"Hazel, I Said No! You Can't Have a New Dress!"

Numbers Game

A lady named
Julia has been confronted with a major dilemma — to move or not to
move. Normal accretion being what it is, her apartment has become
inadequate for her needs. She gets a crowded feeling every time she
enters it. However, she also knows about the ordeal of moving and the
headaches of getting adjusted somewhere else.

The other day she made her decision. She's staying.

What
decided her was the awful thought of all the tabulating machines
whirring to a stop, maybe tying up the economy a little, while new sets
of holes were punched in her cards for magazine subscriptions, utility
bills and bank statements and new serial numbers were assigned her for
credit cards and whatnot.

Frightening, but that's life today.

A
NEWSMAN talking to a first-time visitor to L.A. said, "It's this kind
of a town. You can go  downtown at 8 a.m. and the sun will be shining
and the birds will be singing, then suddenly around 3 o'clock somebody
will say or do something and you'd swear everybody had gone crazy. You
never know what's going to happen around here." 

LITERARY
NOTES — The
mystery of the B-24 found recently in the African desert
reminded writer Sparks Stringer of an "unbelievable" radio drama he
wrote in 1937. In it he had a World War I  plane landing in the same
place with footprints leading away from it, then suddenly disappearing
… Devotees of J.D. Salinger ("Catcher in the Rye") are fascinated and
puzzled by his rambling, stream-of-consciousness tale which ran through
69 pages in the June 6 New Yorker, dealing with his brother Seymour,
who committed suicide … Through a line here, CBS Radio located Joseph
Hudock, whose "Suspense" script, "Spoils for Victor," was repeated a
few weeks ago, and he has received his "spoils," a check. Hudock is a
chemistry teacher at St. Monica Boys High School in Santa Monica.

A
PLAYFUL young man exploded a firecracker under the chair of an
unappreciative colleague in a downtown office yesterday, thereby
creating all sorts of consternation.

Never
mind the obvious question, where did he get the illegal firecracker?
The upsetting thing was that when the victim examined the blasted bits
of the firecracker he discovered it was fashioned from an American
syndicate's colored comic section marked "Copyright 1957." Furthermore,
its point of origin was Red China via Hong Kong.

He doesn't know whether to charge his joker friend with trading with the enemy or leave things as they are — inscrutable.

KID
STUFF — While his parents were inspecting the new models in a showroom
in San Fernando, their son, 9, rushed up and asked, ""isn't this where
they sell Chevrolets?" The salesman said it certainly was. The boy
exhibited the gum balls he'd gotten from the vending machine –with
"Ford" imprinted on them … His teacher asked Hank Naylor, 9, to
define the word "sandbar" and replied, knowingly, "That's a bar at the
beach."

AT
RANDOM — Know how papers and refuse are gathered from the parking lots
at Hollywood Park? They're blown into piles with a wind machine. Beats
stabbing them with nail-pointed sticks … Someone asked columnist
Sydney J. Harris if capital punishment is a deterrent to crime and he
replied, "Statistics prove conclusively that not a single person who
has suffered capital punishment has been indicted a second time" … The DMV crackdown on misbehaving motorists will get even tougher July
1 …  An unseen TV announcer said, "Some programs are mechanically
produced to prevent them at a more convenient time" … Someone, Herb Schneble reports, has written in two-ft. letters on Ocean
Blvd., Long Beach, "Tourist Go Home."