A Peep by Wire

 

    This is to alert the ladies that the "Dr. Seaton" is busy again.  He phoned a lady I know the other day and in his pleasant voice said he was Dr. Seaton of the city health department.  He was making a nutrition survey, he said, and wanted to ask some questions.

 

    First, how tall was she?  She told him.  Was she overweight?  She isn't and said so but didn't like his familiar tone.  Then he asked her bust and hip measurements and she retorted that they were none of his business, although she is of movie star proportions, and hung up. 

 

    She phoned the health department and confirmed her suspicion.  There is no Dr. Seaton there, and the health department is not making a survey.  Furthermore, people were warned about the caller a month ago, when many such calls were reported.  Attempts were made to trace him at the time, but they were unsuccessful.

 

   

 

    The complication is that the Census Bureau is making a similar survey for the U.S. Public Health Service and so are the cancer people.  Their canvassers are legitimate and have proper identification.

 

    Around the health department "Dr. Seaton" is known as the telephonic Peeping Tom.

 

 

    SPEAKING OF things medicinal, a young man came into a doctor's office in San Fernando Valley and said he wanted his third polio shot.  Naturally he was asked when he'd had his first and second.  He replied, "I haven't had them.  I just want the third.  I understand that's the one that does the most good."

 

 

 

 

    TODAY'S IRONY quota concerns Navy Lt. Don Walsh, 28, who with Jacques Piccard descended more than 36,000 feet, about seven miles, in a bathyscaph into the Marianas deep, farther than anyone ever has gone before, in January.

 

    His father, Don Walsh, vice president of Simon Levi Co., wholesale liquor firm, recalled yesterday that Don, when a child, hated the water.  However, he became a good swimmer while attending Alameda High School, up north, and later Annapolis.

 

    Another oddity was that Don, who receives extra pay as a submariner, noticed that his paycheck was less than usual after the big dive.  When he inquired, he was informed that the manual didn't cover bathyscaph descents, so, no extra pay.  He's still on Guam.  Conditions are reported unsuitable for further dives.

 

 

    AS PARENTS of school children know, it's a daily race against the clock to get the youngsters to the bus stop in time.  If they miss it, someone is stuck to drive them to school.  The other day a patient parent called to his son, "If you don't hurry you're going to miss the bus — and the way you're dawdling you're even going to miss me!"

 

 

    MORE AND MORE, people seem to be jumping the gun on holidays.  They become Christmas conscious, for example, around Halloween, instead of Thanksgiving, as it used to be.  Now, unaccountably, some of them are anticipating St. Patrick's Day.  Anyway, a TV performer, not a singer, sang an Irish ballad badly a few days ago and a Hill St. bartender named Jack, of Irish descent, observed, "If my mother was alive she'd turn over in her grave."

 

 

    FOOTNOTES — Mention here of the letter S (for smoke) on the dashboard cigarette lighter of a Toyopet reminded a reader of the S knob on his Citroen mini-car.  When he asked the Frenchman at the agency what it stood for he replied, "Eet ees what you call le choke, no?  But een Frawnce eet ees, how you say, le strangler!" . . . The chairman of the L.A. County Fitness Council was absent at the regular meeting the other night, Joe Micciche reports, because of illness.