mr. Life Snapper.”

All the Coney Island lifeguards are familiar with an old gent known as Doc, who wears a straw hat and a towel draped across his skinny shoulders. In the belt of his bathing suit, like bullets in a cartridge belt, he carries a supply of paper-wrapped candies. It is his pleasure to seek out as many lifeguards as are on duty and present a candy to each one. He then bows, tips his skimmer, and scuttles off.

Besides these regulars, other singular individuals show up from time to time. Looking around one day, Alma saw sand flying furiously out of a hole in the beach. He looked down into it and spied a little man digging diligently. The pit was deeper than the man was. “What do you think you’re doing down there?” Alma shouted into the hole, shipping a mouthful of sand.

“I’m trying to strike water,” was the muffled reply.

Alma reached down and yanked out the well-digger. “Over there,” he said, pointing to the ocean.

Well-diggers and candy-givers are a relief from the real pests, like the ballplayers. About one third of the 1,000 summonses Sergeant De Leo and his men issued last June went to these sand-lot athletes.

One defendant in Coney Island Magistrates’ Court on a ballplaying rap said: “I was only getting a little extracise. I didn’t hurt nobody.”

“No,” the court agreed, “but the next time, you’re liable to step on some poor old lady’s nose.”

“It sometimes seems.” says Mario Bigongiari, court interpreter and cashier, “that there are more ballplayers on our beach than there are in all organized baseball.”

Besides being warned about ballplaying. bathers are cautioned not to go strolling along the boardwalk in a bathing suit. This heinous infraction usually brings the “guilty-with-an-explanation” defense when the rule breakers are brought to court.

One defendant offered Magistrate Rams-gate this explanation: “It was this way, Your Honor. I lost my little boy. He has bright red hair. I couldn’t see him while I was on the beach, so I figure I’ll go up on the boardwalk and look down from there. His hair is so red, I couldn’t miss him.”

The judge respected the novelty of this excuse and suspended sentence.

Naturally, if appearing on the boardwalk in a swim suit is an offense, appearing un- der it without one is worse, and bathers who undress under that promenade rate high among the recipients of summonses.

One day recently, one of Captain Fagan’s men came upon a woman changing from street clothes to a bathing suit under the boardwalk. To his blushing embarrassment, he spotted her when she had on neither. He gave her a summons and she snapped: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself for looking.”

But the cops’ most persistent annoyers are the illegal peddlers who sneakily infest every part of the 110 acres of beach.

“The ice-cream peddlers do all right,” Sergeant De Leo says. “They pay 35 cents a dozen for their junk and sell it for 15 cents each. They make as high as $50 a day —if we don’t nab them.”

A policeman’s lot is not a happy one when it comes to catching the illegal vendors, whether they sell ice cream or knishes, which are square, weighty pastries filled with potatoes and spices. They are highly fancied by Coney Island sun bathers.

“The trouble is,” Sergeant De Leo explains, “that the peddlers usually wear bathing suits and go barefooted. We wear shoes and street clothes. We start chasing the bums and they outrun us. Meanwhile, the crowd on the beach is pulling for the peddlers. They holler, ‘Why don’t you go arrest burglars?’ It hurts your morale.

“Then, if you manage to get close to the peddler, he gives you the works. Throws his carton of ice cream right at your dogs and you trip and fall flat on your face while the crowd cheers.”

Peddlers of knishes, when pursued to the water’s edge, have been known to put their baskets of goodies on the pilings that stud the water at intervals, and float away on the waves. When the cops depart, they retrieve their knishes, unless the tide got them first. No knish-peddler has ever dared take his wares into the briny with him. “He would sink to the bottom of the sea at once,” a cop once explained. “A basketful of knishes could anchor Big Mo.”

Sergeant De Leo recently discovered a new type knish-peddler—a knish-bootleg-ger. “This guy,” he declares, “was going around the beach whispering to the people. He had a little pad in his hand and a pencil. He was taking orders for knishes and promising early delivery. He’d bring back a few at a time and slip them to his customers.”

Like most of the others who are brought in to face Magistrate Ramsgate, the illegal peddlers are seldom at a loss for an explanation. “Some guy,” one said recently, “sold me space on the beach and told me it was okay.”

“Congratulations,” the judge said dryly. “They’re selling the Brooklyn Bridge again, and you’ve bought it.”

Two warrant officers are attached to Coney Island Magistrates’ Court to bring in bashful parties who ignore summonses. One is George Dillon, a huge, moonfaced man with a gentle smile. His partner is Charles Barlow, who succeeded Henry Frumkin, Dillon’s old partner, when Frum-kin retired last June.

Dillon and Frumkin were a most effective team. Once, when they asked an obstinate Coney Islander to please come along like the summons said, the man said no and held on to a picket fence in his yard. “When we got him out of the yard,” Dillon recalls modestly, “he was still holding a picket.”

The court summons cases in the Little Brown Jug—featuring tenant against landlord and neighbor against neighbor—have a heady seaside flavor all their own. Court attaches agree that no other court in New York can match their savor.

For example, there was the celebrated Ham-and-Cheese Case which recently went before Magistrate Ramsgate. The complainant was a faded, truculent blonde; the defendant, an old lady with birdlike eyes.

“She’s my landlady,” the complainant said. “She took away the ice cube trays from my refrigerator. I wanna have them back. Make her gimme.”

“Sure,” the defendant conceded, “I take them away. She ruin them. She make with ham-and-chis’.”

“You had no business,” the judge re- “I counted four,” said the court.

“It isn’t four people, it’s eight,” the landlady said, “and they go to the beach; then they come back and they all take a bath.”

“Dismissed,” was the verdict.

Some complainants are virtual regulars in the Little Brown Jug. They consider it an achievement to have more than one case going at a time.

Recently, a chubby woman sought a summons for a neighbor because she said the latter slapped her daughter. “You look familiar,” Magistrate Ramsgate said.

“Sure,” the chubby one said happily. “1 got another one going here about my landlady, she’s a mean one, and how she wouldn’t let anybody come to my flat for my daughter’s graduation party and so now I got in my house turkey sandwiches up to the ceiling.”

“I remember,” the judge said. “No summons in the slapping case. One to a customer.”

Magistrate Ramsgate presided over a lulu a few years ago. There were two property owners in this case. Call them Lewis and Clark. Clark had erected a clothesline pole that Lewis chopped down, claiming it was on his property. But in doing so, Lewis chopped it so that it fell on his own garage, ruining the roof.

Thereupon, pole-builder Clark got out a summons for Lewis, charging the ruin of his clothes pole, and pole-chopper Lewis got out a summons for Clark, claiming that Clark’s pole had ruined his garage roof.

The court suggested they shake hands and forget the whole business. But they would have none of his peacemaking, so he packed them off to Municipal Court, where they sued each other heartily.

proached the complainant, “keeping ham and cheese in the trays. The smell stays.”

“No,” the defendant said. “She don’t put ham-and-chis’ in the trays. She wantsa get the cube out, so she hit them with ham-and chis’.”

“Ooh, what a liar,” the blonde said. “I never used a hammer and chisel on her old trays in my life.”

“All right, ladies,” warned Melvin Haw-ley, the bridgeman. “Do not start a cat fight in this august courtroom.” He glared at the ladies with all the sternness of a retired bosun’s mate, which he is.

The judge stirred impatiently. “The trays are only 33 cents each,” he said to the blonde. “You can buy a couple. Dismissed.”

“Another thing,” the complainant said. “The handle on my refrigerator is busted. Make her fix it.”

The judge sighed. “Will you do something for me?” he asked the landlady. “Fix the handle—for me?”

“Judge,” the landlady beamed, “for you I do anything. Where you live? 1 gonna send a man to fix you door handle.”

“Never mind,” the court said. “Tell them to go home. Melvin.”

Many, of the tenant-landlord beefs revolve around the subject of hot water.

“It’s only me and my wife,” one tenant complained piteously. “We rent a room for the summer from this woman. We want to take a bath, but there’s no hot water.”

The judge, hep to the ways of summer roomers, asked: “Any friends visiting you?”

“Nobody,” said the tenant fervently, “except maybe a cousin, and my wife’s brother-in-law stops in, and I think his wife, and my brother’s boy, he’s just home from the Army. A couple people.”

For Putting in Her Two Cents Some of the sensitive ladies of Coney Island take neighbors into court on charges which are nebulous, to say the least. A few weeks ago. a woman had her neighbor up before the court bench for annoying her.

“What does she do?” asked Magistrate Anthony E. Maglio, presiding for the day.

“When I’m talking to a friend,” she explained, “she is all the time putting in her two cents.”

“Yes, but what does she do?”

“She just puts in her two cents,” was the dogged reply. “All the time.”

Magistrate Maglio, who, like Ramsgate, is a Coney Island student from away back, realized he had reached a dead end.

“Madam,” he sternly told the defendant, “you better stop putting in your two cents, or it will run into money. Now both of you go home.”

Whenever members of the Coney Island set blow a gasket, the Little Brown Jug seems to be their safety valve. There was the dignified housewife who slapped a summons on her next-door neighbor because, she charged, “he turned the hose on me from top to bottom.”

“I should waste water on her with the shortage and all,” he sneered. “I am watering my petoonies. and she has to come out and stick her nose in.”

“This man hit my child alongside the ear with his hedge shears,” another woman complained.

“So what?” the defendant countered reasonably. “They wasn’t sharp.”

There are two schools of thought on what makes Coney Islanders wear out the wooden stairs of the Little Brown Jug in a never-ending quest for “satisfaction.” Some court observers blame it on a high percentage of “Full Mooners” among the thousands of summons seekers.

“Court attendants all over know about the Full Mooners,” Chief Clerk Fitzgerald says. “They are people who get the urge to take somebody to court whenever there’s a full moon. Don’t laugh. Full Mooners are a fact.”

But Phil Levinson, a court stenographer who frequently works the Coney Island court, entertains a different theory.

“The salt air,” he says, “has something to do with it.” the end

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Going Steady

TEEN-AGERS FIND IT IS A HAPPY GUARANTEE OF DATES

Photographed for LIFE by CARL IWASKI

“After we had three or four dates,” Barbara King recalls wistfully, “I knew I wanted to go steady with Morrie. I hinted and hinted and hinted —and finally he asked me.” From that day last fall, at the start of their senior year at Greeley, Colo, high school, through last week when they were graduated as honor students, Morrie Mawson and Barbara, both 17 years old, have spent a part of almost every day with each other.

They are affectionate, and openly so. They do their teen-age share of “parking,” today’s term for necking, but “we don’t make a production of it.” They visit freely back and forth, and their parents accept it smilingly if sometimes with silent doubt. Their hands touch often, in school, at church, on the street. When a dozen Greeley teen-agers made plans for an outing (above) in the mountains near Big Thompson River, there could be no question whatever that Morrie and Barbara would be there together. Since they started going steady, they have dated only each other.

A generation back the candor of such a relationship at such a tender age would have raised eyebrows. Today Barbara and Morrie are anything but unique. In Greeley some 25% of the high school crowd are similarly spoken for; elsewhere the figures run to 50%. To teen-agers who go steady it is basically a form of guaranteed dating. For girls it solves the problem of whether they will be invited out. For boys it saves the expense of making a big impression on a series of new girl friends. Though parents worry about their youngsters “tying themselves down” too early, few teen-age couples like Barbara and Morrie seriously look ahead as far as marriage. Denver’s Judge Phillip Gilliam, an authority on family problems, acknowledges a potential danger of “steadies” cutting themselves off from other people their age. But he also observes, “Many marriages fail because the young people didn’t take time to know each other. Going steady gives them this chance—and gives parents a chance to know the youngsters.”

TOGETHER-EARLY, LATE

Barbara and Morrie have it better than some couples. They have known each other for years —Barbara once went out with Morrie’s older brother—and, subject to fairly rigid week-night hours, they have the approval of both parents. Appreciative of this confidence, the youngsters talk freely with their families about their reasons for wanting to go steady. Barbara says, “It’s happiness all the time and sometimes being miserable, too, but mostly it’s being happy together.” For his part, Morrie says, “It’s the way she looks at me.”

Their casual ardor is noticeable in such activities as homework (opposite page), a scene that made Morrie’s mother inquire, “If you kids want to neck, why don’t you neck? If you want TV, why don’t you watch TV, and if you want to study, why don’t you study? I don’t see how you can manage all three at once.”

SMALL CROWD, BIG DATE

With surprisingly mature understanding Barbara and Morrie make a point of doing little things for each other to show that they do not take each other for granted. Though Barbara says that golf is “nothing but walk, walk, walk,” faithfully she follows Morrie around when he plays (top left). And though Morrie would prefer to “tear like mad” when he is at the wheel of a car, he considerately holds the speed down when Barbara is along (above).

They like going around with other teen-age couples, whether to a throw-together dance (below) where they may be more engrossed in the “steadies’ clutch” than in their footwork, or to big events like a double date at Colorado Springs for a meal and a swim. Morrie’s mother went along with the four youngsters as chaperone but nobody seemed to mind, particularly when she offered to pay part of the $30 tab the boys had to square up before leaving.

A TIFF, A TRIBUTE

Spending so much time together leads to an occasional squabble (below), and when Barbara and Morrie spat they recite every imagined meanness that ever has marred their idyl. Seeking reassurance, one asks, “Do you still want to go steady?” and the answer usually is, “If you do.” The worst threat Morrie can fling is, “O.K., I’ll go back to the guys,” and then Barbara pleads, “Let’s not fight anymore,- ever.” When all is going well, Barbara will receive a “happy, happy” gift from Morrie (opposite page), the more welcome because its coming is utterly unpredictable.

The summer ahead is filled with some uncertainty. Though both have won college scholarships Barbara will work as a typist in Greeley while Morrie is away at Estes Park working in a restaurant to help pay future school expenses. They do not say it, but each is aware that next fall when they enter college everything may be different and they may find themselves going steady with a boy and a girl they now do not even know.

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SMOKING OUT JAP SPIES

by Don Eddy

If you are not yet awake to the peril of invasion on our west coast, this article will give you a jolt. For weeks Mr. Eddy has been hot on the trail of enemies in our midst. He has seen U.S. agents uncover nests of spies working with short-wave radio, blinkers, signal flags, and carrier pigeons. And we’ve been handling these deadly snakes with kid gloves! Eighty per cent of them slip from the Army’s grip through legal loopholes. With our shores in imminent danger, this article is a challenging call for action.

JUST before midnight on last December 22, a young California farmer and his girl were sitting in a parked automobile at the brink of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was a clear, crisp night.

It was the girl who first noticed a mysterious pin point of light on the sea. It went on and off, on and off, then vanished. The man got out of the car to watch. Several hundred yards away, on a sharp promontory, he thought he saw a small light blinking seaward.

Afterward he told investigators rue-fully, ” I knew I should have gone over there!” But the girl was frightened. So they went back to town for a soda. They told the soda jerker. He was apathetic. “Just some kind of Navy maneuvers,” he said.

A few hours later, and not many miles distant, a Japanese submarine fired two torpedoes at an American oil tanker which had crept out of a darkened port under secret orders. The tanker zigzagged and escaped. So did two others. These three were the Larry Doheny, the H. M. Storey, and the Idaho. A fourth, the tanker Montebello, was less fortunate.

Ninety minutes before dawn residents of a beach settlement were awakened by gunfire just offshore. They reached their front windows in time to see and hear a tremendous explosion. That was a Japanese torpedo smashing into the Montebello’s bottom. She sank quickly. Thirty-eight members of her crew were saved by villagers after their bullet-pocked lifeboat capsized in the surf.

Next day the farmer led investigators to the headland where he had seen the lights. There were prints of a small shoe (“Jap-size,” they decided) in the sand and a mark where a five-celled flashlight had been dropped.

Thus that wartime bugaboo, that butt of endless satire, the “flashing signal from the shore,” has entered the secret annals of the new war. This time it was no laughing matter. Authorities believe spies saw the tankers leave port and blinked word to the submarine.

Day and night, in every nook and cranny of America, the grim work of tracking enemy spies is going forward. I have talked with scores of our anti-espionage agents since Pearl Harbor. Not one doubts that powerful spy rings are operating inside our borders, at least three, loosely coordinated, on our Pacific coast. Irrefutable evidence has been unearthed that spies are using all the time-honored methods of communication—blinkers, invisible ink, signal flags, even carrier pigeons—plus one we didn’t have to worry about last time: ultra-short-wave radio.

Running down enemy spies is one of the most difficult and unsatisfactory of wartime jobs. Why? Because suspecting them and convicting them are two different things. True, several hundred have been interned for the duration. A few have committed suicide, but not one has been condemned to death.

Other warring nations treat spies as military offenders; judgment is swift and final. Until recently we have given them kid-glove treatment, handling them through civil agencies, notably the FBI, and bending over backward to give them all their legal rights.

Fortunately for the spies, and perhaps unwisely for national safety, our democratic laws provide loopholes that even dangerous enemy agents can slip through.

One of these is the fundamental that every individual is presumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty. That puts the burden of proof on the arresting officers, and circumstantial evidence is seldom sufficient. Even a rookie cop knows that conspiracy, of which espionage is a form, is one of the most difficult accusations to prove to legal satisfaction.

So here is one disturbing result: Of the thousands arrested on reasonable suspicion in the first roundups after the outbreak of the war, almost 80 per cent have been released with polite apologies for lack of conclusive evidence! In fact, they were not even taken to court.

This is the secret reason for the current evacuation of Japanese, German, and Italian aliens from our Pacific coast “theater of military operations” in the states of Washington, Oregon, and California. The first real clamp-down on the spy menace in this area came on February 20, when the President issued an executive order giving the Army authority to evacuate anyone, alien or citizen, from military areas. Such areas are to be defined by Army officers, and may include the entire west coast if that is considered advisable. Until this order was issued, the FBI controlled persons of Axis descent who were aliens, but was powerless to deal en masse with those who were citizens.

BEFORE it is over, the lives and fortunes of about 300,000 individuals will have been affected. About a third of these are alien enemies and the rest are their American-born progeny.

Anti-espionage is a jigsaw puzzle of tiny bits that must be patched together painstakingly to make a whole design. Young Eddie Good wasn’t thinking of that as he fiddled with the dials of his short-wave receiver on his father’s farm in the Pacific Northwest one February night. Eddie is one of the great “ham” fraternity of short-wave enthusiasts. His sender had been sealed by the government; all licensed amateurs were shut down. He was dialing through the band from force of habit when he intercepted a strong dot-and-dash signal. Listening, he decided it was gibberish. Nothing made sense, yet Eddie realized that the hand on the key was swift and sure.

He got a pencil and paper and copied the message: “KLGYD MCLSJBX JN KSMYCYH . . .” There was a lot more of it. Eddie thought it was funny, so he sent it to one of his friends in the Army. The friend passed it to his sergeant, and eventually it found its way to G-2, the Department of Military Intelligence, and things began to happen.

Onto the Good farm one twilight swarmed a squad of soldiers with elaborate wireless equipment. They concealed their truck in an outbuilding, ran up a system of antennas, and sat down to listen. The air was soundless all that night; it was, in fact, two nights later before the mysterious sending station came back into action.

A few minutes later one of the soldiers backed out the truck and roared away. One of his comrades told Eddie, “He’s gone to the next station.” Gradually Eddie learned that three listening stations were in action at widely separated points. Each had equipment to determine the direction from which the signal was coming. With this information, it was necessary only to draw lines on a map until they crossed. The sending station was located where the three lines met.

But it wasn’t as simple as that. The place where the lines intersected proved to be an open field on the slope of a hill, about two miles outside a fishing village. A dirt road passed along one side of the field, then meandered up the hill, connecting eventually with a main highway. The road was watched, and the listening posts continued their vigil.

Again, on the third night, the mysterious signals came through. This time a watcher on the road discovered that at the time the dots and dashes were heard, a wholesale fish truck from the village ground slowly up the hill. On the third night after that, when the truck returned, soldiers pounced out of hiding and stopped it.

There were four men in the truck, two on the seat and two apparently asleep on boxes of fish in the back. A search revealed nothing, until one of the soldiers crawled under the truck and discovered a secret compartment containing extra storage barreries. By following the wires they found the sending set—smashed to smithereens under a heavy box of fish.

Yet, under our tolerant laws, this was not sufficient evidence to convict the truckmen of espionage! Why? Because there was no satisfactory proof of conspiracy; in other words, no proof that the truckmen were actually sending messages to the enemy.

In almost any other country the four would have been summarily executed; they are living comfortably in a concentration camp for the duration. Yet investigators are convinced these men were units of a spy ring, picking up information on ship movements at the harbor cannery where they delivered their fish, and flashing it to enemy submarines on the return trip.

More recently, a fresh rash of mysterious wireless signals had broken out along the Pacific coast. Authorities believe that at least two other mobile sets are operating, quite likely encouraged by the gentle treatment we accord enemy spies. . . .

PACKS of Japanese submarines off our west coast just after Pearl Harbor were brain-teasers to anti-espionage agents: Where were the subs being refueled? Most likely area was Baja California’, Mexico, that 760-mile finger of wild, sparsely settled land jutting down from San Diego, Calif. About 1,000 Japanese aliens live in that desolate region. Many are fishermen.

In January, two husky young American sportsmen decided to explore the coast line, fishing as they went. One was an expert abalone diver, able to go down several fathoms and wrest shellfish from the rocks.

Far south of Ensenada, the last settlement, they came one afternoon to a fisher-man’s shack on a cliff above the sea. They noticed it particularly because of a galvanized tank resembling a water tower. The tank stood on the seaward side of the house. The place was deserted except for a snarling dog. The young men made a camp on the beach some distance away. That night they went back to investigate.

They found that the water tank was empty and smelled strongly of oil. From the bottom, a three-inch pipe passed into the ground. They went back to the water’s edge, and after some search found the pipe again. It came out of the sand and extended into the sea. One of the men, the diver, followed it until the depth became too great.

Back in the United States they reported their find. The information was flashed to the commander of Mexican troops in the area. After a time word came back that the shack had been occupied by a Japanese family, who had been evacuated to the interior a week earlier.

HERE is a typical piece of an anti-espionage jigsaw. Was this a makeshift fueling station for enemy submarines? Were sub commanders able to take bearings from shore, grapple and raise the end of the pipe, while agents ashore dumped drums of fuel oil into the tank? Nobody knows the answers.

Yet our agents know that at least two bands of carrier pigeons are being worked almost daily across the Mexican border. One was shot by a hunter, and many others have been seen. Apparently this is part of an international spy ring’s operations, possibly to convey information from the United States into Mexico, from where it can be disseminated with less interference. It takes little imagination to hypothecate a case: a submarine flashing instructions to an agent in California by wireless; the agent sending word across the border by carrier pigeon; agents in Mexico standing by to refuel the sub at the appointed time.

But imagination has little place in trapping enemy spies. . . .

Raids on alien nests along the west coast have revealed amusing and astonishing things.

In one house, officers found a complete set of U.S. Navy signal flags. The head of the family explained naively that they were used in “Boy Scout work.” Three people lived there—a man and wife and her brother. The youngest was 47; the oldest 52. The officers thought they were a little mature for Boy Scouting and took them along.

After neighbors became suspicious because a Japanese housewife hung out an enormous washing every day, anti-espionage agents raided the place. They found a closet stacked to the ceiling with baby’s diapers, some in regulation squares and others sewn together. The house stood on a cliff above the sea. On the brink of the cliff, running parallel to the sea, was a wire clothesline 300 feet long. They deduced, since there was no baby in the house, that the diapers must have been used for code signaling—the regulation size for dots and the double-width for dashes. But they can’t prove it.

One hundred miles inland, an indigent German farmer suddenly began to spend money lavishly. He paid off his mortgage, bought miles of barbed wire, hired workmen to make a tight fence. When a troop of United States cavalry on maneuvers blundered along by mistake, he came out brandishing a shotgun and ordered them away. They went, but a few days later a raiding party swooped down and found three other Germans hiding in a root cellar. Their conflicting stories indicated they were being smuggled into the country, and agents think they broke up a way station of an enemy “underground railway.”

On a bitter night, a raiding party moved into a middle-class Japanese home to talk with its occupants. The house was frigid. Noticing that a fire had been laid on the hearth, an agent asked permission to light it. The Japanese said nothing, so the agent started a blaze. But the chimney didn’t draw. Smoke backed up, filled the house, and forced them all outdoors. The Japanese thought it was a great joke until an agent climbed to the roof and found that an automobile spotlight had been fitted into the top of the chimney. When the smoke cleared they traced the wires and found a concealed push-button switch. The device was evidently intended to signal airplanes.

MUCH less conclusive is Los Angeles’s own mystery—the mystery of the green sedan. For three weeks after Pearl Harbor this wraithlike vehicle cruised the vicinity of military emplacements at night. On twelve occasions its occupants fired on military sentries. Their aim was usually indifferent. Eventually the sedan vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared.

In San Francisco snipers and sluggers created a mysterious reign of terror among guards around strategic areas. In one night they ambushed four state guardsmen on duty at bridges, beating one so severely he will be hospitalized for months. All these attacks seem to have been senseless, since sabotage was not attempted. Some investigators think they may be dress rehearsals for mass attacks at later dates.

Mexicans with whom I have talked in Baja California are convinced the Japanese will make their first assault on the Pacific coast in May. This seems to be generally believed among the peons, who say their Japanese neighbors tell them that one large California city will be a “mass of smoking ruins” that month. While military authorities take this skeptically, all armed forces are kept in a state of continuous alert, both for invaders and for enemies within.

Of the aliens evacuated from west coast areas, some have filtered into the Mississippi Valley. A few others have gone to the Great Plains. But most of them are clinging to the fringes of the prohibited zones and have settled in the interior valleys of our westernmost states.

One town in California has lost almost half of its 6,000 inhabitants in evacuated alien Germans, Italians, and Japanese. Many towns have lost one third or more of their people. Evacuees include persons of almost every occupation, from laborers to professional men and bankers. I talked with an evacuated Italian doctor who has been in the United States 52 years, owns property, pays taxes, has voted for every President since William Howard Taft—but had never bothered to become a citizen.

There remains, however, the indisputable fact that enemy spies are operating on our west coast and that some of them, at least, must be among the alien population. Military authorities feel safer with all of them out of the potential combat zone.

What an organized fifth column ashore can do to assist an invading force is becoming increasingly apparent as details of Pearl Harbor continue to be revealed. Best-known incident is that of Japanese farmers who cut enormous arrows in fields of cane, the arrows pointing to military bases. In our Northwest, Seattle had a similar scare a few nights after the outbreak of the war. Airmen reported a string of “signal fires” pointing straight to the blacked-out city. An investigation revealed them to be brush fires started by state workmen along a main highway.

Less well known is the fact that the old targetship Utah, of no military value, was sunk at Pearl Harbor because she was moored where an airplane carrier usually lay. The carrier, blacked out, slipped out of the harbor Saturday night and the Utah moved over to her place. It was no more than a routine fleet operation, and apparently went unnoticed by spies ashore. Next day dive bombers concentrated on the Utah, evidently believing they were hammering the carrier.

Comparable to many of the mysterious happenings on our own west coast is the advertisement which a Japanese silk-importing firm placed in Honolulu newspapers the first week in December. It was apparently an innocuous bid for trade. But our anti-espionage agents found a cut-out screen which, when fitted over the advertisement, revealed certain words that spelled out a warning of the time and place of the impending attack.

THESE are the things authorities on our west coast intend to circumvent, if they can, by removing all aliens from preparedness zones. They don’t expect they can eliminate all danger of fifth-column activity; too much of it, they are convinced, is centered in traitorous American citizens.

The argument they hear most often is that hardships are being imposed on loyal aliens by lumping them with a few who may be disloyal. Their answer to this is sound: “All who are loyal to America must make sacrifices for the war effort. This is your sacrifice, your opportunity. Surely you won’t mind a little inconvenience if you can assist in saving American lives and property.”

And there’s only one answer to that.

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BEWARE THE BANK GOBBLER

George W. Hensel, Jr., warns of the chain gang that threatens small towns, in an interview with
JOHN T. FLYNN

I WAS sitting in George Hensel’s big parlor talking with him about the new bank building just on the other side of the road. Hensel is the president of that bank and he was telling me about it and about other country banks and bankers he had known. This was in Quarryville, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a village of a thousand souls in the center of one of the richest farming sections in the world. Go south from that bank a dozen miles and you will almost run into the Susquehanna as she flows into Maryland. Hensel’s bank stands at a fork in the road. One prong leads due south. The other leads off to York County and beyond to Gettysburg. Over these roads swarmed the armies of Lee as they pressed their desperate invasion of Pennsylvania. This was Lee’s gateway to the North. Now they call it the Gateway to the South. And George Hensel, big, generous-hearted son of Pennsylvania, has a picture of Lee upon his wall. “For,” he tells you, “this is where the South begins.” Along this road now move two ceaseless streams—men of the North going south and men of the South motoring north. Hensel’s home is truly the

House by the side of the road
Where the race of men goes by

And so Hensel has had carved on one of the stone posts that guard his porch those words:

Where the race of men goes by.

But in Quarryville they will tell you the race doesn’t go by—all the men seem to stop at Hensel’s house.

I had been talking about banks and money to some of the big bankers of New York who direct the flow of hundreds of millions. Some of them had told me the day of the little bank and the little banker is over. They could see very near the time when the country banker would disappear and his bank would become just a branch of the big city institution. Down in Washington a committee of congressmen is studying the subject and powerful interests are trying to get a law passed permitting national banks to buy up these little country banks and turn them into branches.

I thought I would like to hear what a country banker thought of all this. And so I went to see my friend George W. Hensel, Jr., president of the Quarryville National Bank. I picked him because I know he is one of the wisest of men, a genial, kindly, observant, tolerant man. For all that he is a hardware merchant and a bank president in a village of a thousand people he is one of the best-known men in Pennsylvania, noted for his wide acquaintance, his countless friendships, his varied interests and the achievement of having carved out an extraordinary career in a little farming village.

“EVERY now and then,” he said, “we go in for abolishing things L in this country. Right now it looks as if we had gone to work on the country banker. The big bankers want to buy up all the little country banks and turn them into branches of the big banks. It’s amazing how this thing is spreading. Back in 1900 there were sixty branch banks all over the country. Now there are three thousand. Look at this man Giannini. Here is a young Italian starts out in California twenty years ago with nothing. Now his bank, the Bank of Italy, has 299 branches all over the state. In 170 towns in that state the country banker has disappeared. Instead they have branch banks run from San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“A lot of states prohibit this, twenty-nine of them forbid it one way or another. So what do they do? The promoters form a holding company. Then the holding company buys up the stock of the country banks. They don’t call them branches. They seem to be independent. But the stock is owned by a central holding company in some big city and to all intents and purposes they are branch banks. Only they are called chain banks. Out in Minnesota, for instance, they have thirty-five chains owning over 400 banks. One man in Minnesota owns the stock of sixty-four banks in that state, Michigan, North Dakota and Montana.

“At the last meeting of the American Investment Bankers’ Association in Quebec it was said that at least half of the country banks were lined up to be taken over into chains if Congress would just pass a law to permit large-scale branch banking by national banks.”

“Well,” I interrupted, “these big city bankers say that you little fellows in the country don’t know how to run banks. They tell me that in the last eight years five thousand banks have failed and that seventy per cent of them were little banks.”

“That’s true,” said Brother Hensel. “Did you ever see an empty mill dam? Well, it may be empty because the water that flowed into it has stopped running. The streams that supplied it have ceased to flow. The country around has dried up. It’s not the mill dam that failed. It’s the country that failed. A bank is built on a community. In the last eight years a lot of farming communities in this country have failed. You know a bank can fail and wreck a community. But it is also possible for a community to fail and wreck a bank. Most of those little banks failed because the communities they were built on failed. Any kind of banks would have failed there.

OF COURSE, a lot of them should never have been brought into existence. There are foolish bankers just as there are foolish merchants. But don’t forget the country banker has no monopoly on failing. Only a few months ago a banker who owned a chain of twelve banks died. The next morning all of the twelve banks failed to open. You see that failure didn’t hit just one town. It hit twelve towns. When the Bankers Trust Company of Atlanta failed recently, eighty-three small banks in its chain in eighty-three towns of Georgia and Florida failed. When the Merchants Bank in Canada closed its doors the people of four hundred towns woke up next morning to find their local branches closed. When one of our little country unit banks fails it is just a small explosion in one town. When one of these chains blows up it’s like a pack of firecrackers going off in scores of towns.”

“But these big bankers say you don’t make any money,” I put in. “They tell me that it takes a lot of brains to run a modern bank and the necessary brains are not available in the small banks. In one large agricultural state, they say the banks in that state are operated at a profit of around one and one-half per cent and many are run at a loss.”

“Well, there’s no doubt about that,” was Hensel’s answer. “There are poor business men in the banking business as in every other business. But I am afraid these great gentlemen are overlooking something. You can’t always judge the utility of a country bank by the profits it makes. You know that in times of depression even the smartest city bankers don’t make very large profits. Now a lot of these agricultural communities have not been sharing in all the prosperity we have been having these last eight years. And so their banks have not been doing so well. But many of them have been standing there against great odds rendering fine service to their people.

“If banks are established for the benefit of bankers, then the only thing to gauge them by is the per cent profit they can make. But I have never thought that banks were set up for the benefit of the bankers. They are established for the benefit of the people. If a banker can make a profit out of his bank while it is serving its people, all well and good. But the first thing is to serve the community. The bank is primarily the depository of the money of the people of the village. The money belongs to them.

The banker’s duty is to see that it is safely kept and is there for them when they want it. Meanwhile he must see that the money is used for the benefit of the people of the village. A banker visiting a village in the far west of Canada said he went into a branch bank which had $400,000 in deposits. Of this money $300,000 had been sent east to the parent bank. The village was getting the use of only $100,000 of its own money. That bank may make money. But what good is it to that village? You know there are two kinds of bank failures. There’s the kind where the bank just busts and gets its name in the papers. Then there’s the kind where it keeps on running but stops serving its people, just gets to be a machine for collecting interest. That’s sometimes the worst kind of a failure.

“Suppose our bank here was just a branch of a bank in Philadelphia. We’d have a branch manager. He’d be a stranger sent out from Philadelphia. That’s all right. We welcome strangers here in Quarryville. But he wouldn’t know our village. What 1 is more, he wouldn’t have much real interest in us. He would probably be a young man with ambition to make good here—that is, show a good record of profits—so as to get a promotion as rapidly as possible to some bigger town and then shake the dust of Quarryville from his feet. Then we would have a new manager for a little while.

“And how would we make loans? Well, if Emery Null came into the bank to borrow ten dollars, the manager would get out the book of rules, turn to page 46, rule 167 and that would tell him the loan couldn’t be made. We don’t have to turn to any book of rules here. We know Emery Null. And by the way, Emery used to come into our bank at intervals and borrow ten dollars. He always got me to endorse his note. He was the only man I endorsed for. One day he presented himself for his loan when I was away. He went to the cashier and said: ” ‘I wish to borrow ten dollars but my endorser is away. Can I get the loan?’ “‘Well, Emery,’ said the cashier, ‘I’m sure you’re all right. But could you furnish some collateral?’ “Emery fished into his pants’ pocket and pulled out a ten-dollar gold piece. ‘How is that for collateral?’ he inquired.

” ‘That’s excellent collateral all right,’ the cashier assured him. ‘But why do you want to borrow ten dollars when you have ten dollars?’ “‘Well,’ said Emery, drawing himself up to his full height, ‘from time to time I deem it wise to come here and reestablish my credit.’ NOW we have a lot of customers like Emery. You can’t put into a book of rules the human elements a country banker must deal with. We have three thousand depositors and ten directors. And we seldom have an application for a loan in which at least one or more of our directors doesn’t know the applicant thoroughly. Character is one of the biggest kinds of collateral used in this bank. When we don’t know a man the first question we ask is what kind of a wife he has. Often we have to turn down a loan because the applicant’s wife isn’t good collateral. You can usually get a loan on a good wife in this bank.

“Then there are all the countless little facts about the man himself which we know. Years ago when my father ran this bank a man came in and asked for a loan of one thousand dollars. Any branch manager in the land would have turned him down. He had no collateral. But he had a good father and mother back of him, a sober, industrious young manhood, a good wife and a few kids. He was a bright, keen, ambitious young fellow. My father knew all about him and the business he wanted to buy. He made the loan. 1 mention it merely because this man died last week, the most prosperous citizen of this section. He spent his life here, built up a fine business, gave work to many people, was a useful citizen. If that loan had not been made he might have gone away from Quarryville to seek his fortune some place else. That’s the basis on which we make our loans. We don’t pretend to be great bankers here. I am a hardware merchant. Our directors are just business men and farmers. Yet we have built up our bank until our surplus is four times our capital and we have had only three losses of three hundred dollars here in our own territory.

“It doesn’t seem right when a man in Quarryville wants to borrow money in Quarryville—money that belongs to the people in Quarryville—that he should have to get permission of a Philadelphia or New York official who knows nothing about our town, its people or its farms, who has never been any nearer to a wheat field than he gets in a bowl of breakfast food and never met a hog face to face in his life.

“This bank has prospered amazingly. And yet many of our loans are the kind no branch bank would countenance. We lend all kinds of small sums—five dollars, ten dollars, fifty dollars. We have notes for as little as three dollars. We lend a man one day thirty-five dollars to move. The next day we lend forty dollars to another one whose wife is expecting a baby. We lend sixty dollars to a farmer who wants to buy a tractor, five dollars to a man whose children have the mumps, seventy-five dollars another day to help a young fellow get married and one hundred dollars the next day to some troubled farmer to bury a wife. Our little bank stands there a friend—a kind friend and a strong one, I hope—to which our people turn in all the serious moments of their lives.”

PEOPLE come to Hensel for all sorts of advice. They want their wills drawn and they want him to act as executor. He had thirty wills in his safe the day I was there, wills he had drawn and in half of which he was named executor. Occasionally people leave their children in his care. He always has a flock of four or five orphans whose small estates he is administering. He is a kind of human trust company. He is the leader in the life and fun of the village. Saturday night in Hensel’s hardware store is fiddlin’ night. Half a dozen old gentlemen fiddlers will be there with their fiddles playing the old tunes and one or two can do a dance. Every spring Hensel mobilizes all the old fiddlers of that section at Parkers-burg for a big fiddlin’ field day, with five thousand people devouring the music. Henry Ford came through Quarryville and made a little visit. “I can get together forty-six fiddlers,” he told Hensel. “And how many can you muster?” When Hensel answered “176,” Henry murmured: , “Well, Hensel, you are richer in fiddlers than I am.”

Hensel is hibernating governor of the Slumbering Groundhog Lodge, a kind of burlesque, skylarking satire of a fraternal organization which he organized and which has been written about in every paper in the country. He is president of the Martinville Horse Detective Association and of the Consolidated Horse Detective Associations for tracing stolen horses. He has built bird-feeding stations all over Lancaster County, takes a big batch of children to the circus every year and with his kindly, gentle wife visits practically every old person in his territory twice every year. And he has for years written a weekly feature for the Philadelphia Inquirer called “Down Lancaster Way.”

Of course, all country bankers are not like Hensel. But Hensel thinks the country bank plays an important part in providing the village with its leaders.

THAT bank over there has done something else for us besides take care of our money. It has not only developed the community, it has developed men. Every village needs its leaders. But you will never have the leaders unless you have something to lead. Man after man has been brought into our directorate from his small business or his farm. The honor and responsibility has deepened the ties that bound him here, stimulated his sense of responsibility and inspired him to move out toward the front. I want to preserve these little independent banks not only to preserve the independence of the bankers but to save the independence of the towns. I don’t want our villages to become just branches of big towns.

“Keep on the way you are going and Main Street will become just a string of branch managers—the grocery-store manager from New York, the clothing-store manager from Baltimore, the hat-store manager from Newark, the shoe-store manager from Boston, the drug-store manager from Pittsburgh, the branch-bank manager from God knows where and nobody from your town but the fellow who sweeps the floor and carries the bundles. When that time comes what kind of opportunity will there be in your town for your sons? The only opportunity you will be able to offer your boys will be a railroad ticket on the main line for New York, where they can go and learn to be branch managers for stores in other men’s towns. What we spend will go out of the town by way of the store and what we save will go out by way of the banks. The chains will get us coming and going. They’ll still let you manage the farms and do the plowing. You can raise the corn and wheat and tobacco, fatten the cattle and dig the potatoes; send them to town, get your money for them and as the money arrives in town the “chain gang” along Main Street will be there to relieve you of it and send it right back to the big town from which it came.

“Remember what Shylock said: ‘You take my life when you take that by which I live.’ Maybe a banker ought not quote Shylock. But you may set this down as settled: that you take the life of the small town when you take the business by which it lives. And that business, whatever it may be, must have blood coursing through its veins. That blood is the money and credit of the town, and the heart in the middle of the town’s body that keeps that blood moving in a wholesome stream is the town bank. Take that heart away or interfere with its functions and don’t be surprised to see your village die of heart disease.”

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THE Superiority of MODERN WOMAN

More and more women have invaded fields from which their supposed physical, mental or psychological limitations once barred them. With increasing opportunities and a formidable record of success in competition with men, women are now laying claim not only to equality but even to superiority. By recognizing the fields of their superiority, women can attain their proper place in society and perform vital functions for the benefit of mankind in this no-longer-a-man’s world.

by Ashley Montagu

Woman superior to man? This is a new idea. There have been people who have cogently, but apparently not convincingly, argued that women were as good as men, but I do not recall anyone who has publicly provided the evidence or even argued that women were better than or superior to men.

How indeed could one argue such a case in the face of all the evidence to the contrary? Is it not a fact that by far the largest number of geniuses, great painters, poets, philosophers, scientists, etc., etc. have been men and that women have made by comparison a very poor showing? Clearly isn’t the superiority with men? Where are the Leonardos, the Michelangelos, the Shakespeares, the Donnes, the Galileos, the Whiteheads, the Kants, the Bachs, et al. of the feminine sex?

In fields in which women have excelled, in poetry and the novel, how many poets and novelists of the really first rank have there been? Haven’t well-bred young women been educated for centuries in music? And how many among them have been great composers or instrumentalists? Composers—none of the first rank. Instrumentalists—well, in the recent period there have been such accomplished artists as Myra Hess and Wanda Landowska.

The Royal Society of London has at last opened its doors and admitted women to the highest honor which it is in the power of the English scientific world to bestow—the Fellowship of the Royal Society. I well remember that when I was a youth—less than a quarter-century ago—it was considered inconceivable that any woman would ever have brains enough to attain great distinction in science. Madame Curie was an exception. But the half dozen women Fellows of the Royal Society in England are not. Nor is Lise Meitner. And Madame Curie no longer remains the only woman to share in the Nobel Prize award for science. There is Marie Curie’s daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie, and there is Gerty Cory (1947) for physiology and medicine.

Nobel prizes in literature have gone to Selma Lagerlof, Grazia Deledda, Sigrid Undset, Pearl Buck, and Gabriela Mistral. As an artist Mary Cassatt (1845-1926) was every bit as good as her great French friends Degas and Manet considered her to be, but it has taken the rest of the world another 50 years grudgingly to admit it. Among contemporaries Georgia O’Keeffe can hold her own with the best.

It is not however going to be any part of this article to show that women are about to emerge as superior scientists, musicians, painters or the like. I believe that in these fields they may emerge as equally good, though possibly not in as large numbers as men, largely because the motivations and aspirations of most women will continue to be directed elsewhere. But what must be pointed out is that women are, in fact, just beginning to emerge from the period of subjection when they were treated in a manner not unlike that still meted out to the Negro in the Western world.

The biggest dent in this series of myths was made by World War I when women were for the first time called upon to replace men in occupations which were formerly the exclusive preserve of men. They became bus drivers, conductors, factory workers, farm workers, laborers, supervisors, executive officers and did a great many other jobs at which many had believed they could never work. At first it was said that they didn’t do as well as men, then it was grudgingly admitted that they weren’t so bad, and by the time the war was over many employers were reluctant to exchange their women employees for men!

But the truth was out—women could do as well as men in most of the fields which had been considered forever closed to them because of their alleged natural incapacities, and in many fields, particularly where delicate precision work was involved, they had proved themselves superior to men. From 1918 to 1939 the period for women was one essentially of consolidation of gains so that by the time that World War II broke out there was no hesitation on the part of anyone in calling upon women to serve in the civilian roles of men and in many cases also in the armed services.

But women have a long way to go before they reach full emancipation—emancipation from the myths from which they themselves suffer. It is of course untrue that women have smaller brains than men. The fact is that in proportion to body weight they have larger brains than men; but this fact is in itself of no importance because within the limits of normal variation of brain size and weight there exists no relation between these factors and intelligence.

Women have been conditioned to believe that they are inferior to men, and they have assumed that what everyone believes is a fact of nature, and as men occupy the superior positions in almost all societies this superiority is taken to be a natural one. “Woman’s place is in the home” and man’s place is in the counting house and on the board of directors. “Women should not meddle in men’s affairs!’ And yet the world does move. Some women have become Members of Parliament and even attained Cabinet rank. In the United States they have even got as far as the Senate. They have participated in peace conferences, but it is still inconceivable to most persons that there should ever be a woman Prime Minister or President. Yet that day too will come.

Woman has successfully passed through the abolition period, the abolition of her thraldom to man; she has now to pass successfully through the period of emancipation, the freeing of herself from the myth of inferiority and the realization of her potentialities to the fullest.

It is because women have had to be so unselfish and forbearing and self-sacrificing and maternal that they possess a deeper understanding than men of what it is to be human. What is so frequently termed feminine indecision, the inability of women to make up their minds is in fact an inverse reflection of the trigger-thinking of men. Every salesgirl prefers the male customer because women take time to think about what they are buying, and the male usually “hasn’t sense enough to do so.”

Women don’t think in terms of “Yes” or “No!’ Life isn’t as simple as all that—except to males. Men tend to think in terms of the all-or-none principle, in terms of black and white. Women are more ready to make adjustments, to consider the alternative possibilities and see the other colors and gradations in the range between black and white.

By comparison with the deep involvement of women in living, men appear to be only superficially so. Compare the love of a male for a female with love of the female for the male. It is sometimes the difference between a rivulet and a great deep ocean. Men often act as if they haven’t been adequately loved, as if they had been frustrated and rendered hostile; becoming aggressive they say that aggressiveness is natural and women are inferior in this respect because they tend to be gentle and unaggressive!

But it is precisely in this capacity to love, this unaggressiveness that the superiority of women to men is demonstrated, for whether it be natural to be loving and cooperative or not, so far as the human species is concerned its evolutionary destiny, its very survival is more closely tied to this capacity for love and cooperation than with any other.

This is of course where women can realize their power for good in the world and make their greatest gains. It is the function of women to teach men how to be human. Women must not permit themselves to be deviated from this function by those who tell them that their place is in the home in subservient relation to man. It is indeed in the home that the foundations of the kind of world in which we live are laid, and in this sense it will always remain true that the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. It is in this sense that women must assume the job of making men who will know how to make a world fit for human beings to live in. The greatest single step forward in this direction will be made when women consciously assume this task—the task of teaching their children to be like themselves, loving and cooperative.

As for geniuses I think that almost everyone will agree that there have been more geniuses for being human among women than there have among men. This after all is the true genius of women, and it is because we have not valued the qualities for being human anywhere near as high as we have valued those for accomplishment in the arts and sciences that we have almost forgotten them.

Surely the most valuable quality in any human being is his capacity for being loving and cooperative. We have been placing our emphases on the wrong values—it is time we recognized what every man and every woman at the very least subconsiously knows—the value of being loving and the value of those who can teach this better than anyone else.

Physically and psychically women are by far the superiors of men. The old chestnut about women being more emotional than men has been forever destroyed by the facts of two great wars. Women under blockade, heavy bombardment, concentration camp confinement and similar rigors withstand them vastly more successfully than men. The psychiatric casualties of civilian populations under such conditions are mostly masculine, and there are more men in our mental hospitals than there are women. The steady hand at the helm is the hand that has had the practice at rocking the cradle.

Because of their greater size and weight men are physically more powerful than women—which is not the same thing as saying that they are stronger. A man of the same size and weight as a woman of comparable background and occupational status would probably not be any more powerful than a woman. As far as constitutional strength is concerned women are stronger than men. Though women are more frequently ill than men, they recover from illness more easily and more frequently.

Women, in short, are fundamentally more resistant than men. With the exception of the organ systems subserving the functions of reproduction, women suffer much less frequently than men from the serious disorders which affect mankind. With the exception of India, women everywhere live longer than men.

The myth of masculine superiority once played such havoc with the facts that in the 19th century it was frequently denied by psychiatrists that the superior male could ever suffer from hysteria. Today it is fairly well known that males suffer from hysteria and hysteriform conditions with a preponderance over the female of seven to one! Epilepsy is much more frequent in males, and stuttering has an incidence of eight to one.

To the unbiased student of the facts there can no longer remain any doubt of the constitutional superiority of the female. I hope that I have removed any remaining doubts about her psychological superiority where psychological superiority most counts, namely to believe. But there appears to be a conspiracy of silence on this subject. Perhaps women feel that men ought to be maintained in the illusion of their superiority because it might not be good for them or the world to learn the truth.

In this sense this article perhaps should have been entitled “What Every Woman Knows!’ But I’m not sure that every woman knows it. What I am sure of is that many women don’t appear to know it and that there are even many women who are horrified at the thought that anyone can entertain the idea that women are anything but inferior to men. This sort of childishness does no one any good.

The world is in a mess. Men without any assistance from women have created it, and they have created it not because they have been failed by women but because men have never really given women a chance to serve them as they are best equipped to do—by teaching men how to love their fellow men.

Men have had a long run for their money in running the affairs of the world. It is time that women realized that men will continue to run the world for some time yet and that they can best assist men to run it more humanely by teaching them when young what humanity means. Men will thus not feel that they are being demoted but rather that their potentialities for good are so much more increased. What is more important, instead of feeling hostile towards women they will for the first time learn to appreciate them at their proper worth.

There is an old Spanish proverb which has it that a good wife is the workmanship of a good husband. Maybe. But of one thing we can be certain: a good husband is the workmanship of a good mother.

The best of all ways in which men can help themselves is to help women realize themselves. This way both sexes will come for the first time fully into their own, and the world of mankind may then look forward to a happier history than it has thus far enjoyed. ?

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Interesting People in the American Scene

Governor.

ROBERT OSCAR BLOOD is one public official who looks after the physical as well as the political needs of his constituents. Besides being Governor of New Hampshire, he is a practicing physician, and often keeps a committee waiting in the state capitol at Concord while he dashes over to the hospital to deliver a baby or perform an appendectomy. This dual life keeps him hopping. Starts his hospital rounds at 8; works as governor from 10 to 1; receives calls in his doctor’s office from 2 to 4; and winds up his official day at 5:30 to call on his patients, as he’s doing in our picture. The youngster is Robert Bruce Davis, whom the Governor brought into the world.

(Bob will be able to vote for him in 1960.) A Republican, Blood was elected in 1940. Plans to run for re-election this fall, when opponents will probably begin describing him again as “bloodless Blood” (that’s because he’s unemotional) and his friends will revive the slogan, “New Hampshire needs a Blood transfusion.” Born on an Enfield, N. H., farm, he earned his way through Dartmouth Medical School driving a milk wagon. Recently a political opponent fainted on the floor of the legislature while arguing against one of Blood’s pet bills. The Governor revived the fellow so successfully that ten minutes later he was back arguing against the bill again.

Superman.

Mitchell Leisen, Hollywood producer, is one of the world’s busiest men. Producing and directing movies would be a full-time job for most people, but Mitch is also artist, sculptor, architect, interior decorator, dancer, dress designer, aviator—to mention just a few of his side lines. Found time hanging heavy on his hands not long ago and decided to open a tailor shop; the business cleared $12,000 the first year. If a friend wants a new wing on his house, Mitch dashes off the plans. When he’s producing a picture, technicians and workmen enjoy a holiday. He turns out blueprints by the sets, and when they’re finished he swarms all over the lot, whacking nails and splashing on paint. Son of a Michigan beer manufacturer, he started out as an architect, but quit when he heard that Cecil B. De Mille needed a costume designer. Whipped up 35 dresses in 48 hours and landed the job. When Leisen filmed I Wanted Wings with Veronica Lake, he learned flying and directed from the clouds. Current hobby is taking kids who haven’t clicked in films, putting them into “packaged” revues which he sends to night clubs across the country. Below, he demonstrates a new dance step with Carmen Bailey.

Betsy Ross.

WHENEVER you salute a U.S. Army Hag, you can thank Mrs. Bertha McAnally, of Philadelphia, Pa., that “our flag is still there.” With 300 seamstress assistants, working on a 24-hour schedule, she turns out all the U.S. Army flags, from 38-foot Old Glories to the tiny pennants that flutter from official cars. Her official title is Supervisor of the Flag Manufacturing Section of the Quartermaster Corps, but officers invariably call her Betsy Ross. Today her organization turns out flags at the rate of nearly 2,000 a week. Sewing has always been second nature with Mrs. McAnally. As a youngster, she made all the clothes for her dolls, and her first job was stitching fancy baby caps. Moved into the Quartermaster Corps to work on uniforms, and sewed up her present job in 1909, when the Army started making all its own flags and picked her, as the best seamstress, to boss the department. Stars and stripes still have to be sewn on patiently by girls operating sewing machines, but Mrs. McAnally has invented a speed-up technique which she is showing, in the picture above, to an assistant, Sarah Campiglea. When General Douglas Mac-Arthur refused to lower the garrison flag during the siege of Manila, Mrs. McAnally beamed proudly: “We made that flag, and we’re making another one right now to run up in its place.”

Dream Girl.

HOW TO GO to sleep is a problem that bothers most of us only at night; Martha Alden, of Cleveland, Ohio, thinks about it all day. That’s her business. The nation’s busiest slumber specialist, she teaches the fine art of snoozing to 250,000 people a year in clubs, stores, and schools over the country. Figures her advice puts thousands of Americans to sleep every night. For bed-tossers, she prescribes: Grab the headboard of your bed, stretch muscles taut, then relax; that helps quiet war-weary nerves. Don’t curl up in a ball; that cuts down circulation, strains muscles, eventually sets you tossing. Lie on your right or left side, but not on your back or stomach. Make sure your bedroom is really dark; even a dim light can filter through your eyelids. Calm down emotionally before bedtime; don’t read thrillers or think about the day at the office just before you turn off the light. Curiosity about sleep kept Martha awake when she was studying Home Economics at Purdue University four years ago. Clocked the sleepless twists and turns of her sorority sisters, experimented with hot drinks and cold showers, and studied sleep psychology. After graduation, talked a sheet manufacturer into hiring her as a sleep consultant. Today, she practices what she preaches so successfully that the chatter of her three roommates never bothers her. Believes five hours’ sleep a night is enough if you follow a rigid pattern: same hours every night.

Hooky.

When scholars go fishing they usually run into trouble with the truant officer. But they can’t be charged with playing hooky if they study under Dr. Francois D’Eliscu, of Teachers College, Columbia University. A super-professor of fishing, Dr. D’Eliscu annually turns out scores of more or less complete anglers who go out and teach others how to outwit fishes. Shows his scholars how to cast a mean fly in the gym, and takes them on field-and-stream expeditions to put theory into practice. Admits there is no shortcut to finished fishing; says patience, practice, and persistence make expert pisca-toreadors. During his career as a professional fisherman, Dr. D’Eliscu estimates he has caught upwards of 2,000 fish. Landed the first one, a sucker, near his home town of Philadelphia, Pa., when he was 12. Since then, he has caught fishes bare-handed, with spears and harpoons, and the orthodox rod and reel. Incidentally, at Columbia, he prepares his fishermen against priorities: If equipment becomes scarce, they can make at home substitute lures from chicken and turkey feathers; live fish boxes from orange crates (lashed to the side of the boat); and nets from mop handles, wire suit hangers, and heavy twine (as he’s doing above).

Mike.

TO BOOST her glamour quotient for Paris audiences, a stage-struck French schoolgirl decided four years ago to take an exotic American name. So Simone Roussel became Mike Morgan, thinking her new name tres, tres chic—until somebody informed her “Mike” was definitely masculine. Hastily compromised on Michele Morgan, and proceeded to crack French box-office records in movies with Charles Boyer and Jean Gabin. Received a bid from an American producer in May, 1940, just as the Nazis swept through France, and crossed into Spain one hour before it was too late. Promptly scored a hit in her first picture here, Joan of Paris, and Hollywood is convinced Michele is going places fast. Her main ambition, next to becoming an actress, is to be a dyed-in-the-wool Yank. Back in France she learned English from Wild West films and eavesdropping on American tourists. Today she has a 5,000-word vocabulary, double the average American’s, and her accent is more like that of Paris, Illinois, than Paris, France. Holds her first citizenship papers, and likes to dance with the draftees in California Army camps. She presents a paradox even stranger than being a Parisian actress named Mike—she’s exactly five birthdays old. Born February 29, 1920, she celebrates only in leap years.

Second.

RAY ARCEL is America’s No. 2 second. For the last five years, he has made a hobby of seconding contenders for Joe Louis’s heavyweight crown. He has swabbed, patched, and generally encouraged 12 out of the champ’s last 21 victims, including Braddock, Nova, and both Baers. That’s Ray’s way of putting into practice his enthusiasm for the underdog, but he also hopes some day to second a new heavyweight champ. As a sock doctor, he’s a recognized expert with cotton swabs and antiseptic solutions to clean cuts and stop bleeding. Calls one special solution “dynamite” and uses it only when a fighter’s whole future is at stake. The stuff hardens over a cut like a rock and has to be sliced off with a knife after the bout. A former lightweight, Arcel started fighting professionally in 1914. In 12 fights, he was never knocked out, but he never knocked anybody out, either. So he decided to go in for patching up other fighters. Since then has been in the corner for more champs and near-champs than any other second in the business. Trained 13 titleholders in various classes, including Benny Leonard and Max Baer. At his Flushing, N.Y., home he’s the unofficial family doctor—whenever his wife cuts a finger, Ray goes to work with his antiseptics as conscientiously as if she were a promising bantamweight. His most vivid ring memory concerns one boxer who was taking an awful pasting. Backpedaling frantically, he kept begging Ray to throw in the towel. Ray hesitated because he thought the kid still had a chance. But finally the fighter shouted, “Throw it in now. I won’t be around again.” He wasn’t.

Brainchild.

ALTHOUGH Tony (“T. F.”) Roselle is just 10 years old, he’s a full-fledged inventor who has solved a major traffic problem. His traffic clock (right) tells pedestrians of his home town, Atlanta, Ga., how much time they have to cross an intersection before the light changes. Police recently planted four of “T.F.’s” clocks at a busy intersection as the start of possible city-wide installation, and officials in other cities are watching with interest to see whether they cut accidents. This is only one of the products of “T.F.’s” inventive talents. His family and teachers say, however, that he’s no longhaired genius, but a perfectly normal kid who’d rather play ball than study, and who often lets his mind wander in class. Ever since he could hold a hammer he’s been taking things apart and putting them back together. He’s the envy of his pals, because he always has the best scooter brake, the most efficient slingshot or model airplane engine—all conceived and built by himself. His grandfather, T. F. Roselle, his father, T. F. Jr., and his Uncle Joe are hat manufacturers who invent on the side; each holds a number of patents on machinery. “T. F. 3d” has a basement workshop with an electric lathe, drill press, and other power machinery, which keep him busy when he ought to be doing his homework. Chief household handyman, he keeps the family’s electrical equipment in shape, makes repairs on the car, and devised a yarn holder that’s the envy of Mrs. Roselle’s knitting circle. Got his idea for the traffic clock last summer, when he and his father, trapped at an intersection, barely escaped a crack-up. Now he’s cooking up a way to save crews of sunken subs by means of a hose which would be floated to the surface to siphon air to the ship.

Bouncer.

Usually a sober scientist, Waldo Lounsbury Semon astounded his colleagues one day when they found him bouncing a ball in his laboratory in Akron, Ohio. However, it was no ordinary ball, but his first lump of synthetic rubber. In 1939, after a hunt that took 14 years and 5,000 experiments, Semon finally evolved the right chemical formula, a combination most simply described as consisting of petroleum, gas, air, and soap. His product, used in the first synthetic tires made commercially in this country, will help stretch Uncle Sam’s war-production lines when the $400,000,000 government-sponsored synthetic rubber industry gets under way.

Semon’s scientific genius first served his country during the last war. As a sophomore at the University of Washington, he solved the chemical secret of invisible inks used by spies. Met his bride, the former Marjorie Gunn, in freshman chemistry class. Today their Akron home includes a basement lab, where they get together with their three daughters to conduct experiments and analyze foods. The youngest, Constance Anne, 13, has confined her experiments to fudge-making so far, but she’s learning by helping Dad (above). Only 42 and a husky 6-foot-2, Semon looks more like an All-American tackle than a scientist with 200 patents to his credit.

Mrs. Sox.

FIRST LADY of baseball is Elizabeth Grace Comiskey, head of the Chicago White Sox and the only woman president in the major leagues. No absentee owner, Mrs. Comiskey takes her diamond duties seriously. Surveys rookies and veterans critically at spring training in California, always travels with the team on the road, often sits on the bench during workouts, and seldom misses a game (just one, in fact, last season). The players call her Ma, and she takes a motherly interest in their personal and professional lives. Born Grace Reidy, she made a reputation as a child violinist at the age of 12, and today she is almost as interested in Bach and Brahms as she is in batters and basemen. Our photograph shows her playing for her 16-year-old son, Charles, whose ambition is to be a star first baseman like his granddad, Charles A. Comiskey, founder of the Chicago Sox and co-organizer of the American League. The White Sox really constitute “Ma” Comiskey’s family. One of her daughters, Grace Lou, is a club director, and another, Dorothy Elizabeth, is treasurer besides being the wife of Pitcher Johnny Rigney. “Ma” has been a fan ever since she attended her first baseball game in 1912. There she met J. Louis Comiskey, and they were married a year later. She took over the club reins in 1940 after her husband’s death, and has carried on the family tradition with flying colors.

War Dogs.

Sergeant Robert Pearce is the only American soldier permanently assigned to the doghouse. But that’s an honor, not a disgrace, because he’s the trainer for the new “Canine Command” set up by Major Glen L. Miller at Fort MacArthur, California. Has already taught several hundred ex-pets how to carry messages (right), attack an enemy without barking, and haul supplies and small field guns. Pearce used to teach tricks to movie dogs, but now he won’t look at a trick dog. “They can’t forget their stunts,” he grins. “If an enemy approached, they’d probably sit up and beg or start walking around on their hind legs.” Finds shepherds and mongrels make the best war dogs. His first call for volunteers last September brought out hundreds of owners of all sorts of pups, all willing to enlist their pets for the duration. One woman insisted her Peke would make a perfect soldier because “he bit my Jap gardener last week.”

American Aces.

Here is the American home front in its most literal sense. With the coming of war, Homer Clayton Price and his family turned their 8-room cottage in Columbus, Ohio, into a parlor, bedroom, and bath arsenal. Set up power machines in their living-room, dining-room, kitchen, and basement, and started turning out vital pump parts for Martin bombers under two $30,000 sub-defense contracts. A former supervisor of convicts in the Ohio State Penitentiary machine shop, Price made most of his machines from secondhand material he picked up in junk yards. Now has 22 employees working 7 days a week on three 8-hour daily shifts. Among the most industrious is Mrs. Price, who takes her turn at a lathe between sweeping up and doing the dishes. She accepted the industrialization of her home quietly. For the duration she moved most of the furniture to the second floor, where the family eats and sleeps. Her daughter, Mrs. Howard Walsh, neglects her own housework to help on the home-production line. Other equipment besides that shown in the pictures includes a three-ton punch press, two grinders, a vertical milling machine, and a bench lathe. The last is mounted on a side-board in the ex-dining-room, with the motor atop an old-fashioned phonograph. Occasionally Price sighs that the vibration of the heavy machinery is causing the ceiling plaster to drop, but he’s sure the roof will hold up until the Axis is beaten. His part-time workers include teachers and students from near-by Ohio State University. Democrats all, they call the boss by his first name and don’t hesitate to tell him when they think he’s wrong. But they all agree that Homer Price is just as much of an American ace as a pilot of a fighter plane.

Cut-up DANIEL PEARCE, of Ripley, Tenn., is probably the only student in the U.S. who is clowning his way through college. A senior at Harvard, he’s the son of the famous circus clown, Danny McPride, and a regular quip off the old block. Makes up just like his dad and charges $15 a night for clowning at kids’ parties and faculty fetes, where he makes a particular point of popping balloons in his profs’ faces. In our picture, he’s boning up for an exam in thermo-dynamics while waiting to fill an engagement with his trick pup, Wiggy. Between antics, Danny is an honor student of mechanical engineering, stands in the top quarter of his class. Unlike other kids who have to go to the circus to laugh at the clowns, Danny always had an honest-to-goodness clown in his home. Used to laugh at his father’s private performances for his benefit, but when he was six he began to learn how to earn laughs himself; Once broke into his father’s trunk and outfitted all his pals for a circus parade through Ripley. His dad took the hint and took Danny Jr. along on his circus tour that spring. Now Danny spends his vacations clowning or working as a construction engineer.

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YOUR LIFE TEN YEARS FROM TODAY

During the next 10 years the world will see changes dramatic as those introduced by the industrial revolution. Technicological progress will be equal in this period to that of any previous five decades, and in its wake will come new problems. If man can foresee and meet these challenges, our way of life in 10 years could be amazingly different.

by Leo Cherne

The progress of these next 10 years will be as dramatic, as filled with change, as jampacked with impact for American business in the total American community as any 50 years in the entire development of civilized man.

Here are some of the things we know. Ten years from now our population will be larger by some 24 million people — that’s the new market, or additional market. There will be a five-hour drop in the work week with the most fabulous increase in leisure time the civilized world has ever seen. Personal income will be up nearly 30 per cent. The output of business and service institutions will have increased another 50 per cent by then, one half again as much as business is now turning out. This is a measure of what will be available for sales.

The market will be there with its money. The institutions will be there with their products. The customer will be there with his desires. They must be brought together — they must be brought together, because on the other side of the coin is danger. Every year will add four per cent to our productivity, for each year we can produce the same quantity with four per cent less labor— that’s without the additions to population. The things we’ll sell must make 2,700,000 additional jobs this year if we are to end the year exactly where we started it, no further ahead, no records broken as in ’55, no future challenges foreseen and met.

These 10 years will see a revolution in distribution as dramatic, and, in some ways, as disturbing as were the changes which were produced by the industrial revolution. We will in these 10 years finally come to an end of what is fundamentally a dead-end road of selling, the opportunity of selling more of the same in the same old way. There is literally a point at which the customer rebels against a third TV set, against 50 more horsepower that only enables the car to stand bumper to bumper with the other cars on a mad Sunday afternoon on a contrivance that some American humorist called a highway. The method of selling, the incentive to spur the mechanism, even the purpose, will, within these 10 years, undergo dramatic change as distribution is forced to make a belated effort to catch up to the fantastic new world which has already opened to production — the world of new technology.

These 10 years will see the highest prosperity level the American people have ever dreamed of. But, within this same 10 years there will be no comfort for the small merchant, no comfort for the cash-hungry independent manufacturer, no comfort for the comfortable whatever their size or kind, … no comfort for those who just want to hold their own, because the next 10 years will see the wildest competitive scramble in which the edge will be given to bigness in business, bigness in government, bigness in unions.

The world we are entering during these 10 years is based on the most incredible investment ever made by man in scientific research. But research is a big company’s tool, with a big company payoff, and the smaller enterprise, the independent, may find itself sitting on the sidelines as business multiplies, as merger, diversifications and decentralization move the giant into every last corner of enterprise in America.

These 10 years will be filled with opportunities and challenges that can only be hinted at. We are at the frontier, for example, of a new age of personal health and medicine. We will find ourselves deep in the paradox that as the age of effective man is lengthened and his energy and wisdom increased, the retirement age gets lower and lower. It may be in this reservoir that selling in America will find its ultimate answer for effective manpower to meet this awesome challenge.

Within these 10 years the wide variety of new drugs will increase the capacity of every one. The antibiotics have already killed infection; the cortisones will smash fatigue and the relaxers will suppress anxiety. But only man can create purpose. And it is the search for purpose which will be the ultimate goal of this incredible new enterprise.

These ten years will find us already using the new instruments of power, atomic and solar. As we concentrate on the word atomic with which you are more familiar, take your long-term view, keep your mind open for the power of the sun. The scientists are virtually agreed that man’s age-long quest for free power will be found within the next 25 years in the sun itself. The most historic development that has occurred within this generation occurred in 1955. This was the opening of the first, effective private solar plant.

These 10 years will see a word which has been abused and misused translated into real meaning — automation. What is talked about as automation today in most instances is not automation, it is increased mechanization, itself a dramatic step. But automation is something other than increased mechanization — it’s the application of a brain to the machine, not merely the elimination of physical and mental power by the machine . . . a machine that thinks — a machine which has memory, that can tune back its own experience to itself and which consequently can correct itself.

The most important consequence of this development will not be the manpower displaced, the retraining of vast millions of American labor, nor the fact that it opens up vast new frontiers of production, but another one: the automated factory can’t afford to stop. It will not be able to tolerate even a slowdown. We will, within these 10 years find ourselves unable to permit not only depression, but even significant recession. We cannot order a lay off for a period of 30 days. An automated factory grinds on. It must, to pay for itself. Planning, the sinister word of the New Deal, will be the essential of private American industry in this fabulous new world.

We will yet get to the bottom of our persistent problems, the farm for example. Not a soil bank, not a billion of additional government investments, not any of these very obviously needed measures which may or may not work, but chemistry will bail out the farm as it is bailing out the traditional industry of the western world, coal.

Above and beyond all of these perhaps the greatest challenge of all is facing us, one I have already indicated — leisure. For the first time we shall have a society which devotes the greatest part of its working day not to making money but to spending time. A mad rush to spend time creatively, effectively or even with just plain narcotic effect will dominate a very significant portion of the activities of almost all of American business.

We cannot possibly approach this problem by building another Fontainebleau — another hundred Fontainebleau’s in Miami. The Fontainebleau may well deaden the senses, it doesn’t occupy them. There will be another five million pleasure boats of all kinds on America’s lakes and shoreline, and this will not be adequate to fill the time. The automobiles will back up still faster than we can build roads for them to ride on, and this will not be enough. It’s the search for the constructive use of leisure which will take hundreds of thousands and send them flying on a five-hour trip, 10 years from now, from New York to London, Paris or Rome, with no more thought and less effort than is now involved in getting on Route 17 for a trip to the Catskills.

The world of 1966 will place every kind of new vision and opportunity before the American people. In every home the majesty of color will come out of a television set and will, for a moment, obscure the fact that there aren’t enough individualist thinkers in business any more.

One of the problems of selling will be to overcome the wild drive for sameness. As a matter of fact, selling will confront that problem in a very large measure on its present battlefield. Ten years from now there will be no significant distinction among brands as there is in fact now. All products will be good. What will sell them? Not the product but the salesman . . . his training, his professional skill, his proper know-how, his merchandising capacity, his interest in his customer. And if he doesn’t, we shall fail, because there is no economic law that says: Just because you can turn out 50% more you can sell 50 per cent more.

We will, within these 10 years, have every conceivable component needed to rise to the highest heights civilized man has ever dreamed of in his wildest imagination. We will have all the makings, all the parts and pieces. ?

BEAM OF LIGHT FROM DISTANT STAR TO OPEN WORLD’S FAIR

A beam of light that left the star Arcturus about the time of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 will set in motion the wheels of the 1933 World’s Fair at Chicago. Upon the star, approximately forty-one light years away, will be trained the great forty-inch telescope of the Yerkes Observatory at Williams Bay, Wis. At the proper moment the image of the star will be allowed to fall upon a photo-electric cell or “electric eye” at the end of the telescope. This will produce an electric impulse that will be amplified and carried over land wires to Chicago, where it will open the exposition by switching on the lights. A preliminary demonstration showing how the feat would be accomplished was recently staged at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York.

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New Products Hasten Return of PROSPERITY

How Inventors’ Activity Is Swelling the Growing Tide of Business MANY times has the statement been made that prosperity will return through the appearance of a great new invention which will create a new industry just as the development of the automobile, the movies, the radio, has added billions to the national wealth of the United States in the past.

During the last half century, American prosperity has grown by leaps and bounds as the result of American inventive genius. The telephone, the phonograph, the cash register, the airplane, the safety razor, have literally created out of air great new industries which have played a leading role in the nation’s industrial advance. The rise of such industries has often been a key factor in the return of prosperity after a period of depression.

A careful study of present-day inventive and industrial activity, however, shows no such revolutionary development on the horizon. No single invention appears likely to bring an end to this depression. Instead, the next few years will see the return of prosperity through the appearance of thousands of new and improved items, each contributing to the total volume of augmented business.

A comprehensive survey, just completed by Popular Science Monthly, shows this beyond a doubt. Covering thousands of manufacturers and all parts of the country, it reveals that an overwhelming percentage of the concerns are placing new and improved products on the market. The data show manufacturers have done more to improve their products in the last two years than in the whole decade from 1920 to 1930. It shows that more new products have been devised and more neglected inventions have been put on a basis of actual production during these two years than at any similar period in all history. Out of this practical action and pioneering spirit throughout America will come a new era of progress and prosperity.

Prosperity depends upon the circulation of money. And, this circulation is most quickly increased by the introduction of new products so attractive and valuable the public is compelled to buy them.

The typewriter is a case in point. A bottle of ink and a pen costs, at most, fifteen cents. A typewriter costs twenty-five dollars or more. Yet, the typewriter turns out written words so much more rapidly and efficiently that millions of people have been willing to pay the extra cost to obtain the benefits of the new product.

Similarly, a host of other new items have shown definite improvement over existing equipment and have found a ready market. By creating a flood of new and better products, manufacturers will stimulate a tremendous demand from the buying public.

That this is being realized, is indicated from all sides.

The number of new items being submitted for inclusion in the editorial pages of Popular Science Monthly has never been so great as in recent months. In the middle west, a New Products Conference recently attracted representatives from industries all over the nation. The problems of creating, perfecting, and marketing new products were discussed by experts. When an eastern technical school, a few weeks ago, invited manufacturers to send exhibits for display during a New Products Day, the response was overwhelming.

A leading New York patent attorney told a representative of Popular Science Monthly that never in forty years of practice has he seen so many inventors occupied in perfecting small, useful devices as at present. The demand of manufacturers is for items of novelty and utility which will have high value and find a ready market.

The head of an eastern advertising agency declares that his clients have shown more interest in new products during the last six months than at any other time in twenty years. The research engineer in charge of a famous industrial laboratory reports that experiments concerned with the far-distant future are being shelved while the staff of experts under his direction concentrates upon improvements and innovations which can be placed upon the market at once.

An association of more than 800 manufacturers recently made a survey of its members to see what steps they were taking for a return of prosperity. The number who were turning to new products ranged in the various classifications of the industries, from fifty to ninety percent of the concerns.

Other trade groups tell the same story. When interviewed recently, the secretary of one national association of manufacturers concerned with home equipment, said: “It is safe to say that our members are marketing four times as many new products now as they were in 1928.”

The statistician of another home product manufacturer’s association reported: “There have been more new and improved appliances in our field during the past two years than made their appearance in the dozen years that went before.”

And the head of a national group of motor car manufacturers declared: “There have been more innovations, changes, and improvements in automobiles and automobile equipment during 1931 and 1932 than there were in the whole decade which preceded those years.”

An organization which specializes in introducing new products into department and chain stores has made a special check upon the number of such products appearing in different years. It has 1,500 stores in the United States and Canada as its clients. The result of its check shows that the last six months have seen the greatest flood of small, ingenious, new items issuing from American factories that the concern has ever experienced in its entire history of marketing such new products.

Another company in the middle west makes a business of placing new inventions with manufacturers looking for new products in their particular fields. Recently, 336 inquiries were received from such manufacturers concerning items which appeared in a single bulletin sent out by the organization. This record number of requests for more information, indicates the keen interest and increased activity among companies in connection with new and improved products.

“Any company,” a noted industrialist told several hundred manufacturers at a convention not long ago, “which does not keep up its product development is riding for a fall.”

Industry is awake to the fact that it is the new, the novel, the improved product that will sell today. The following is quoted from the official publication of the leading trade association in the United States: “Industry may have slowed down its production, business its pace. But there is no slackening of interest among business men in new and useful products and processes.

“Despite the depression, the flow of new products and processes in industry continues unabated. To them, many established companies are turning in an effort to put idle plant capacity to use.”

How necessity has proved the mother of invention and the manner in which depressions have increased the number of patents applied for in the past is shown by a glance at the records.

The Silver Campaign Depression of 1895-7 showed a marked increase in the number of patent applications received. Similarly, the Rich Man’s Panic of 1903-4 showed the largest number of applications ever received up to that time. Again, the Panic of 1907 brought in the largest number of applications up to that year and the depression of 1911 showed a jump of 5,000 applications as a result of business stagnation. But, most striking of all, was the increase which came as a result of the Primary Post War Depression which occurred in 1921 and 1922.

However, the number of new ideas finding their way from the workshop and laboratory to actual production in factories and sale in stores is greater during the present months than during any previous period of depression.

Yankee ingenuity and progressive manufacturers are laying the foundation for the return of prosperity.

A glance at the patent records of the world gives an interesting sidelight upon the relation of improved products and prosperity. It is not just a happen-so that in the United States, where wealth has increased most rapidly, innovators have been most active. From the beginning of the patent records in each country to the end of 1930, the totals in the four leading nations are: 825,882 for France, 754,-054 for England, 531,681 for Germany and 1,797,380 for the United States. The seventy foreign nations which issue patents have a grand total of 4,395.493. Thus, busy American inventors, alone, hold more than one-fourth of all the patents in the world.

With more than 100,000 American manufacturers alert for new ideas and watching for improved products which they can add to their lines, the tide of newly-marketed items is steadily rising. Each new product, with greater eye or utility appeal, plays its part in increasing the volume of business and in producing prosperity for all.

While the general public watches for some spectacular single invention to pull the country out of the depression, thousands of small, unnoticed, useful innovations are lifting it toward prosperity.

Mobile Bank Tours Suburbs

A ROVING bank on wheels has just been put into service by the Seaboard National bank of Los Angeles, to serve a wide and diversified clientele of depositors whose demand for swift and convenient banking facilities is thus met. Guards armed with riot guns and a sub-machinegun protect the automobile bank against hold-up men. The photo shows the traveling bank teller serving two of the moving bank’s hundreds of small depositors.

Finally, someone that makes sense! Now maybe others will believe me when I say that the financial meltdown was actually a secret plot by devious, amoral Pomeranians and not those poor, honest bankers.

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THE DOLLAR VALUE OF MORAL FIBER IN BUSINESS

by George H. Cushing

THE biggest thing in American life today is that children are not being disciplined. They are not given moral training. Every man notes the result but only a few the cause.

The first visible result is lack of respect for the parent and wholesale disobedience. This comes to seed in impudence to older persons generally and disregard for the rights of others.

The second expression of the same thing is the absence of any sense of responsibility. This is the root of the lack of application which is almost universal in the younger generation.

The third expression of the same thing is the feverish demand for excitement and extravagant amusement. In this respect, the younger generation is abnormal. It cuts loose from all forms of restraint.

The three things combined tell why the younger generation is wholly unfitted for business and why business men are complaining everywhere that they cannot get dependable helpers. The fact is that the American youth lacks stamina. He cannot and will not stick to anything, merely because he has no moral strength.

The adage is that “as the twig is bent, so is the tree inclined.” If the business men complain about the present-day youth, they must think they were trained differently. If they were, it would show in their present conduct.

To get an idea whether their dissatisfaction is justified, I selected for study fifteen men in several businesses. Of these, two were merchants; three were railroaders; and ten were owners of factories. I put them all to this acid test of business morality. Do the same ethical standards govern when business is bad, is good, and is excellent? That is, in hard times, would they “cut a competitor’s throat?” In excellent times would they disregard contracts and use the stolen merchandise to gouge the public? In a word, had they the stamina to take a severe financial loss and yet keep their word?

For example, I knew that the hard times of 1914 would bring out the worst or the best in all of them. My record shows that of the two merchants, one stood by his policy. He gave consistent quality and paid his bills. The other announced frequent bargain sales and sold shoddy goods at big prices over the bargain counters. I bought from his store “a $5.00 Blank hat” for $2.90. When I got it home, it turned out to be an ordinary $2.00 hat.

Of the three railroad men, one maintained his road in excellent condition and paid for the repairs out of earnings. To do so, he had to cut two per cent off his dividends. The other two robbed their roads and paid big dividends to attract Wall Street.

Of the ten manufacturers, eight maintained the quality of their product at the old standard and went without profit. Two didn’t. One put composition soles on his shoes and sold them for leather. The other made tools of highly polished soft metal and sold them as steel tools.

After that, came the boom times of 1916 when nearly anything would “go”. The one merchant admitted that dyes were hard to get but guaranteed his colors just the same and then charged moderate prices. The other sold “English all wool clothing” that was made of Carolina cotton and Texas wool, woven into cloth in New England. He even advanced the price sharply, saying: “England has advanced the price on cloth because Australian wool is hard to get; labor is scarce in England, and taxes there are high.”

During this boom one railroad man served all patrons alike, giving to each shipper his share of the few cars available. The other two moved only those goods which paid the highest rates and told the other shippers that a shortage of cars kept them from doing any better.

The record of the ten manufacturers shows that eight filled contracts to the last letter of the last syllable. The other two stole goods from contract customers and sold them on the “open market” at fancy prices.

The cash value of this business morality is not buried. It does not have to be exhumed for measurement and identification. For example, the railroad that was, in 1914, maintained in good condition, had the most facilities to hire out to shippers in 1916 when the car shortage struck. It earned money proportionately.

The merchant who in 1914 guaranteed the colors in his fabrics had the bulk of the business in 1916. And, the manufacturers who have filled all their contracts since July 1, 1916, already have signed contracts which assure them the cream of the business for 1917. It was not, therefore, a case of casting bread on the water promiscuously in hope that it might come back.

If it is true that “as the twig is bent so will the tree incline”, we may say that, of fifteen men, five evidently had been bent to the side of unmoral conduct when young. Ten had been trained carefully and patiently to do the right thing. But, in such an important matter, I could not assume. I must know. So I put a direct question squarely to one of them, and he said: “When I was a boy my father used to gather us children around him on Sunday afternoon and teach us the Bible. Every morning we had family prayers. At every meal, grace was said. We had such a steady diet of religion and morals, I grew tired of it. At times, it seemed that rebellion and flight were the only things left. Several times I started to run away from home. I am no coward now. I was not then. But I didn’t run away because I couldn’t. The drill had been too thorough. I could no more run away than a German soldier can turn coward and desert.

“Today, I can’t play truant from any business obligation. Often, if I consulted my wishes, I would quit midway in a big campaign. The burden seems too heavy compared with the returns. When I think of it, the duty I owe to my men and the other stockholders demands my attention. So, I don’t run away. I suppose it is because I was trained not to quit.”

To get the cash value of this program to this man, I went over his business record. Ten years ago his capital was $15,-000. Today, it is $5,000,000.

With his statement and record in mind, I questioned and investigated the other fourteen men. My record shows that seven of them had been drilled about the same as had been the first one. Their drill had not been so severe but still it was thorough. Two more had been drilled by parents or friends in the works of the great philosophers. Thus 100 per cent of those who had stuck by their guns in a business sense said they did so because they had been trained in morality and could not desert the way they had been “brought up.”

And, 100 per cent of them had scored a financial success. They all said their success was due to the fact that they had played the business game cleanly.

From that, I went into a study of the moral and financial record of the five who had quit—sold out when trouble came. I found that not one of them had had any Serious moral training. Two said they were members of a church, but they smiled and winked when they said it. The only thing about it which seemed worthy of mention was that the minister was “liberal”.

The other three laughed at the very idea of morality in business. One said a man had to decide between principles and profit. The second said that Roosevelt preached morality in business but did not dare try to practice it. The third said that religion is now obsolete and he had no time for dead issues.

Then, I studied the business record of those five men. This showed that they were the ones who had abandoned their own business policy and their regular customers the instant trouble or hope of a large but unmoral profit appeared. Also, of the five two headed properties which had no standing. One had passed through a fire of suspicious origin and had become a bankrupt when no one believed he had failed. One was prosperous because he had a clean organization behind him. The fifth was, admittedly, a great success. Of him it was said: “He is the cleverest man in his line.

He has to be clever to keep out of jail.”

In October, 1916, a woman at the head of a department of a big school at Evanston, Illinois, announced to the students one morning that the floor of the chapel had been refinished and waxed that dances might be held there in future. One of the students exclaimed, when he heard the announcement: “Gee, wouldn’t the old Methodists, who started this school, turn over in their graves if they could hear that?”

The woman who made that announcement hastened to explain to the reporters : “Times have changed, you know, since this school was founded. Young people are going to dance; there is no use trying to prevent them, for everyone is dancing now. If they must learn, I prefer it should be here under proper influences.”

The astounding thing about this inci- dent is not the fact of departure from the “blue laws” of stricter days but the admission by the school’s principal that efforts to control students now are hopeless and hence had been abandoned. The incident, as I said, is but a bit of flotsam, but the principle involved drops like a plumb line into the center of the modern system of child control. It implies that the student shall be allowed to dictate what he wants to learn regardless of whether or not it is best for him. The whole idea is to please the youth and amuse him, this being’ in contrast with the old notion of improving him without reference to his personal feelings or desires for amusement.

My personal opinion is that you can’t build a Sandow on skimmed soup and French pastry. And, you can’t develop an Abraham Lincoln, a John Hay, or a Theodore Roosevelt in a dance hall and a moving-picture house with sex stories and plays filling the gaps.

While the logic of these circumstances seems irresistible, I know that the Evans-ton experiment is not exactly new, although it is a most striking example. America has been trying it for almost a generation. It started perhaps—I make no claim to being a historian— with the introduction of the institutional church. This was to religion what homeopathic medicine was to a world drugged by the allopathic method. It put a sugar coating on moral training and tried to fill its pews and Sunday School classes on the Sabbath by teaching pool and bowling during the days of the week.

To find what influence this new idea has, I have studied for a few years five young men in Chicago. They were, when I first knew them, about seventeen or eighteen years old. Now they are past twenty-two. When I first began to observe them, they were typical of the new order of things. The mother of one was a divorcee. That of another kept a Pomeranian poodle. The parents of a third gave him money and left him to his own devices while they went to the picture show.

Soon I noticed something truly significant. These same boys were always at the picture shows when I went there. I learned they went nearly every day. On those nights when some vulgar slapstick farce was to be seen, they were sure to be on hand. And, when any glaringly sentimental thing was offered on the bills, the managers could count on them as patrons.

Also, they were to be seen playing pool in the neighborhood barber shop whenever I went out for an evening walk. In nearly five years, I never have seen one of them read anything but a newspaper. Even then it was some crime, the sporting section, or the page of comics, which attracted—never an article or even a fiction story that one, by any stretch of the imagination, could consider worth while.

These five boys were getting energy from their food. But, instead of using it to any purpose, they were playing it out. Not one, in youth, was going through the drill that would make of him a man who could stand the gaff in business. I saw the truth of this when the time arrived when these boys tried to go to work. One of them has had inconsequential jobs intermittently; mostly he has been idle—at his employer’s suggestion. A second one went into an office. His employer tells me he lacks application ; has in six months about reached the limit of his capacity to grow; and, is a clock watcher. The third thinks he is clever because he has learned a way of getting money without working for it. On two occasions he has sought a job in a commercial house during its dull season. When he got it, he was assumed to be learning the business and the stock. Having been paid for doing no work for several months, he deserted when the rush season came and when the work became hard.

The fourth boy came to me one day to ask a question. It was rather an intelligent question and I was delighted because it indicated that I had misjudged him. I began to answer. He listened for a few moments and then broke in with: “I hope you are enjoying yourself. It doesn’t even amuse me.”

He then turned on his heel and walked away.

The fifth of these boys presents a peculiarly striking example of my point. His father met a misfortune in business some time ago, and, for months, was terribly “hard up”. Although the boy is now of age, he displayed not the slightest indication that he felt any responsibility for helping to keep the family together. Assuming obligations was clearly not in his line. But he did complain bitterly because the home table was not supplied with the delicacies which he enjoyed.

These five boys have had no such training as will develop any strength of character or build for financial success. I am wondering what they will do when forced to get into business to support themselves. I am wondering how they will stand the gaff when subjected to the ordeal where success can be won only by close application and by taking hard knocks. I wonder whether they will stand by those principles which alone can win, as did the ten men, or whether they will turn out as did the other five—unprincipled, unreliable, and without any real success to their credit.

As I see this great business game, success comes at the end of an enduring contest. To endure, however, one must have strength, but the essence of strength is stamina and the life of stamina is moral training. Because it is the first requisite of business success, I say that moral training is the most valuable of all training. I say further that the youth of the present generation are being taught to be business failures because they are getting no moral education at all. Instead, by precept and example, they are drilled to be mentally dissolute and easy going—life from the start is satiated with sensuous luxury. And, we cannot build character and hence business success on that.

I am no stickler for church-going, although I regard it highly. I do say, however, that every penny’s worth of strict morality that is added to a young man’s capital before he reaches the age of twenty-one is bound to bring him a dollar’s worth of business success. The moral prostitute can make only a prostitute’s hire; that always is a miserable pittance, and exacts an agony of discontent in later years far greater than its worth. The unmoral may prosper in exceptional cases; they doubtless would prosper immeasurably better if they had a working capital of sterling honesty to fall back upon. Usually—and you and I cannot think of ourselves as exceptions— the straight man, the man with strict moral training, is the big business success.

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Are the Russians Beating Us Into Space?

By G. Harry Stine
Viking-Aerobee Operations Engineer
White Sands Proving Ground

CLOSE on the heels of the White House announcement concerning the United States’ unmanned satellite project, the Russians came out with the announcement that they would also put an “automatic cosmic laboratory” into orbit around the earth.

The date given by the White House for the launching of the first American satellite was 1957. The Russians say they will have one up in 1956!

Are the Russians really that far ahead of the United States in rocket research? Or are they merely bluffing to uphold their national prestige.

Part of the answer is revealed by talking with some of the ex-German rocket scientists at White Sands Proving Ground. They were first-hand witnesses to the break-up of German rocketry.

In 1945 both the Russians and the Western Allies were advancing rapidly into the collapsing Third Reich. The Germans’ prime rocket center was at Peenemunde on the shores of the Baltic Sea. According to reports and the stories of the German rocket men in this country now, this center was evacuated when the Russians got close and a temporary headquarters was set up near Nordhausen in the Hartz Mountains. Nordhausen was the big underground assembly plant for the huge V-2 rockets and was finally overrun by American troops. Peenemunde was taken by the Russians. But they were not the only rocket research centers in Germany; the Germans literally had them everywhere, for there were 12 different guided missiles in the final stages of development in Nazi Germany in 1945, although at one time the Germans were working on 48 different missiles!

Nordhausen was in the territory to be occupied by the Russians, so the Allies stripped the Nordhausen factory, taking anything and everything that even looked like a rocket part. A few days later the Russians moved in and took it over.

The United States got about 100 V-2 rockets, most of the research scientists and engineers who had built the giant rocket and a great number of technical papers and blueprints.

But the Russians got Peenemunde, Nordhausen, nearly 200 V-2′s, all the production facilities that had not been stripped, and about twice as many German rocket men as we did. Most of these men were production people rather than scientists.

We brought the scientists to this country with the V-2′s. They showed us how to fire them, then got to work on new missiles such as the Army’s Redstone. We shot up our V-2′s in upper atmosphere research and concentrated on building newer and more advanced rockets. It was almost a matter of starting from scratch since the United States had only a limited amount of technical knowledge in spite of the fact that Goddard and the ARS had originally developed nearly 90 per cent of the principles right here!

The Russians learned to fire V-2′s, too. And they had the production facilities and production men. In 1950 George Sutton of North American Aviation, Inc., reported that the Germans had put the V-2 rocket back into production. According to the magazine Aviation Week, the Russians had given it to the Red Army troops by 1948 as an operational weapon.

This story is pretty well backed up by the tales told by the Germans who came to this country. A lot of their friends had been taken by the Russians and they never heard from some of them again. But a short while ago a very significant development took place: a German at White Sands— he’s now a naturalized U.S. citizen—got a letter from one of his friends who had vanished back in 1945 behind the Iron Curtain. While the letter told nothing, the man was back in Germany again. It was somewhat of an indication that the Russians might have picked the brains of the German rocket men and are now proceeding on their own!

By 1953 rumors began reaching this country saying that the Russians had made real improvements on the V-2. They were getting ranges of 500 miles with accuracies of plus-or-minus 2,000 feet at that range. This might seem to be a little fantastic, but the Germans actually achieved an accuracy of about plus-or-minus 2,000 feet at 230 miles range with the V-2 in early 1945.

There were also stories about a super-powerful Russian rocket motor, the Model 103, supposedly capable of 460,000-pounds of thrust and burning kerosene and liquid oxygen. This may well be a development of the V-2 motor for this was the propellant combination the Germans would have liked. But kerosene and gasoline were not available due to the general shortage of petroleum products in the Third Reich.

Recent reports state that the Russians claim to have fired single-stage rockets to 250 miles altitude. They even claim to have made mammal flights with monkeys and mice to 150 miles with successful recoveries.

There is no way of checking some of these reports. Some may be wild rumors, others exaggerated news releases. Our intelligence agencies undoubtedly know more, but they aren’t talking.

But, in spite of these stories, and in spite of the fact that the majority of the information on America’s rocket program is classified, the author is extremely doubtful that the Russians are ahead of us .. . right now.

One particular faction among American rocket people has a very good reason to believe that we have not lost the race, although the race is probably close. They are the electronics specialists, the guidance and control people, the radar men, the instrument men. They all know that a rocket, regardless of how good its motor is, is nearly useless unless you can guide it or have it guide itself.

Anti-aircraft rockets, ICBM’s, or sounding rockets all must have control or they remain big skyrockets. Control and guidance is the single factor which separates modern rockets from their pyrotechnic ancestors.

Soviet progress in nucleonics startled the Western world at the Geneva nuclear power convention, but some experts still maintain that the Russian electronic industry has a long way to go to match ours. Without electronics to guide Russian missiles, it is rather illogical to think that they might surge ahead. Our electronics industry is the result of a great deal of individual incentive and the growing knowledge that progress means better products and markets for those products. Most people have no conception of the staggering assortment of advanced electronic material available today on the open American market. It is only an indication of what is available to American rocket people in the form of equipment and components still highly classified.

The real test will come in the sky. We may not know the answer until we see a bright speck in the sky near sunset. As a rough guess, it is about a 50-50 chance right now that that speck might be carrying a Red Star on its side.

It is time we stopped considering the conquest of space as a silly, fantastic dream. It is real. It is coming. And it is now a matter of national honor and prestige. It will determine for the rest of the world whether or not we are the wonderful Yankee wizards we claim to be.

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1880 SUPERMARKET

LOCK, stock and old barrels, Mrs. Mary Kidd of Walden, N. Y. ‘ has created an early American general store. Spurred on by a love of collecting antiques, Mrs. Kidd, with the aid of her husband, began putting her 1880 country store together. The little two-story building, once a barn and carriage house, sits behind her home. It is stocked with everything from fine herbs to horse collars, with a post office in one corner lighted by old oil lamps. Visitors flock to visit this bit of old Americana and discuss its charm around the ancient pot-bellied stove.

VISITOR’S first view is panel glass window and cobbler’s boot above the entrance, at right. Old-time potbellied stove and the checkerboard over a barrel recalls fond memories of the 1880s, far right Note the spittoon, located for the easy convenience of the checker players.

ANCIENT garden tools and culinary instruments of long ago, at right. Posters touted products. Clothing and canned goods, cannisters filled with perishable food, even straw hats and eggs were some of the many products stocked in the supermarket so mom could shop with ease.

POST OFFICE had series of glass-backed pigeon holes that held mail, right. Proprietor was also the postmaster in many communities. Pair of long johns are hanging on line, far right and selection of hats for gentlemen of the period were prominently displayed in the spacious front window.

QUESTION OF THE MONTH

Is the Communist conspiracy to conquer America an imminent danger at present? Are subversive elements in this country being held in check?
Asked of: J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI.

YES, Communism today does represent a great danger to America. Our democratic way of life is threatened by a gigantic tyranny which already has engulfed millions of freedom-loving people.

The Communists seek to establish a dictatorship. They would replace freedom, justice and love with tyranny, terror and hatred.

This threat, however, is being met by the determined vigilance of the American people. Using democratic methods, this nation is defending itself against the assaults of the Communist International. As long as law and order reign and citizens have faith in the democratic processes of government, Communism cannot win in this struggle of ideologies.

The FBI, as the governmental agency responsible for the internal security of our country, is keeping close track of Communist machinations. Any person can be of assistance to us in this cause. A citizen having information about subversive activities should contact the closest FBI office immediately.

We can conquer this menace. It is the job of all of us.

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They Find Us Hard to Believe

By BEVERLY SMITH

Washington Editor of The Saturday Evening Post

The Frenchman’s eyes popped at American laborers driving expensive cars. The Britisher concluded that the U.S. production secret was our wives’ greed. The Italian went mad over supermarkets. Here’s how we look to Europeans sent here by ECA.

Columbus sailed the ocean blue In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-two.

THAT was Europe’s first discovery of America. The second discovery is now under way, as an unforeseen by-product of the Marshall Plan. The Europeans are at last trying to understand what one Britisher described to me as “your vast and incomprehensible country.” They want to know what makes America tick — and click. They are coming over here by the thousands, not as tourists, but as teams of earnest investigators bent on finding out how Americans live and work, in their homes and offices, their farms and factories. These are the so-called “Technical Assistance Teams.” They go back to Europe to spread a strange new gospel known in French as productivité, in German as Productivity, in Italian as produttività, and in Dutch as productivite it. What surprises them most about this mysterious productivity, by which Americans outproduce their European counterparts by sometimes as much as two or three to one, is that it resides only partly in our fancy machinery and mass-production methods. More importantly, they find, it grows out of the entire attitude and spirit of the American people.

As a Norwegian engineer observed to me, “The strength of America is not in the turn of a lathe, but in a turn of mind.” And he marveled that this turn of mind is not confined to production experts, but pervades the entire population, whether corporate executives, machine tenders, farmers or housewives. As Lord McGowan, the British industrialist, said, after studying the reports of dozens of returning British teams, “Americans seem to have a fervent belief —one might almost call it a religion — that the discovery of faster, cheaper ways of doing a job and making better products for the service of man is everybody’s business.” We hope his lordship is right, though we can think offhand of a couple of million exceptions.

Even more revolutionary, perhaps, is the discovery by Europeans that Americans are comparatively normal human beings. I asked a foreman from Brussels, a member of a machine-tool team, what had impressed him most in his study of America. Was it the skyscrapers? The millions of cars? The humming assembly lines? He shook his head.

“Le home” he said. Seeing that this puzzled me, he went on to explain. He was astonished, he said, to find that most Americans have happy and affectionate home lives, just like people in Belgium. But yes, he had been invited into many such homes; he had seen them with his own eyes. Hitherto he had judged America by the occasional Hollywood films he had seen. These films were very exciting, very dramatic, but he had not found in them anything he could recognize as family life. He remembered one picture, years ago, in which William Powell and Myrna Loy had seemed happily married, but since Monsieur Powell was a detective, there had been much drinking, shooting and higlif— not like a home. I started to point out that even our detectives do not live like M. Powell and Mile. Loy, but decided to let that illusion ride.

Many of the visitors comment on this fact of American home life, until now apparently concealed from Europeans. As one French team revealed in their report: “Nous pénétrons enfin dans le secret de la vie américaine —le home.” They also noted with interest, after having read for years about the marital antics of our playboys, heiresses and movie stars, that not all Americans vacation in Reno.

These misconceptions are natural enough. While millions of Americans of all classes have roamed over Europe, in or out of uniform, the reverse traffic has been a trickle. For Europeans of moderate means the costs of a transatlantic tour make the U.S.A. as remote as the moon. The relative few who visit America have been mainly of the wealthier classes, traveling a New York-Florida-California plush-carpet route, and glimpsing the rest of the country through the windows of a plane or streamliner.

Consequently 99.9 per cent of the Europeans must pick up such secondhand impressions of America as they can. The movies display the glittering dream world of Hollywood. The newsreels, on the other hand, picture Americans as plagued by floods, hurricanes, riots, auto-race smash-ups, beauty contests and female wrestlers. The popular European press specializes in our strikes, gang killings and debauchery de luxe. To add to the confusion there is the steady short-wave drumfire from behind the Iron Curtain, asserting that millions of Americans are starving in the streets, while other millions slave under the lash of the Wall Street warmongers, taking time out only for lynching parties. The Voice of America and Radio Free Europe strive to counteract this, but some of the communist propaganda sinks in by sheer repetitive suggestion.

Why don’t the Europeans turn to American literature for enlightenment? Some do, but this also can have befoozling results. Writers such as Steinbeck, Mailer, Caldwell and Jones present a view of America as quaint as that of the movies, and more misleading to the stranger. One elderly Hollander, an industrial designer, prepared conscientiously for his technical-assistance trip to the U.S.A. He had heard about America’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist, so he inquired about Mr. Faulkner’s most famous book, and obtained a copy of Sanctuary to read on the ship coming over.

Later, to one of his American hosts, he confided his bewilderment. “I studied very hard to understand this book,” he said, “and finally when no one was looking I dropped it overboard. In case of accident—you know —I did not wish my family to find it among my effects. Of course,” he added, “I have read other things, pleasanter things about America. But reading is no good, pictures are no good, wireless is no good for understanding the United States. I had no concept of what it is like until the last few weeks, when I have seen how Americans really live and work. I still do not fully grasp your complex country, but I have some idea, some appreciation of it, and I will try hard to convey it to my friends and colleagues in Europe.”

When Congress passed the law setting up the Marshall Plan, in April of 1948, one of its main objects was to increase the productivity of Western Europe, so that that area could eventually stand on its own feet. Therefore the law provided for technical assistance to friendly countries.

One obvious way to do this is to send American production experts to Europe to explain our methods and techniques, and a good deal of this has been done. In the summer of 1948 a new idea appeared. It grew out of a conversation between Paul Hoffman, administrator of the Marshall Plan, and Sir Stafford Cripps, who, as Britain’s leading patent lawyer, appreciated America’s technical achievements. Cripps said that lectures, formulas, charts and statistics were all very well. “But one look is worth a lot of advice and description. I wish our people could see how you do it, right in your own factories and farms.” Hoffman, a successful automobile manufacturer, understands both production and salesmanship. He caught up Cripps’ idea at once and expanded it. Why not send teams of Europeans to study American production on the spot? And, since productivity means everybody pulling together, why limit the study tours to eminent engineers and experts? Send a cross section on each team — workers, foremen, technicians, managers, owners.

To develop the idea in England, the Anglo-American Council on Productivity was set up, consisting of industrial and union leaders in each of the two countries. The head of the American section was Philip Reed, chairman of the board of the General Electric Company. As the plan worked out, the expenses of the teams are paid in part by Marshall Plan funds, in part by contributions of the British Government, industry and trade-unions. In general this pattern of payments is followed by other European teams, though the contributions vary somewhat from country to country. From the point of view of the American taxpayer, the costs of the European Technical Assistance (TA) teams are relatively small. Although many observers feel that these teams have become one of the most valuable features of the Marshall Plan, they have absorbed less than one tenth of 1 per cent of EC A appropriations. Recently Congress created the Mutual Security Agency (MSA) to take over the work of EC A and shift the emphasis from economic to military aid, but technical assistance will be continued and intensified, since higher productivity is essential in bearing the burdens of rearmament.

American monetary aid, indeed, has been less important to the teams than the voluntary efforts of thousands of Americans, who vie with one another in their amiable efforts to instruct and entertain the visitors. Chambers of commerce, the CIO, the AFL, and the National Association of Manufacturers co-operate in advising on the tours and making them a success. Businessmen throw open their factories, often at a sacrifice of working schedules, and drop other duties to serve as personal guides. Workers patiently repeat their operations or perform them in slow motion, to be sure the visitors understand. Engineers go to infinite trouble, working through the interpreters who accompany the non-English-speaking teams, to make clear the fine points of technique. In the evening the company may “throw a feed” for the team or the individual members may be invited to the homes of workers or managers.

Of course there are exceptions. Some American companies decline to receive the teams or brush them off with a quick trot through the plant. The great majority of Americans, however, at all levels, will rim themselves — and the visitors—ragged to make the visits worth while.

This produces a lasting impression upon the Europeans. They have heard of the generosity of the Marshall Plan, with its billions for foreign aid. But those billions are somewhere up in the stratosphere of “politics.” The friendly helpfulness of the average nonpolitical American is something the visitor can see and feel. He responds to it and does not forget it.

The Europeans recognize that there is an element of pride —or even vanity—in the American’s eagerness to explain his methods. As one American said, “Sure, we like to strut our stuff.” (That was a tough one for the interpreter.) What surprises the visitors is that this pride extends up and down, from the workbench to the top office. An Italian engineer visited six American motor plants. In each, the workers assured him that their motor was the best on the market, and told him why. A British visitor talked with a striker on the picket line. The worker spoke freely of the canine ancestry of the company’s president. “He’s a stubborn old-,” he said. ” But you got to admit he runs the best company in the business. If you want to learn about production, why don’t you talk to him?”

A French earth-moving team was inspecting the tunnel being driven through the Continental Divide at the Big Thompson Project, to divert the waters of the Colorado River to the Big Thompson River. The work was being pushed in three shifts. The visitors noticed that each shift would mark how far they had driven the tunnel.

“The shift that goes farther gets more pay?” one Frenchman inquired. No, he was told, that does not affect the pay. Then why, he asked, should the shift mark up its record? The American foreman scratched his head over that.

” Well,” he said, “it’s kind of a game, I guess. Each shift wants to prove it can outdig the other guys. And besides, the faster we cut, the faster we all get out of this hole.”

The Frenchmen took copious notes on this novel bit of American philosophy, and were later heard debating it hotly among themselves. Even more fascinating to the Frenchmen, and, in fact, to all the European teams, is the American “big-pie” idea. This is expressed in several ways, one of which is: “The bigger we make the pie, the more there is for all, and the easier it is to divide it up without squawks.” As soon as they get off the boat the visitors begin to hear about this big pie —”the more efficiently we all produce, the better we all live.” They hear it from employers, labor leaders, economists, farmers and workers.

At first they are skeptical. As they go from factory to factory, from one state to another, checking on the weekly wages, pricing articles in shops and stores, sharply observing the general standard of living, they conclude that the pie is not in the sky. They embrace the idea of the big pie — sometimes with curious results. A Danish team inspected a new plastic-materials plant in the Midwest. The company’s president himself proudly showed them around, pointing out the excellence of his equipment and his product. Afterward the Danish team leader made a little speech of thanks.

“Sir,” he said, in careful English, “in this establishment you are creating an admirable, a superb, a magnificent pie”

“Good heavens,” wailed the plastics manufacturer, “does he think we are making pies? ” It took a little while to clarify the situation and soothe the ruffled industrialist.

One of the first things that strike the visitors is the friendly freedom with which Americans open up their plants and show their techniques. Every member of the European teams, by the way, is given a security check before he leaves home, by his own government and by American Intelligence representatives. Among the workers, for example, only members of anticommunist unions are acceptable. These workers believe that if some of their acquaintances in the communist-dominated unions could be brought over here and given an eyewitness view of American pay and working conditions—no need to let them see any war-production plants —it would do more than anything else to break the communist grip on European labor in such countries as France and Italy. Sounds reasonable, but EC A officials are afraid of the idea — Congress might blow a gasket.

An even more radical suggestion was made by a British foundry worker at the end of his American tour.

“Take old Stalin,” he said. “Disguise him so no one would take a shot at him, bring him over here to the States, show him what you have shown us, and he would give up forever any idea of making war on the U.S.A.”

As I say, the Europeans are at first startled, almost shocked, at the freedom with which Americans disclose their methods. “But we may compete with you,” said one Dutch visitor frankly to an American manufacturer. “How can you afford to show us these things? A Dutch manufacturer will not even show his rival the road to Rotterdam.”

“We don’t see it that way,” said the American. “We show our competitors through the plant any old day. By the time they can imitate a new process, we are two more jumps ahead. And they do the same for us. Look at our annual convention. We all go there, order up the drinks, brag about what we are doing and compare notes. That doesn’t mean we don’t compete—we do, and how! It just means the whole industry moves ahead twice as fast.”

Of course American industry has some trade secrets, but the area of secrecy is small compared with traditional European practice. This openness is hard for the Europeans to accept, especially the older men. By the time they have finished their six weeks’ tour, however, and have seen the impetus which exchange of information gives to productivity, the idea begins to sink in. Here is a quote from a report on members of a Dutch team after it returned to Holland: ” Mr. W. H. Braskamp, of Voorburg, manufacturer of electrical machinery, said that for the first time in his life he had received a competitor in his plant, showing him the shop and having a frank talk about their mutual problems. * Well,’ he said, ‘if I had not been in America I never would have come to that.’ This last observation may not appear very important to Americans, but it is to a man living with European prejudices.”

Further, the report continues: “Some leading factory engineers of well-known machine works (are now) meeting every two months … to discuss their mutual difficulties and to find together the way out.”

The Europeans are impressed by the general lack of servility in America; by the cheerfulness and outspokenness of workers of all grades; by the “decentralization of decision” in the plants; by the number of executives who have come up through the ranks; by the frequent use of first names between employer and employee, and sometimes — most strange! — between the head of the company and the head of the union. “And often we use stronger names,” explained one company president. “You can’t battle a guy through a week of day-and-night negotiations in a stuffy hotel room, and try to stand on formiity.”

We Americans think of ourselves as irresponsible in many respects. The visitors give us unexpectedly high marks for responsibility, at least so far as our jobs are concerned; they say we share it more widely than in Europe, and live up to it well; the employee will often go beyond his required duties. The teams frequently travel out to factories by chartered bus. The driver does not merely drive the bus; usually he constitutes himself guide, counselor and friend to the visitors; he will work overtime to show them the wonders of his home town. A French team was enchanted to see a small white-belted schoolboy stop a huge stream of traffic so his schoolmates could cross the street.

“You see,” exclaimed one of the Frenchmen. “Le sens des responsabilités! It begins even in the school.”

The next time your own youngster uses your electric razor on the cat, or tests his new flying tackle on grandma, just remind him of his high “sens des responsabilités.”

A French team of machine-tool builders was staying at the Hotel Alms in Cincinnati. They had been tramping through factories and watching machine operations until they were footsore, eye-weary and perhaps a bit depressed by the roaring volume of production they were expected to emulate. They were sympathetically observed by Alonzo McAllister, the Negro doorman of the hotel. He is an intelligent man, and a student of music. A musical evening, he thought, would be just the thing for these tired visitors. He spoke of it to his friend Thor Johnson, who is a regular guest at the Hotel Alms, and who happens to be the distinguished conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Johnson was delighted with the idea, and said he would see what he could do.

And so, a couple of evenings later, the members of the French team were guests of honor of the Symphony Orchestra at a spirited program of French music. The homesick visitors were touched and happy to the point of tears.

“It was the high point of our trip,” said a team member later. “And to think it was Monsieur McAllister, he who helped with our baggages when we arrived, who had the kindness and imagination to initiate this beautiful gesture. After that, even your mighty American machinery took on for us an amiable aspect.”

From all the foregoing, it is apparent that these teams, originally set up to study production techniques, have come incidentally to serve a far wider purpose. Hardly any of these visitors have ever seen America before. They represent a cross section of the vast majority of Europeans who have hitherto been much in the dark about our ways. It is fair to say that these trips are voyages of discovery. When they get home the explorers spread the word of their findings. They write painstaking reports, which are circulated through their industries and professions, and quoted in the press. They give talks to their trade-unions, their employers’ associations, their engineering societies. They tell their friends.

They don’t all love us, by any means. They find much to criticize in our vaunted “American way of life.” Certain of our customs amuse or exasperate them. They work on an exhausting schedule. I have seen some of the visitors so tired that the very sight of American energy must give them a headache.

On balance, however, they like the actual America better than the country they had imagined. After living among us they regard us with less awe and more sympathy; with less envy and more respect; with less apprehension and more affection. They express this variously. A Luxembourger said, “We see that Americans, also, have troubles. Here, too, there are women who weep and men who are heavy-burdened. Somehow that had not occurred to us. We see that your high standard of living is not luck —not something that drops from the sky. It comes from toil and hard thinking, from good will, from amazing teamwork.”

One French electrical engineer was glum and skeptical on his arrival here. After a few days he chirped up and began to enjoy himself. One day he wrote an air-mail post card to his wife, and the American accompanying the team — the project manager—posted it for him. He glanced at the card. It said: “My dear: You have no idea of how attractive the Americans are when they are not tourists. In their own milieu they are a different species.”

In the fall of 1948 a group of Norwegian workers and labor leaders was permitted to visit Russia. Soon afterward a similar Norwegian labor team visited the United States. Returning to Norway, each team wrote up a careful report.

The report on Russia was politely phrased — after all, little Norway has a strip of common frontier with the Soviet Union —but this politeness seemed to make more damning the dry recital of what the team had observed. They had found comforts and even luxuries among the small communist elite. For the vast majority of the population, living standards were pitifully low: frightful housing, shabby clothing, a monotonous diet of bread, potatoes and vegetables. “The general average wage is only sufficient for purchasing the absolute necessities for maintenance of life.” The homes of the workers? Unfortunately, the Norwegians noted, the law makes it a crime for a Russian to receive foreigners in his home. There was much secrecy everywhere; statistics were “not available”; the team was permitted to visit the two largest cities “but did not see any part of the countryside at all.” The report concluded with the charitable hope that the Soviet Union “will gradually pass into a happier stage of development.”

The team which visited America reported that it found no secrecy. “Everything we required . . . was immediately placed at our disposal.” They moved about freely and talked with whom they pleased. They noted, despite occasional strikes, a friendly and cooperative feeling between labor and management —a feeling of “we are in the same boat.” Their chief criticism was that we lack an adequate system of health insurance. They concluded, after citing facts and figures, that: “The American worker is the best paid in the world. The purchasing power of his income places him in a class by himself.”

The reports by the two Norwegian labor teams, the one on Russia and the one on America, were published side by side in the same pamphlet, which was widely read. The impact of the contrast did much to destroy the influence of communism in Norway.

The specific task of the teams is still to study American techniques and productivity. To go into their technical findings would take a book for each team, and the reports they write are, in fact, of book length. The report of the British Steel Founding Team runs to 108 pages; that of the Dutch Metal Industry Team to 160 pages; that of the Inter-European Pulp and Paper Industry Team to 378 pages.

Certain comments recur throughout the reports. Generally the Europeans are not so much impressed by our machines—they have read about them in their technical magazines. They are impressed rather by how well the machines are placed, the planning of the factory layout, the smooth flow of materials. The worker does not have to lift, pull and haul; the material comes to him at the right time and place; conveyors do the carrying, or the swift little fork-lift trucks. They find our factories—usually — ugly on the outside, attractive and well-lighted on the inside. They note the importance we give to personnel policies, to job evaluation, to cost accounting, to time and motion studies. One Britisher says we apply time-motion studies to everything but eating.

“Each American engineer tells me about time-motion studies,” he said. “Then we go to dinner. He holds the fork in his left hand, his knife in his right. He cuts his meat. He lays down knife, transfers fork to right hand, conveys food to mouth. He retransfers fork to left hand, picks up knife, cuts another piece of meat, and so on. Shockingly inefficient, reahlly!”

He even spoofed one of his American friends into trying to eat in the English fashion, with a considerable spillage of gravy. Since American efficiency is drummed into the visitors from morning to night for weeks on end, they enjoy noting —not without a tinge of amiable malice —the occasional lapses in our performance. “We flew into St. Louis at 350 miles an hour. Marvelous. Great saving of time. Then we stood around for forty-two minutes waiting for our bags to be unloaded!” They are pleased by our cafeterias, but find the service slow in the restaurants. They wonder why we tolerate such long lines at the railroad ticket windows. They love our sleeping-car roomettes, but are disturbed, in the usual curtained sleeper, by the lack of privacy and the adjacent symphony of snores. ” In-croyable!” As for the upper berths: “When one wishes to go to the W. C., one must sound the alarm bell, wait for help, and then scramble half-clad down a ladder—as though one’s house were on fire.”

The Europeans are overwhelmed by the size and number of our automobiles, and their widespread ownership. A French team, at the Hill Acme foundry in Cleveland, watched sympathetically the heavy labors of trois noirs — three Negro steel puddlers. “What was our surprise then, at quitting time, to see the three blacks drive nonchalantly away in a luxurious new car (une luxueuse voiture du tout dernier modele J.” A thrifty Dane stared incredulously at a factory parking area containing 6000 cars. “But they will never be able to pay for them —never,” he asserted.

“You’re right,” said a parking attendant. “They’ll just trade them in and start paying on the next one.” This left the Dane more in the dark than ever.

Unable to envision such a profusion of cars in their own countries, the Europeans take a wry consolation in our parking troubles. One American drove his Dutch guest two miles into town and got there, fighting heavy traffic, in eleven minutes. Then he sweated ten minutes more trying to wedge his car into a narrow parking spot.

“Do you have a mess-up like this in Holland too?” he asked his guest.

“Oh, no,” said the Hollander. “My bicycle takes me nicely to the office in twelve minutes.”

The Europeans helpfully suggest that Americans would be happier and more efficient if we made our cars — which to them seem enormous —a foot or so shorter.

Back in the 1930′s there was a Charlie Chaplin movie called Modern Times. It pictured Chaplin as a worker driven to distraction by the speed and gadgets of mass production. Perhaps because of Chaplin’s popularity, it left a deep impression. It gave European workers the idea that the famous American productivity is based on a cruel and inhuman speed-up of American labor—an idea which the communists have not failed to pick up and ex- ploit to the utmost. Americans deny it, but the thought sticks —until European workers come over here and see with their own eyes. Then at last it sinks in that Americans work about the same hours as they do and generally under more comfortable conditions. They wonder at the absence of wheelbarrows, hods, shovels, sledgehammers, and are enthralled by the variety of ingenious power-driven hand tools by which the American lightens his toil. The American does not have to fuss around and hunt for things; the work “flows to his hand.”

At the same time, the Europeans note that the American, while he uses less physical energy than they do, works with more concentration. “He seems to throw himself into it,” they say. “He goes at it with a will.” One visitor pointed to a brisk, whistling operator. “See,” he said, “he works as if he were making something for himself.” ” Well, ain’t he? ” commented the foreman. “He buys our product too. (Shoes, in this case.) Best on the market.”

This habitual energy on the job, this apparently voluntary hustle is a continuing source of wonder to the Europeans—maybe we should allow a discount here for the fact that the worker knows strangers are watching. The visitors debate it among themselves. Some attribute it to our invigorating climate. Others call it a survival from strenuous pioneer days or put it down to a better diet, a stronger ambition, a keener competitive spirit. A favorite theory is that American wives put on the pressure. The Europeans view American women with admiration and a touch of awe; they endorse the slogan of our esteemed affiliate the Ladies’ Home Journal: ” Never underestimate the power of (an American) woman.”

A popular London newspaper, after interviewing a returning British team, ran a banner headline: Ooh-Buy-Me-That Wives Spur Yank Productivity. A French visitor, Pierre Ferenczi writes: “The American women forever astonish us. It is well known that in the U. S. A. they possess 75 % of the American wealth, and exert an influence proportional to their riches.” M. Ferenczi goes on to say he has at last discovered the secret of these charming ladies’ power. In rural Ohio, he says, he attended a meeting of women who were addressed by a “farm wives’ counselor.” She would give her hearers, he expected, useful tips on such matters as cooking, sewing, housekeeping. But no. First the lady lecturer explained how they should weigh each bit of their food so as not to get fat. Then she launched into the main theme of her talk: “How to guide your husband in making a proper will.” This, writes M. Ferenczi, made his hair stand on and (m’a fait dresser les cheveux sur la tete).

“And now you can see,” he concludes, “how in America productivity pervades every domain.” Thus our visitors find much to brighten the tedium of instruction.

The impression the travelers get of America depends greatly upon the American project managers who accompany each team. They are usually employees of EC A (now MSA), but may be chosen from the departments of Commerce, Labor, Agriculture or private industry —on contract —to fit the special needs of the team. These men plan the tour, arrange in advance for factory visits, line up the transportation, guard against mishaps, preserve harmony and try to show their charges a fair slice of American life. They live with the teams for six weeks, and need the combined gifts of an economist, baggage smasher, diplomat and wet nurse. It is an exhausting job, modestly paid, but has attracted a variety of unusual talent. Col. Charles W. (Chuck) Kerwood has been a member of the Lafayette Escadrille, a soldier of fortune, a colonel in the Greek Air Force, a sales representative in Europe, an officer of the American Air Force and a member of MacArthur’s staff in Tokyo. He is especially effective with the French teams, and makes sure that they see the life as well as the factories of America. John Saunders is a consulting engineer with industrial experience in many states. Bradford Johnson, a mechanical engineer, came up through the ranks of the automotive industry. John H. Street is a manufacturer of tank- and plane-control instruments. Samuel Stovall, real-estate man, ex-professor of engineering, student of art, music and law, describes himself as a ” polymathist” — a man of varied learning—a useful faculty for a project manager. Albro Fowler, ex-machine gunner in the AEF, was a business management consultant before shepherding TA teams at a fraction of his former salary. All the project managers I have met grumble about their hard lot, boast about their teams and seem wrapped up in their work. They treasure sheaves of appreciative letters from their charges who have returned to Europe.

The visitors vary in their estimates of American food and drink. The French like our beer better than our wine; they are highly amused at what we call “French dressing,” and appalled by the oyster cocktail drowned in catchup. They are disappointed in our hotel and restaurant cooking; surprised at the excellence of the meals in many American homes. The British don’t like our beer, but say the Scotch whisky here is better than they can get at home. They like our banana splits. They carry their own marmalade with them, and pine for British tea and kippered herring.

On two American institutions the European teams are unanimous: they all delight in our kitchens and supermarkets. Whenever an American asks the visitors to his home, the party eventually gravitates to the kitchen, to examine the stove and the washing machine, to peer into the electric refrigerator, to study the congealed food and juices in the freezing compartment. Even the sink with its hot and cold running water, which we take so much for granted, wins high praise. An Italian chemist said he could get along without a car and television. “But if my good wife had such a kitchen, her whole existence would be happier.”

Supermarkets have become a commonplace in America. To Europeans they are as strange and exciting as a fairyland. The immense variety of products, the ease of access, the convenient way in which meat or cheese is ready-wrapped soigneusement emballe”) with its weight and price marked —all these enchant them. They love the little metal baskets on wheels — “un chariot leger a deux etages “—especially the ones which have a seat where mamma can tuck in her small child. “What love, what consideration for the little ones this shows!” exclaimed one visitor. The supermarket manager explained that it also prevents the little ones from wrecking the joint. The visitor was a bit taken aback, but conscientiously made a note of this, too —one more item for his report on this surprising land and its people.

the end

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Outwitting the Plant Smugglers

by James Nevin Miller

IT WAS an ordinary looking package in the hands of an honest-appearing man who stepped from the steamer Charlotte M. Hall onto the Baltimore dock not so long ago.

The parcel had passed the customs officials, and had, apparently, a clear road to its destination anywhere in the United States. Yet it contained destructive agents that bade fair to wreck hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of property, and that might have left a trail of poverty and ruined homes throughout a period of many years.

Fortunately the U. S. government has eyes, concealed in unexpected places. This package aroused the suspicion of an inspector of the Plant Quarantine and Control Administration of the U. S. Department of Agriculture. He got possession of it, questioned the owner, opened the parcel, and saved the nation from a loss than can scarcely be calculated.

The passenger who landed that day from the Charlotte M. Hall was a Mississippi planter, returning from a business trip to Brazil. He was a progressive farmer, and his motive—the improvement of his cotton crop —was legitimate enough. But the package contained 59 separate sets of cotton seed, every set infested with living larvae and adults of the dread pink bollworm, the most destructive enemy of cotton in the world. Already it has destroyed the cotton industry of the Hawaiian Islands, and annually inflicts tremendous damage upon the cotton planters of Egypt, Brazil, Mexico—in fact, every great cotton growing country in the world save the United States.

Experts say that if this innocent appearing personal package had not been intercepted through the vigilance of a plant inspector, it would have carried to the heart of Mississippi enough living pink bollworms to have started an invasion of the entire state which might easily have gotten beyond control before discovery.

This incident is only one of the many thousands involving similar interceptions made annually by the inspectors of the Plant Quarantine and Control Board. Their job is to prevent plant and fruit smuggling, innocently intended, or otherwise; and their personnel, while comparatively small numerically speaking, is of the highest caliber. Inspectors are stationed at all principal ports.

Down along the Mexican border the Federal officers have their share and more of adventures, humorous and dangerous. Even some of the old-timers hardly dare put their hands in their pockets while working in certain hard-boiled communities, for fear of being shot at from behind. The license tags of their trucks carry the letters, U. S. D. A., meaning of course, United States Department of Agriculture. But thirsty souls, and there are many along the border, are prone to take a different interpretation—United States Dry-Agent! And lovers of the corn and rye like to take the law in their hands—when in doubt.

And now for some of the tricks of the smugglers! The following side splitting incident took place at the port of New York a few years ago. It seems that a woman arrived from Jamaica, and in her possession was dis- covered a basket containing some plants. They did not meet the current rigid requirements so a plant inspector explained that her plants could not be brought in. The good woman explained that she really wasn’t greatly interested in the plants themselves, but that she was anxious to have the soil for her prize cat to play in—he did so love to frolic about in Jamaica soil.

A tear or so appeared in the official’s eye— for he was a kindly soul. However, it did not remain there long. After being hard-hearted enough to do his duty and advise the dowager that she must return home sans the soil, he gave it the thorough Sherlock Holmes. Hardly had the good woman departed when his astonished, but no longer humanitarian eye, noted two bottles of Jamaica gin buried therein.

Joseph of Biblical fame had a coat of many colors. But the inspectors around Brownsville, Texas, and the notorious Tia Juana district, are still chuckling over the Mexican of many pockets. Some years ago this man came waddling across the border at such a slow rate that he aroused suspicion. To begin with, he was plump, but his avoirdupois seemed to be not altogether of the flesh. And it was not, as examination of his portly person revealed. Inside his coat was an ingeniously devised vest containing many pockets filled with alligator pears. Now, these delicacies are likely to contain an unwanted kind of pest. This “inventor” extraordinary was tried, found guilty, and given a stiff fine for his ambitious efforts to pull a fast one on your Uncle Samuel.

A somewhat similar incident, but of a far more serious nature, took place on the border near El Paso recently. A very dignified gentleman of middle age who claimed to be some sort of a scientist presented his trunk for Federal inspection. Nothing contraband seemed to be on hand until one of the inspectors nonchalantly plunged a hand into a bulky looking pile of the man’s coats and trousers. Encountering numerous hard objects, the inspector made a thorough investigation and found no less than 56 contraband orchid plants. That the offender’s intentions were anything but innocent was revealed by the fact that every one of the plants had been sewed painstakingly into the garments with an obvious intent to deceive. Imagine Mr. Scientist’s embarrassment when he saw his well worked plans go awry, even to the point of earning a substantial fine.

Then there was the case of the American woman who crossed the Mexican border into the United States wearing an extremely full skirt of a type common to certain well known religious sects. Devout looking was this lady, yet there was a certain something about her . demeanor that aroused suspicion, so a lady inspector was instructed to give her a thorough inspection. This brought out the interesting fact that the good woman had tied a huge bag, filled with contraband fruit, around her waist. Which may explain why she chose such full skirts on that eventful day.

But for sheer ingenuity, consider a package lately received by postal inspectors. At first glance it consisted of a number of heavy magazines. But their weight was so out of proportion to their size that the inspector opened the “magazines”. Whereupon he found many bunches of contraband nursery stock, alongside of which a couple of potatoes had been packed in order to afford moisture to the stock.

Other clever ruses of the smugglers are: false bottomed trunks and barrels, besides contraband fruits and plants which have been hidden in partially baked loaves of bread.

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The Date Line

by Jan Landon

Facts and Fancies for the Girl in School

“Frosh girls register here” is an official-looking sign that appears every September above little stands on the Cornell campus . . . unsuspecting girls don’t know it’s the upperclassmen’s way of getting a new date list.

Your own coffee van full of “Hobo Hash” is a cook-out-party special in Denver—it’s a huge hamburger covered with lots of vegetables cooked and served in the metal container.

One way to quiet a chronic complainer is to ask, “Do you want a martyr pill?”

Steadies separated by school or military service let each other know that they’re counting the days ’til they meet again by noting the actual number on every letter…….Writing letters serial style on unnumbered post cards—sometimes 15 to a letter—is a West Coast fad……”Deany,” meaning the movie star, of course, is a Minnesota word for “dandy”!

Sweater girls are switching to V necks—in boys’ style pullovers worn overblouse fashion and classic short-sleeved ones with new neckline detail . . . The do-it-yourself fans have already found ways to restyle last-year’s round necklines into trim V or scoop necks.

Boys pay a penny a minute to keep coeds out after hours on a special money-raising night at Nebraska U. . . . the limit is 60c, and profits go for scholarships for foreign students.

To describe a day when nothing seems to go right, call it “raggedgy . . . otherwise, call it “unraggedy.”

A wide-awake club at Sidney Lanier High in Montgomery, Alabama is selling illustrated calendars especially designed for the school . . . the blocks for the days have important Lanier events, Lanier football schedules, etc. already printed on them—and each one is big enough to accommodate write-in reminders of dates, tests, and term-paper deadlines.

The man on the mind of more and more girls is Jeff Chandler, despite the fact that he hasn’t yet made an Academy Award movie or sung a Hit Parade song. They are hoping, however, after seeing Foxfire and Female on the Beach, that he’ll stop making movies that star “older women.”

TV youth panels that give easy answers to hard problems are called “brain washings” by some cynical viewers.

…..Halloween party planners are picking up “Voodoo Suite,” a strange-sounding LP by Perez Prado and Shorty Rogers……

Texas teen-agers weren’t hit by “The Yellow Rose of Texas” craze—they’ve sung it for years.

The nickname fad that started with calling Cokes “Eddie Fishers” continues . . . now they’ve renamed napoleons, the French pastries, “Marlon Brandos”……”Cayuga’s Waiters” is the wonderful name of a Cornell singing group.

At a post-game party a Boston girl served foot-ball-shaped hamburgers.

To publicize pinnings, Valparaiso U.’s Lambda Chi men salute girls newly pinned to members of their fraternity by lighting flares in the pattern of their Greek initials on the lawn of the sorority house involved…… It’s a fad for a boy to tie his steady’s scarf to the aerial of his car, in the fashion of knights of chivalry . . . the more frayed it is, the longer she’s been his!…… The most mysterious thing about the To Catch a Thief movie is why no one noticed before the remarkable resemblance between Cary Grant and band-leader Ray Anthony.

Moviegoers, males especially, were struck by Jeanne Crain’s transformation from subdeb to siren in Gentlemen Marry Brunettes……

Girls wear black to the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Undertaker’s Ball at Louisiana State… they come to the party alone and have to look for their dates under a row of sheets!

An Oklahoma girl has a theory that you can tell where a girl comes from by the way she wears bobby socks . . . double cuffs at the ankle say she’s from the Southwest, no cuffs at all indicate the East, colored socks that match her sweater usually mean the Far West . . . and if her socks are rolled down to just above the ankle bone, she’s almost certainly from Iowa!

On “Joe-Nite” Saturdays Purdue U. coeds can wear slacks and scarf-covered pin curls to dormitory dinners……Everyone, including professors, has to wear tartan patterns during a fall “Plaid Week” at the University of Wisconsin……

“Button Bags” are a Boston fad, designed primarily as conversation pieces… The idea is to cover a cloth handbag with as many buttons as you can find and give that shy boy something to talk about.

The girl who gets a football hero at Capuchino High in California wears felt miniatures of his number all over her gametime outfit……

Even mood-music addicts like the way Sammy Davis, Jr., handles the lyrics to torch songs in his “Just for Lovers” album……It happened last summer in Fayette, Alabama: So many of the boys were swept by a craze to dye their hair black that some annoyed girls took revenge by bleaching theirs blond!

The Tobacco Institute believes every thoughtful adult American will want to read every word of this front-page editorial in BARRON’S-one of America’s most responsible publications.

It’s kind of amazing to think that my iPhone has far more capacity than the entire “overseas” telephone network had at this time.

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‘America Calling’

How A Transatlantic ‘Phone Call is Made

By A. P. PECK

1. Within an average of 12 minutes after an American subscriber puts in a call for a party in London, the connection is made and conversation is carried on as clearly and easily as if the called party were only a few blocks away. Behind this commonplace occurrence (an average of 50,000 overseas calls are made yearly, 60 to 65 percent of them being transatlantic), there is a vast array of technical developments and their application, aimed toward maintenance of service and speech quality.

2. The United States subscriber making the call asks his local operator for “Long Distance” (above); she in turn connects him with one of the operators at the switchboard through which all overseas calls are handled, shown at 3.

3. Left: The “Overseas” board through which passes the call to London. Here are handled most of the ‘phone calls set up between the United States and foreign countries by wire and radio telephony. First duty of an operator receiving a call at this board is to write down all details of the destination of that particular call.

4. Left: After the “Over-seas” operator looks up the number of the called party in London, she passes the information to the London operator over the radio circuit. At the desk shown are assembled ‘phone books of the principal foreign cities reached by the radio service.

5. Right: The wire part of the overseas circuit passes through the control room in the same building as the switchboard. Here operators maintain a constant watch on the apparatus; here also outgoing speech is “scrambled”.

6. To insure privacy of overseas telephony, speech is “scrambled,” or inverted in frequency; anyone listening in with a radio receiver would hear sounds resembling almost anything but coherent speech. The above drawing, fanciful in its execution, shows briefly what happens. The voice frequencies of “America calling” are scrambled to sound something like “on oy ikau ki yung”; they are unscrambled when they reach the receiver.

7. From the control room shown at 5, a wire line carries the voice of the speaker to a short-wave transmitting station at Lawrenceville, New Jersey (above), whence it is hurled across the Atlantic by a directive radio antenna system, picked up at a receiving station near London, and sent on its way once more by wire.

8. Left: The radio control room in the London Trunk Exchange, where the voice from the United States is unscrambled. Here also operators keep check on the functioning of all associated apparatus, and control the volume of current passing through the circuit so that transmitted speech will at all times be within the easily audible range—neither too loud nor too low for perfect understanding.

9. From the radio control room the incoming voice is passed by wire to the International Exchange in the same building, whence it is routed through the local telephone exchange system and finally reaches the party being called.

10. Right: The call is completed. Quickly and without hitch, two parties on opposite sides of the Atlantic have been connected by wire and radio, an accomplishment made possible by the findings of intensive scientific research.

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Germany Awakens

PEWTER, PLIERS AND PORSCHES

German manufacturers make a vast array of products for the special tastes of foreign consumers

For millions of shoppers around the world the words “made in Germany” have always meant such ingenious, finely machined articles as are arranged on the opposite page. These products, once again available to consumers everywhere, still bear the mark of the clever and inventive German mind. The Niirnberg and Black Forest toy industries have repeated their prewar successes with steam engines, working cranes and remote-controlled automobiles and moved into new educational fields with plastic motors. Camera companies, which perfected their Leicas, Contaxes, Rolleiflexes and Linhofs before the war, have refined new models. New German ideas range from an automobile dashboard gadget that whips up a cup of coffee to a Plexiglas-covered scooter.

Principal postwar addition to basic German skills is improvement in design. To get it, German industries have called in foreign designers, like the U.S.’s Raymond Loewy, to style their wares for foreign markets.

OUTBURST OF ART.

Pent up for years, artists emerge with fresh energy and new styles

Today there are more artists—half again as many more— at work in Western Germany than there were 20 years ago when Hitler came to power. The numerous museums and galleries are crowded with people who come to look and to buy. A single exhibition of contemporary German art in Munich last summer drew 60,000 visitors who, with their limited earnings, bought 180 works.

Such craving is understandable in a people who for years were not allowed to see or produce creative and vital art. When Hitler abolished the “degenerate” work of world-famous men like Paul Klee, Karl Hofer (above) and other moderns in favor of “healthy, Aryan” products, the major artists were forced to flee the country, work in secrecy or cease working altogether. In 1945 they emerged with pent-up energy and tremendous will to create again. Seeing anew or for the first time the innovations of modern French art, the majority plunged headlong into abstractionism. Today they are working out their personal styles, each in his way trying to make up for the frustration and isolation that stifled them for more than a decade.

WINDOW DESIGNER Near Cologne, Painter Georg Meistermann, 43, earns a living designing stained-glass windows for churches and for secular buildings. In the Cologne radio station (left) he decorated the stair-well windows with abstractions to suggest electronic equipment.

MUNICH MODERN Once a student of Klee, Munich’s Fritz Winter, 49, spent three years in a Russian prison camp. Since his release in 1949 his dynamic abstractions, exhibited internationally, have established him as the outstanding new painter of postwar Germany.

NEW BERLIN GROUP Foremost center of German art is Berlin, where exponents of every style have congregated. Most of the city’s leading artists have joined together in an informal association known as the New Berlin Group and have held joint shows every year since 1949. The majority teach at the Western Academy of Fine Arts which is flooded with students from both west .and east sectors of the city. Members of the group, shown with their work, include (above, from left): Hans Kuhn, 48, ex-war prisoner whose art stems from “dreamlife”; Juro Kubicek, 48, also ex-prisoner who developed abstract style in a U.S. PW camp; Hans Uhlmann, 54, sculptor who turns scrap metal into abstractions; (seated) Hans Thiemann, 44, former student of Klee; Max Kaus, 63, early Expressionist; Alexander Camaro, 53, onetime dancer; (leaning on painting) Hans Jaenisch, 47, a best-selling painter; Woty Werner, 51, tapestry designer, and her painter husband Theodor, 67; Bernhard Heiliger, 48, sculptor; Fritz Kuhr, 55, house painter during Nazi regime; (seated at table) Renee Sintenis, 66, who specializes in tiny bronzes.

STUTTGART PRINT MAKER A hobby of making prints has turned into a profitable venture for Painter Willi Baumeister, 65 (above, center). With the aid of assistants in Stuttgart, he turns out editions of his own colorful, nonobjective work, as well as prints by other Germans which sell well both at home and in the U.S. Labeled “degenerate” by the Nazis, Baumeister painted in hiding during the war. He is now a teacher at Stuttgart Academy and one of the major influences on young German painters.

ACADEMY PROFESSOR With Karl Hofer, Karl Schmidt-Rottluflf is one of the Berlin Academy’s most distinguished professors. A pioneer of the Expressionist school which centered in Germany, Schmidt-Rottluff was one of the first to be blacklisted by Hitler. Some 600 of his boldly colored paintings were confiscated and he was visited periodically by the Gestapo to see whether his brushes had been used. Today, at the age of 70, he still teaches a class and also paints in his studio every day.

COUNTRY REBUILDS IN MODERN DESIGN

Faced with a prodigious rebuilding job, German architects at war’s end looked forward—as the artists did (preceding pages)—to working in the modern styles which Hitler had forbidden. They were handicapped, however, not only by an acute scarcity of materials but by the apathy of civic officials and laymen who resisted modern architectural designs and in many cases advocated a return to the safe styles of the 19th Century.

This aversion to the modern was a paradox in the country which had been the center of advanced architectural ideas. Between 1919 and 1933 some of the world’s leading architects—Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer—were at work at Germany’s famous Bauhaus (literally “building house”), a school where revolutionary concepts of architectural and industrial design were put forward. Most of the Bauhaus leaders left Germany for the U.S. when Hitler came to power. But many of their disciples remained and now have come to the fore. Working with concrete, glass and steel which today are available, they are building modern theaters, factories, stations, stores and homes. New apartments, like the looming rectangles above, are a further answer to the tremendous housing shortage, aftermath of the wartime destruction of five million homes, which still plagues the country. Along with the painters and sculptors, the architects are devoting special attention to rebuilding the war-torn churches whose former traditional contours are being recast in the inventive geometric styles which reflect Germany’s modern spirit.

NEW CHURCH in Pforzheim was built over the ruins of bombed St. Matthew’s Church. The walls are of concrete blocks inset with octagons of colored glass.

CONVERTED CHURCH in Frankfurt has its original outer walls but a new interior. Now used as a meeting hall, it is lighted by chains of neon lights.

HOUSING PROJECT, covering six blocks in Hamburg, occupies the site of two-story houses which were all destroyed during the war. The administration building right has indented ground floor surrounded by pillars. The building with a canopy roof (background, left) has top-floor terrace studios for painters.

ART SHOP in Bremen is a converted underground air-raid shelter fancied up with a modernistic entrance. Concrete roof has tiny glass panes to provide light.

LUMINOUS BANK in Diisseldorf has mirrorlike marble columns which catch the reflections of fluorescent lights arranged in the shape of spoked wheels.
A TRANSPARENT STAIRWAY, encased in glass, rises outside a Diisseldorf office building. Designed by H. Hentrich (above), it is a bright column at night.

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The Cult of VIRILITY

A discussion of the fears and worries that lie behind the tough bravado of would-be he-men.

by Richard Stiller, M. A.

Quite recently an acquaintance of mine was congratulated on the birth of his first child. One of the well-wishers—a long-married but childless man who was well-known for his athletic vigor and his very aggressive personality—said: “Well, at least nobody can question your virility.”

Obviously this outwardly masculine man had some private doubts about his public image as a 100 per cent male figure.

Otherwise he would not have made the revealing error of confusing virility—sexual potency—with fertility— the ability to father children.

A man can be potent, but sterile; he can also be impotent even though his testicles produce sperm.

There is no doubt that visible evidence that one is virile is very important to some men, especially those who doubt themselves.

Since it is impossible (or at least illegal!) to demonstrate one’s virility to the world by an act of sexual intercourse, what better public proof is there than fatherhood? The birth of a child is an advertisement that proclaims: “I am able to impregnate a woman; I am therefore an unquestionably virile man!”

Of course most people don’t really pay much attention to the other fellow’s virility or lack of it. But for the individual who for one reason or another has doubts about his manliness—or for the adolescent boy who has yet to prove it—such demonstrations of sexual prowess are very important.

For some they are an emotional and psychological necessity. So much so that all sorts of symbols have, in recent times, become important psychological crutches for insecure males.

Take the tattoo, time-honored symbol of the rough-and-tough male, and traditionally associated with such relentlesly masculine types as seamen, construction workers, lumberjacks, etc. Whatever its origins among primitive men, the tattoo in cultures like ours has become a sort of status symbol of virility.

One famous cigarette advertisement became well – known for the prominently-displayed tattoo on the hand of its well-dressed and otherwise socially impeccable male model. The implication, of course, was that smoking that particular brand of cigarettes was a further sign of manliness.

Ironically, 3 investigators—a psychologist and 2 psychiatrists—have since found that the tattooed man is more often likely to have sexual problems than is the non-tattooed man.

In a study of 65 tattooed patients at the veterans’ hospital in Oklahoma City, they found that while most of these men had had themselves tattooed in order to impress their girl friends, they actually scored poorly on a personality test that rated masculine attributes.

The doctors concluded from this and from personal and medical histories that the tattooed man is really more likely to “aspire to be masculine” rather than to be the sturdy male figure one might expect.

As the nationally-syndicated columnist Andrew Tully remarked in a blast at the advertising practice of equating smoking with virility: “It is too bad that the tattoo has become a symbol of a special kind of manhood for insecure males seeking to assure themselves of the right to wear long pants.”

The “right to wear long pants” is pretty much established for most men over—let us say—age 21. But what about the male teen-ager who is painfully aware of the need to win this right?

Here, certainly, is an anxious and unsure individual who “aspires to be masculine.” How does he gain acceptance of his fledgling manhood ? More to the point, how does he demonstrate to himself, as well as to others, his adult status?

The achievement of sexual intercourse—the proof of his virility—is ironclad nailed-down evidence that he is a man. Adolescents know that older men do not consider boys men until they have hat”, sexual intercourse.

Some boys, says Dr. Lester A. Kirkendall of Oregon State University, try to demonstrate their hard-won virility by a visit to a prostitute, preferably in the company of other boys. The presence of others gives them the necessary courage for the ordeal of this self-imposed initiation ceremony.

It also provides the essential witnesses to the triumph. This is also the case when boys engage in collective sexual activity with non-prostitute girl friends, or when gangs of delinquent youth commit mass rape on some luckless girl.

Even evidence of masturbation is taken as some kind of preliminary to real status. In his study of the male, Kinsey says of the adolescent: “There is a social value in establishing one’s (sexual) ability, and many a boy exhibits his masturbatory technique to lone companions or to whole groups of boys.”

But what of the boy who—through sensitivity, fear of his own inadequacy, or any of a number of other reasons—is unable or unwilling to participate in semi-public sexual activity? How does he demonstrate— and he desperately needs this demonstration—his manhood ?

This is no light problem. One of the serious side-effects of our complicated big-city culture is its postponement of adulthood.

The gap between a boy’s sexual and physical maturity—at age 14 or 15—and his social and economic maturity—that is, the age when he can afford to marry and start a family— is a dangerous psychological no-man’s-land. He feels himself at this time an untested man treated like a boy, and not permitted to win his spurs.

Since society does not provide it for him, some authorities suggest, he creates for himself an initiation ceremony by which he tells himself and others that he has arrived. Part of this initiation is the use of symbols to demonstrate his virility and his manhood. In the United States today, one of the most powerful of these symbols is the automobile.

That is why—say some experts— teen-agers drive so hard and so fast, and seem generally to be so car-crazy. When a 15 or 16-year-old gets the keys to a car—preferably his own, but his father’s will do—it is like proclaiming to all the world: “I am a man!” He feels much like the first-time father on the birth of his firstborn.

Other well-known aspects of the teen-agers’ efforts to be manly are quite well-known. They include the copying of what are taken to be adult male ways, such as smoking, drinking, using profanity, etc.

But nothing makes a boy feel as much like a man as achieving sexual intercourse. This is one reason, say some sociologists, for the drive towards early marriage. If one act of coitus is the mark of a man, how much more so is the regular sexual intercourse that the marriage relationship symbolizes!

Sometimes this preoccupation with the signs and symbols of maleness can become a cult of virility. In some Latin-American countries, particularly Mexico, this cult has become a full-blown cultural pattern that is almost a national characteristic.

Known in Spanish as machismo, this cult of masculinity exaggerates the attributes of maleness. To be a “real” male—macho—one must demonstrate to an extreme the manly traits of physical courage, aggressiveness, sexual virility, and personal domination over others, especially over women.

This puts quite a burden on the growing adolescent, just as our own cultural requirements for virility— that a man marry, have children, and support them in a relatively high standard of living—can and do create serious tensions for the young male.

As the sociologist Oscar Lewis has said, “In any country where machismo is considered very important, fear of impotence or at least complex sexual problems must occur.”

To sum up: the cult of virility protests too much. It uses symbols to hide a frightening lack. Tattooing, fast – driving and tough – talking are more often than not a self-confession of male inadequacy.

———————————————-UNRELATED (Kinda)———————————————-
WORSE THAN FORNICATION
“Stealing food from the dormitory refrigerator would be more condemned around here than fornicating on the living-room couch.”

—A Radcliffe senior, quoted in Newsweek.

“but if you’re a smart shemale you’ll concentrate on your partner.”

This word, I do no think it means what you think it means.

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BUT IS IT PROPER?

GUYS AND GALS will always have gripes about each other, still the delicate art of dating survives. Singer Mike Clifford and dancer Ginny Shepard agreed to help illustrate some of the more common gripes, ones with which they’re familiar. Ginny is 19, a ballet student since she was five, a native of Connecticut who shares a Manhattan apartment with another dancer and dreams of doing her first Broadway show. Mike’s 19, a native of Los Angeles; he’s 5’11″ tall, has light brown hair and hazel eyes, is a bug on cars (drives a yellow Lark convertible) and records for Columbia. He and Ginny date when their busy schedules allow it. Ginny likes people; prefers casual dates like movies, especially if you don’t know your date too well. “It’s harder to break the barrier on formal dates,” she says. “A sense of humor helps if the unexpected comes up.” Mike, too, likes movie-and-hot-dog dates, but feels obligated to see other entertainers in his free time. He likes to be mostly off in a corner and doesn’t dig girls who date him just to be seen. “I hate to be with a girl who goes out for herself,” he says. Ginny doesn’t fall into that category. •

Last minute dates are okay if a boy has a good reason, so why shouldn’t you accept? “I usually call at the last minute because I’m never sure my schedule gives me time for a date,” said Mike. “My friends are used to it.” Said Ginny: “I like ‘spontaneous things so I accept a last-minute invitation when I can—but the boy who calls late has got to understand if you are busy, and not get mad. “Mike’s comment: “I don’t like when it happens to me, but I understand.”

Should you keep a date waiting? “No,” said Mike — and most boys agree. It’s neither fair nor smart. A boy won’t wait around too long while you finish what you should have done earlier. Memories of awkward conversations with your parents may make him cross your name from his little black book. And talking with your sister or roommate could eventually push you right out of the picture. “I’m usually ready on time,” said Ginny — and Mike nodded approval.

What about the fella who comes to visit—and ends up sleeping the evening away on the couch? He’s nice, too? Maybe, but it’s not very flattering and makes you think twice about inviting him again. “This has happened to me,” grimaced Ginny. Mike just grinned, kept tactfully silent. Of course, if you’re very serious steadies, and you’re the type who’d rather know where he is than wonder . . . well, you can always watch TV.

You’re dancing cheek to cheek—but what’s going on behind his back? You might think it makes you look more popular to be waving to people all over the dance floor, but if you’re a smart shemale you’ll concentrate on your partner. Otherwise you’re just plain rude—and risk blowing the whole romance bit, if that matters to you. “Ooooooh, that bugs me,” said Mike, which is just about the way most guys feel.

If the phone rings while a date is visiting, answer it — or he’ll think you’ve lost more than one of your senses. But if your vision is 20-20 you’ll see how bugged your date gets if the call takes more than two minutes. It can be tempting if the phone caller is more important to you than Johnny-on-the-spot, but don’t give in. A bird in the hand . . .

It takes two to make a conversation, so if you’re feeling bored to death, think how he must feel. He asked for a date, so he’s interested in you. You accepted, so you must like him a little. So what if he’s not what you expected. You could be equally dis- appointing to him. There must be some subject that will make him come to life. Isn’t it a challenge to try and discover what it is? “The main thing is to enjoy yourself,” said Ginny, so if he looks like he’d rather be out with the boys, you’re both to blame.

Being a football hero might get him a date with you, but once you’re together you’ll soon wish he’d remember you’re on the same team. A guy can goof up an evening by throwing a block and tackle when it comes time to say good night. Grid tactics are fine on the field, but who wants to try and out-maneuver him in the hallway. If the fella’s trying to score, he’s going about it all wrong. You could call a penalty—and be all tied up the next time he phones.

Surprises are fine — providing they don’t make you uncomfortable on a date. “I thought you knew we were going to the Copa,” Mike kidded a slack-clad Ginny. It’s equally aggravating when you spend all day getting ready for a formal date—and then he tells you you’re going bowling! Strike? No, but the urge is almost overpowering!

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My IDEA Paid Me a Million as told by TEN FAMOUS INVENTORS

Money and fame await the man who invents some new device which the world needs. These inspiring personal stories of great inventions give a fascinating glimpse into the successes which have come to men who have patiently developed an idea.

These Ten Inventions Are Making Millions for Their Owners: 1. Westinghouse automatic iron, invented by J. A. Spencer, former night watchman; 2. Disk record talking machine, of Emile Berliner, dry goods clerk; 3. Motion picture projector, developed by C. Francis Jenkins, stenographer; 4. Hoover vacuum cleaner, invented by Murray Spangler, janitor; 5. The outboard motor of Ole Evinrude, former handy man; 6. Rayon, the artificial silk, developed by scores of research experts; 7. Rice Flakes breakfast food, the idea of Howard Heinz, corporation president; 8. Pyrex glass baking dish, perfected by the Corning Glass Works; 9. Kodacolor colored movies, worked out by John G. Capstaff, former ship-building engineer; 10. Stenotype shorthand machine, the idea of Ward S. Ireland, stenographer.

I. An Automatic Iron by J.A. Spencer

IT WAS through watching the middle section of a furnace door move for a noticeable distance when it warped under the influence of heat at its center that I got the idea of contriving a metallic device which would make use of the principle that metal expands when heated, to turn on and off an electric current.

Seven years spare time went into the study of the problem. When the idea finally proved workable, practically all my limited salary resources were spent. With the assistance of friends a shop was rented and production of my current-controlling thermostat begun. The drawing below gives a good idea of the principle on which the device works. Two metals with different rates of expansion are fastened together, with an electric contact point at the center.

When, for example, the brass is heated to a certain temperature, it expands and the disk snaps up like the bottom of an oil can, lifting the contact and breaking the circuit. When cooled, the metal shrinks and snaps the circuit closed again. Thus this little device automatically controls the temperature of an electric iron.

Westinghouse experts, interested in the invention, insisted that it must turn a current off and on 350,000 consecutive times without a single failure before it could be considered a success. The device came through the test with flying colors, having proved its dependability beyond a doubt— the main reason why the housewife today finds the automatic control so satisfactory.

II. The Talking Machine By EMILE BERLINER

I WAS born in Germany in 1851 into a family of 11 children. I went to school up to the age of 14 and then worked as a printer’s devil without pay, later clerking in a dry goods store. Just before my nineteenth birthday a friend persuaded me to go to America to clerk in a Washington, D. C., dry goods store. For several years I worked in New York, Washington, and Milwaukee, clerking, selling glue, and working in a sugar analyst’s laboratory.

In 1883 I became associated with the Bell telephone interests, to whom I had sold my invention of the microphone which I had perfected after considerable experiment. In perfecting the microphone I had naturally acquired a great deal of information on the science of sound, and I became interested in seeing if I could devise a machine which would reproduce the human voice.

In 1857 Leon Scott, a Frenchman, had invented the phonautograph, an instrument which recorded but did not reproduce the vibrations of the voice. By 1883 both Bell and Edison had worked on the problem. They discovered that sound thrown against a diaphragm makes it vibrate, and were promoting the resulting devices. Edison’s phonograph involved a sound recording system whereby sound waves were vertically indented, while Bell’s graphophone had vertically engraved waves in a wax cylinder.

After five years of experiment I patented my gramophone in 1888. In contrast with other machines, its record was made horizontally and parallel with the record sur- face. Soon I was making disk records of the type in general use today, using zinc dies which solved the problem of making unlimited duplicate copies of an original record. It is the disk record which makes present day talking machines able to reproduce sound so faithfully. The Victrola company is the direct outgrowth of the Berliner Gramophone company, which I established in Philadelphia in 1892. The success of the company is well demonstrated by the fact that the name of its product has become a household synonym for “talking machine” throughout the world, with thousands of machines in use.

III. The Moving Picture by C. FRANCIS JENKINS

I WAS an adventure-loving young scamp born south of Dayton, Ohio. After a rural education near our farm outside Richmond, Indiana, I restlessly explored the northwest and southwest before finally settling down in Washington, D. C., at the age of 21 as a stenographer.

Always I had fiddled with machinery, and now, while boarding near the capitol, I enthused over Eastman’s crude box-camera. “Why not,” I argued, “make pictures which give the impression of moving?”

That was in 1890. I knew nothing of photography, but after taking a number of still pictures purporting to show people in chronological motion I drew up some rough sketches, bought a lamp, reflector, and camera box, and set to work.

My first “projector,” developed in 1893 after three years’ spare time tests, worked poorly. Funds were low, but by 1894 I had made a device called a phantascope which turned out better. It photographed moving objects and later reproduced them, giving the sense of continuous motion. Two essentials were involved: a picture mechanism for giving the film a jerky or intermittent movement at the picture aperture, thereby permitting a relatively long illumination, and a loop above this aperture to prevent the film from leaving the projector.

With limited funds, I had great trouble promoting the idea. The rest of the story contains little drama. In 1896, after my phantascope had been patented, Edison persuaded me to sell my rights for $2,500.

The phantascope was the forerunner of the modern motion picture projector, and I afterward regretted having sold it at such a low price. Since then, however, I have taken out over 300 patents, and today maintain my own private laboratory where ideas are turned into reality.

IV. The Vacuum Cleaner by MURRAY SPANGLER

TWENTY years ago Murray Spangler, an Ohio farmer, took a job as janitor in a Canton department store. A “bug” on efficiency, he used all the cleaning implements then available, and even invented a wagon like an old-time fire cart which contained a long hose connected with a tank inside which a vacuum was created by a gas engine. Drawing the wagon up in the street, Spangler would insert a hose through a window and suction the dirt into the tank outside.

From this crude beginning came the Hoover suction cleaner, hailed as the first efficient machine of the portable type familiar today. Backed by W. H. Hoover, a harness-maker who donated a portion of his workshop, Spangler perfected the cleaner after months of patient labor. More years of refinement followed before the cleaner became the small, compact machine in use today.

Murray Spangler, now dead, lived to see his suction cleaner in use in 3,000.000 homes throughout the world.

V. The Outboard Motor By OLE EVINRUDE

ALONG rowboat ride for a dish of ice cream was the immediate inspiration to the invention of the Evinrude motor which is the basis for the familiar out-hoard engine of today. I had rowed a young lady friend two miles from the lake shore to an island hamlet where a picnic was being held, and upon our arrival she expressed a desire for a dish of ice cream— which meant that I had to row to shore and back again, a distance of four miles. I decided then that there was a need for a motor which could be attached to a rowboat.

About a year later I showed that same girl (who was now Mrs. Evinrude) the model of the first outboard motor. The first one didn’t work very well, but in a few months I succeeded in perfecting it. My wife was my partner in our growing business—she engineered a mail-order campaign which sold the motors, while I designed and built the machinery for manufacturing them. In 1911 a national advertising campaign was begun and an organization built up on a production basis. Today there is hardly a lake in the United States without an outboard motor in use.

VI. Rayon, the Artificial Silk

NO ONE man deserves the entire credit for the invention of rayon, the first entirely new and distinctive textile in some 4,000 years of history. But if you were to ask any government textile expert who really put the new fabric on the map in this country, he would probably answer, ex-officio: “the Duponts.”

Back in 1884 two young Frenchmen, Reaumur and Chardonnet, after pains-taking study of the silkworm, succeeded in duplicating the process whereby it derived cellulose from nature. They found that when a mass of vegetable fiber, such as mulberry or oak leaves, has been boiled in water containing certain solvents, a mass of colorless, odorless, and tasteless material remains, composed of the membrane which forms the cells of vegetable matter. In 1902 Topham, an English inventor, per- fected an apparatus for forming textile fibre from this cellulose solution, and his method is now universally used.

Leonard Yerkes, president of the Dupont Rayon Company, describes rayon as an utterly new textile; it is as if a new color were added to the spectrum. Many fabrics are made entirely of rayon; in others wool, cotton, silk, or linen is combined with it.

The possibilities of profit for the man who can invent another new textile of this nature are evidenced by the fact that over 100,000,000 pounds of rayon were consumed in the United States last year. Already rayon has outdistanced silk in the textile markets.

An interesting fact is that the demand for rayon has been built up within less than a decade. The first Dupont rayon plant was erected at Buffalo, New York, in 1921, and in the first year it produced only 658,000 pounds of product.

VII. Rice Flakes Breakfast Food By HOWARD HEINZ

A DECADE ago I conceived the idea of developing a cereal food which would contain elements capable of overcoming the deficiency of cellulose in the average diet, a deficiency known to produce certain stomach disorders. Whole grain cereals contain an adequate amount of cellulose, but the harsh taste of such grains makes them unpopular. It took 10 years of research before our laboratory workers discovered that cellulose (which is merely “roughage” which aids digestion, but contains no food elements) can be obtained from rice bran in a purified, tasteless and odorless state, and then returned to the grain, which is cooked and flaked.

A manufacturing plant was erected at Lake Charles, La., where rice is raised in large quantities. The tasty product was introduced to the public and met with an immediately favorable reception. Today rice flakes are a favorite cereal food throughout the country.

VIII. Pyrex, the Glass Baking Dish

A MINOR household accident which occurred 14 years ago was indirectly responsible for the development of Pyrex, the trade name of a glass which will not break when subjected to heat. The wife of Dr. Sullivan of the Corning Glass Works in New York had lost a pudding dish while moving, and when she visited her husband in his laboratory to tell him of the accident she received such slight sympathy from him that she grasped a glass jar used for laboratory experiments and threatened to bake a pudding in it—which she did. The results were so tasty that Dr. Sullivan set himself to the perfection of an inexpensive glass which could be used for cooking purposes without shattering in the oven.

When finally perfected, Pyrex glass was not entirely the invention of one man. Hundreds of experts contributed their knowledge. Pyrex history really dates back to the pioneer work of Otto Schott of Jena, who studied the ability of glass to withstand sudden temperature changes. In May, 1915, the first large order of Pyrex baking ware was produced at the Corning works. It survived all tests. The formula for its manufacture provided for sufficient metallic content in the glass to make it, in effect, elastic; it could not shatter by expanding or contracting suddenly as temperature changed. Today it is used not only for baking dishes but for countless similar uses as well.

IX. Kodacolor, Movies in Color By JOHN G. CAPSTAFF

Fundamentally, the process by which movies in color are produced is simple enough. An immense number of tiny cylindrical lenses are embossed into the film by passing it between steel rollers. These lenses are only visible under a microscope, being seven times smaller than the dots making up the illustrations in newspapers. A color filter is placed on the lens of the camera and the function of the embossed lenses is to separate the rays of light falling on them so that the red, green and blue rays are imaged behind each tiny lens in three vertical strips parallel to the stripes of color on the filter. There were countless details to be worked out before the system was finally perfected; it would require a text book to explain in detail. The embossed lenses, however, are the real secret of the process.

Kodacolor’s history really covers something like 25 years of research. At first the colors were extremely poor, but by last summer the Kodacolor process was perfected and ready for the public. Today it is being used by thousands of amateur cameramen.

X. The Stenotype By Ward S. Ireland

MY WORK as a stenographer impressed on me the fact that taking notes by shorthand is an arduous job. Furthermore, notes taken by one stenographer can not always be transcribed by another in emergencies, even though both use the same system of shorthand writing. Why not devise a machine which would print shorthand symbols in much the same fashion as a typewriter prints letters of the alphabet? This idea for the Stenotype machine came to me in 1911.

Success followed almost immediately after the Stenotype was patented. The photo gives a good idea of how the machine works, printing shorthand characters on an endless tape. The device looks very much like an adding machine. The Stenotype is now produced by the LaSalle Extension University.

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THE LANGUAGE OF THE Homosexual

Homosexual slang, says this expert, is becoming an important part of our language and literature.

by Donald Webster Cory

America is a mixture of many types of speech reflecting the cultures and backgrounds of its teeming millions. One type that is widely used, though not given recognition, serves a very important function in the lives of many people. This is the language of the homosexual.

There are 2 ways in which homosexual slang is used. The first is when it is employed by the outsider or “straight” individual to describe or refer to homosexuals ar.d their activities. In this way the slang mirrors society’s disapproval and permits a person to talk of homosexuals without incurring any guilt by association.

The other, or “inside” language, is used by the homosexual and serves several purposes other than simple communication. It helps to transform the feeling of being a despised minority to that of a special in-group.

Not only do homosexuals have a language, which in itself becomes an identifying factor, but because of its secret nature it imparts the feeling of belonging, a need particularly strong in the members of this minority.

When these members meet, the dropping of a few homosexual slang words enables recognition, and strengthens the bond of fraternity. It makes them comrades as it were in the common struggle. By giving new meanings to everyday words, it allows a more open discussion of forbidden subjects with little fear of detection by the “outsider.” Words or phrases are also employed to describe other members, not only as to appearance, manner, desirability, and sexual preference, but also to reflect the prejudices of the community.

These labels are often quite stinging in their critical content, and reflect the two-sided feelings of these people toward themselves and their sexual outlook.

Since more and more of these words are finding their way into our language and literature, it is worth examining some of them: AC-DC: the bi-sexual, a person who will have sex relations with members of either sex; the expression has no particular emotional connotation and is sometimes heard also in the heterosexual world.

Auntie: an aging homosexual; employed by the more youthful to show their disdain and superiority.

Basket: the bulge produced, usually in a person wearing tight dungarees, by the male genitalia.

Benrus Queen: a homosexual, not necessarily effeminate, who derives gratification from watching others perform a sex act.

Butch: a masculine appearing person, not necessarily a homosexual; it is one of the higher compliments a person can be paid. In lesbian circles, it refers to a very masculine type of female homosexual.

Camp: A life-of-the-party person, usually one who attracts attention by utilizing the mannerisms of the other sex.

To Camp or To Camp It Up: to have fun, create a jovial atmosphere, by employing gay expressions and effeminate gestures, etc.

Chicken Hawk: a chicken is an adolescent; the chicken hawk pursues this type.

Clever: an attractive or good-looking person.

Come Out: A common expression with 2 meanings—(1) to become aware of one’s homosexual interests; (2) to have one’s first homosexual experience.

Dike: female homosexual; lesbian. Bull-Dike: very masculine lesbian. Diesel-Dike: a lesbian who is considered a “fast worker.”

Do Somebody: perform the act of fellatio. This is descriptive terminology; it is a basic phrase employed, having no emotional overtones.

Fairy: seldom used in homosexual circles, except as a term of contempt for another gay person. In heterosexual slang, it is used to refer either to any homosexual, or to an effeminate one.

Femme: the feminine or womanly type of lesbian.

Gay: homosexual.

Group Expression (or Group Therapy) : a gay orgy involving several people.

Hustler: a male prostitute. The name connotes a certain status, at least to those who apply the term to themselves, whereas in the female counterpart those of the profession are looked upon with disdain.

John: the older man who pays for sexual favors from the younger, more attractive person.

Meat Rack: an area designated as a “pick-up” spot.

Meat Sandwich: sexual activity in which three people take part, the more desirable person being the center of attraction, literally as well as figuratively.

Nel: the name applied to the individual, not necessarily an invert, who displays feminine mannerisms. This person is referred to as being “nelly.”

Number: a sexual contact of short duration or little consequence.

Queen: when used by itself usually indicates an effeminate homosexual, but when coupled with a descriptive word, such as “benrus,” it loses the feminine connotation and becomes simply part of the phrase.

Closet Queen: the person who hides his homosexual interest either from himself or the world. The expression carries with it much contempt.

Drag Queen: the homosexual who wears feminine clothing. To “go in drag” is to be dressed in such attire. This behavior is condemned by the vast majority of homosexuals, not only because these people are not considered desirable sexually, but because of the resultant distorted public image.

Size Queen: the invert who prefers the male with a large penis.

Tea-Room Queen: the deviant who loiters in a men’s room (tea-room) for the purpose of making a sexual contact. It is another working expression and has no particular coloration.

Green Queen: the individual who frequents public parks to seek gratification in the concealment of the trees and bushes. The added danger of detection plus the feeling of exposure in public apparently enhances the excitement of the sexual experience.

Queer: again, used almost exclusively in heterosexual circles, to denote the homosexual.

S & M: the sado-masochistic aspect of deviant activity; many homosexuals profess to look upon these members with grave disapproval.

Seafood: a sailor.

Straight: heterosexual; usually used as an adjective.

To Tip: literally to walk, bouncing on the tips of the toes in an exaggerated, feminine gait. When a person says he must tip, he means he must leave or walk away.

Trade: the inserter in the sex act of fellatio; rough trade is the particularly tough or surly individual playing this role.

Trick: the word is interchangeable with “number”; originally used by women prostitutes in referring to their customers, who were “tricked” out of money or other concessions.
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Mr. Cory is the well-known author of “The Homosexual in America” and editor of “Homosexualily: A Cross-Cultural Approach.”

What Three-letter Word Chills Beverages Without Killing the Taste?

ICE

If you’ve ever been served a beverage filled with cloudy, fast-melting ice cubes and tasting faintly of yesterday’s broccoli, you know why really smart hosts and hostesses use nothing but genuine ice.

For genuine ice—the kind made only by your Ice Company—is not only hard-frozen and crystal-clear but as completely taste-free as the purest water. It is inexpensive to buy—convenient and wonderful to use.

The next time you plan a party, be sure to have plenty of genuine ice on hand to ensure its success. Your Ice Company will gladly supply your needs.

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF ICE INDUSTRIES Dept. SA, 1706 L Street, N.W., Washington 6, D. C.

Genuine ICE FILLS EVERY COOLING NEED

When You Entertain
Use crushed ice generously in serving appetizers, juices, sea-foods and salads. Your Ice Company can supply genuine ice for every occasion.

When You Shop
Get your money’s worth when you buy vegetables! Up-to-date stores always keep their vegetables garden-fresh by displaying them in crushed ice.

Home-Made Ice Cream
Old-fashioned, velvety ice cream made with genuine ice in a home freezer has a texture and flavor no “still-frozen” substitute can equal.

Free Money-Saver
Send a postcard today for your free copy of “Money-saving Tips on Marketing”— a complete guide to buying vegetables, poultry, sea-food.

Ice Makes The Picnic
Picnic time calls for genuine ice and plenty of it. A handy picnic chest carries the ice— and the beverages—and keeps the foods fresh besides. Inexpensive, too. Get one from your local Ice Company.

1850—ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF ICE PROGRESS—1950

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Shackleton the Pioneer

by W. H. TURNER
Technical Editor Encyclopedia Brittanica

TWENTY years ago Shackleton set out for Antarctica with a shipload of equipment. Today a million dollar expedition with four ships and four airplanes is exploring the same ground—but in what a different way! Old and new methods of exploration are graphically contrasted in this authoritative article.

WHEN Sir Ernest Shackleton organized his famous South Pole Expedition in 1907, he carried all of his equipment on one ship, the Endurance. Men, dog teams, provisions, instruments— everything had to be carried on the one frail barkentine and when the Endurance was caught in the ice floes and slowly crushed to kindling in one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of polar exploration, the hardy adventurers were forced to take to the drifting ice and undergo incredible hardships before they finally reached Elephant Island. Then Shackleton, with five companions, set out on a perilous 800 mile voyage to South Georgia in a whaleboat— crossed the bleak mountains afoot to a settlement, where a relief expedition was organized to rescue the marooned men.

Contrast this story of privation with the epic of the Byrd expedition, now under way. Byrd is using four ships, four airplanes, is carrying 75 dogs, a crew of polar scientists and adventurers totaling 75 in number, a complete Antarctic village with specially constructed houses, workshops, airplane hangars, tractors, and hundreds of pieces of delicate apparatus. Shackleton spent dreary winter nights in complete darkness, with little protection from blizzards and terrific winds—just as the present-day Viking would be forced to do if he did not avail himself of modern equipment.

Life on shipboard and on the ice in the Antarctic regions can be made just as comfortable as if civilization were just around the corner, rather than thousands of miles away.

To understand the sheer daring of those steel hearted pioneers who first staked their all in reaching the South Pole, it must be realized that the Antarctic continent is as large as the United States and Canada combined.

Imagine Canada and the United States covered with ice and snow. A thousand miles in the uninhabited interior, near Chicago, lies a place called the South Pole. A few men—with Scott and Amundsen—have walked and struggled on foot through blizzards and gales, often falling into crevasses, from this New York to Chicago. But to say that these men walked this distance with sledges is not enough. This mythical Chicago lies on a plateau nearly 10,000 feet high.

Toiling up mountains, from the sides of which creep the mightiest glaciers on earth, was an additional undertaking calling for tremendous exertion. Further imagine Canada and the United States surrounded by a belt of impenetrable ice. Very little of the coast line is known. New York harbor has been discovered and a few islands off the coast on all sides. This, in a measure, represents the circumstances that the Antarctic pioneer must prepare to face.

Heretofore there have been three chief means of locomotion for the exploration of the polar regions: Sailing in a ship, sledge traveling with or without dogs, and drift with the ice. The use of the first method is limited by the impenetrable ice preventing the movement of the ship.

Today we have acquired two new and important means of locomotion—the aeroplane and the dirigible. Not only have they become a necessity for exploration, but they are the best means of clearing the mystery that surrounds the frozen continent, Huge ice cakes, sometimes twenty feet high, make foot travel extremely difficult, but do not bother airplanes.

The Antarctic village to be set up by Byrd will be the largest settlement ever raised in an expedition in the southern seas. It will consist of five main buildings and a number of provision caches and instrument houses.

The walls of the building will be four inches thick and will be painted orange so that they can be seen from the airplane at a great distance. On the outside is a stiff building board one-half an inch thick. Next come two layers of building paper, a layer of building board, one and one-half inches of kapok insulation, a layer of fibre insulation, more kapok, and a final layer of building board.

Beams supporting the building and tying it together are held by bolts which do not go to the outside, so that they will not transmit cold.

The largest and most important building will be the executive headquarters, which will house the radio apparatus, the scientists, the doctor’s quarters, Commander Byrd’s own quarters and an office. In a part of this room will be complete photographic apparatus so that pictures taken during flights can be immediately developed as an aid to mapping the country traversed. In another wing will be the radio rooms, where the short and long wave apparatus and the direction finder for use in keeping track of the plane during flights will be installed.

Joining the executive building is to be the mess hall and kitchen. It will contain a piano, and this hall will probably be used to show motion pictures of the expedition long before they are shown in America.

Four Planes Carried On either side of the mess hall, and close to it so that communication may be maintained by tunnels through the snow, will be the bunk houses. The machine shop will be stocked with all machinery necessary for making repairs to airplanes, tractors, motors, etc. Heating will be by oil stoves.

Four airplanes are carried, a Ford plane, the Floyd Bennett; a Fokker, the Stars and Stripes; a Fairchild, the Virginia; and a General Airplane Corporation plane.

Most of the exploration work will be done in the Ford plane which is large enough to carry a sledge, dogs and other emergency equipment. The smaller planes will be used for scouting and mapping.

The pole lies 800 miles from the proposed site of the base and this will mean a non-stop flight of 1,600 miles when the dash is attempted.

Such a trek on foot was almost certain death after weeks of exhaustive travel. With modern equipment, it is a matter of a few hours in relative safety.

A half million cigarettes are carried, along with a ton of tobacco and a barrel of pipes. A made to order, ultraviolet ray, will be available. This device will be of tremendous importance as a substitute for sunlight during the long night. It is a lamp similar to that seen in many city homes, consisting of a vacuum tube of pure quartz, in which mercury is turned to vapor by an electric current.

The million dollar expedition has two ships that will stay in the vicinity of the South Pole two or three years. The City of New York will serve as the base-ship within the ice barrier. The Eleanor Boling will remain outside the ice barrier and act as a relief vessel.

Two other ships will transport supplies and equipment to the nearest civilization, a thousand miles away in New Zealand.

This vast expedition can live and carry on its work without contact with the world for as long a time as will be necessary for the attainment of their scientific ends. Shackle-ton, Scott, and Amundsen, and other pioneers could exist for only a few months without relief from the world beyond the ice barrier, and their data gathering facilities were extremely limited. The modern explorer collects and studies the results at his base.

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SEX AND THE BEATLES

The Beatles and their admirers have aroused widespread interest and attention. Fifty million dollars worth of goods bear their name as this article is written. These include wild Beatle wigs, Beatle sweaters, Beatle shirts, Beatle hats, Beatle buttons, etc., etc.

To most adults, the ear-piercing sounds, the jungle screams, and the strange body movements of teen-age Beatle fans are the hardest part of the Beatle-mania burden.

All kinds of speculations and explanations have been published about the Beatle fad. But one aspect seems to have escaped the observers’ attention, namely the sexual involvement of the youngsters.

This is amazing since similar fads of past decades—the Sinatra frenzy and the Presley mania—should have convinced even the most sex-blind layman that it is the sex drive that time and again tosses millions of teenagers into hysterics.

Indeed, the sex glands are clearly guilty in the astounding audience response to the “art” of these mop-topped popwailers from Liverpool. The self-forgetfulness of the young adorers is similar to sexual abandon.

Shrill shrieks break through the moaning—”Yeah, yeah, yeah”—that seem to push toward a climax. Boys here and girls there jump up and down as if they couldn’t hold the contents of the bladder any longer. Some, breathlessly exhausted, drum the rhythm on a neighbor’s chest; others move buttocks, hips and pelvis as if they were galloping on a horse. For some the performance ends when they faint.

Sexual excitement may not be the only trigger to the release of such actions, but it certainly plays an eminent role in bringing this release about. There is even less doubt about the involvement of sexual feelings when two twelve-year-old girls exhibit to each other the signatures of their heroes printed on their panties while they rock ‘n’ roll with the beat of a Beatle record.

Beatle dolls (made of plastic) are passionately hugged in bed. Smaller ones, made of sugar candy, are enjoyed with immense delight. There are even chocolate-cake Beatles that appeal especially to children as young as 5 or 6.

In their attempts to convince parents that the children’s crusade to the lands of the beat is an innocent lark, some writers emphasize the “peculiarly sexless appeal” of the Beatles. A comparison would seem to confirm this judgment.

Frank Sinatra’s crooning warmed up all the longing for wickedness in the bobby-soxers’ hearts; Elvis Presley tried to bulge with sex appeal; the four Liverpoolers appear as if they had intentionally removed themselves from sex competition.

“The way they wag their wigs” is considered cute and funny by their audience but definitely not sexy. Indeed, the mop-style hair-do, adopted in imitation of that of a German female photographer, not only gives them a clownish note, but it also blurs the line between the sexes.

However, this very fact has shaped their appeal to the youngsters who unexpectedly took the clowning seriously.

For if the Beatle enthusiasts are compared with the Presley and Sinatra fans, one difference becomes immediately evident: the majority belong to younger age groups.

The ages of Beatle fans spread as far down as 9 years and include about 30 per cent boys. The solid nucleus consists of girls, 12 to 15 years old, still before or briefly after their first menstruation.

These age groups are characterized by distinctive qualities which every parent and every teacher recognizes.

“Puppy love” is a well-known cliche on the screen and in printed fiction. The treatment usually varies between “haw-haw, how funny,” and “oh, how pitiful they are.” For there they stand, these youngsters, filled with desire for each other yet unable to express it, clumsy, and as a result sometimes so hostile that they thwart their own hopes and intentions.

The cliche may be corny, but it does have some truth. And those mop-headed singers act as if they were pals of the youngsters, partly representing, partly making fun of their clumsiness and their appearance.

Appearance is important. Affected by an awkward but unconquerable irregularity of growth, the older child and the young adolescent feel rather self – conscious. They express their feeling in grouchiness or aggressiveness. The parents are no great help.

Since these youngsters are hard to live with, the adults often show their disappointment. The children don’t like to be cuddled, patted, or kissed. Daddy’s little girl all of sudden spits hatred or sheds tears if father jokingly slaps her on the buttocks.

The snooping mother may find outcries of indignation in the 12-year-old daughter’s diary like the following: “I saw Him touch Her breast. And She let Him.” She may not know that Him and Her are she and her husband.

Sex becomes a problem. The children have become conscious of sin and social prohibitions. And their judgments are usually stricter than the rules require. On the other hand, they may giggle over a word that almost sounds like a well-known obscenity or sex term.

This apparent sexlessness is mirrored in the apparent sexlessness of the Beatles. Their uncouthness dramatizes the pre-adolescents’ aversion to washing and grooming.

In other ways, too, the Beatles provide a safety valve. The frustrations of pre-adolescence and early adolescence are considerable. Overrating their maturity, the young people desire independence, but at the same time they are afraid of it.

The direction of the sex urge is not yet definitely determined. Homosexual thoughts stir feelings of guilt, heterosexual desires arouse feelings of inadequacy.

Confusions and frustrations of this kind seek an outlet in aggression. Yet aggression is not tolerated in our society.

The Beatles give them a legitimate opportunity for both second-hand and direct relief. The Beatle records themselves are an attack on cultured ears. Participation in a live performance does even more for them.

A girl of 15 was asked why she didn’t listen to her four heroes on television rather than standing in line for hours to see them on the stage. She replied: “I didn’t come to listen, I came to scream.”

And that has become an essential part ,of the performance: yelling, pounding, stomping and singing along so loud that the performers themselves cannot be heard. This is an outlet for approval and for defiance. It raises their self-confidence.

Sometimes it also raises the courage to such a pitch that walls and seats and anything breakable cannot withstand destruction. Most often, fortunately, the mood remains within bearable limits, a mere flailing, a noisy rebellion against the demands of a not quite understood world.

Yet a happy rebellion. For those shaggy-haired idols offer the children identification as well as emotional outlets. They are a cool, cynical lot —as cool and unconcerned as their admirers would like to be.

Unperturbed, they admit that they can’t even sing and that they care about nothing except money. Cool. Courageous. Their admirers can see themselves replying to prying adults in similar words.

Hence there is truth in what a 14-year-old girl said when she was interviewed: “They lift my morale.”

But at the same time, the rhythm translates erotic tendencies into movements and moans, a wakening sex force that operates on a deeper level.

These half-adolescents know themselves to be sexually unattractive. They are prevented by the social conventions of the adult world from expressing their sexual urges. Their own group code keeps them from expressing their sentimental wants.

But here, following the lead of those uncombed scrawny fellows with their undisguised backstreet accent, they can admit, amidst tears, aggressive screams and burlesquing, that they too want to hold a hand.

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Dr. Beigel, formerly professor in the Dept. of Psychology, Long Island University, is a consultant in personal and sex problems, author of “Sex from A to Z,” editor of “Advances in Sex Research,” and secretary of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex.

Booze Foe Image Opens Bottles

THE inventor of the combination bottle opener and cork screw, “Old Snifty,” shown in the photo at the left, must have had a strong sense of humor, for he puts the image of the advocates of prohibition to work at setting the much-hated joy-water to flowing. The nutcracker chin and nose form the bottle opener, while the cork puller projects from the rear. The whole device is made of metal.