Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 9 December 1947 — Page 15
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Inside Indionanolis
THESE ARE SOME of the things that happened -
while I watched people give to the Mile-O-Dimes. These are some of the things that made it a Smile-O-Dimes for me. Bob Ross held a woman's packages whille she dug ino her purse for coins. After Ross had the. coins in his hand the woman took her packages, thanked him and hurried away. Ross and his three buddies, Stanley’ Martin, Michael Anderson and Robert Princell from Fire Station 22 were on volunteer duty. A fast-walking man attracted Anderson's atiention with a loud “Hey” and flipped a half dollar into the air. Anderson made an easy catch and got a big smile from the donor, A fat lady with a tattered purse waited until Martin placed her dime on the sidewalk: Her contribution towards the fund fo supply needy children with clothes through the annual Times Clothe-A-Child was safe and she was satisfied. - A bashful little youngster ran up to Anderson, dropped a coin in hand and ran to his mother. All the way to the |entrance of Ayres the little fellow looked back and waved. The men happened to be too busy at the moment to ring the two bells. “Mister,” a little girl
A WARM SIGHT—Mrs,
Patricia Maurey sent 5-year-old Elaine to fill a gap in the Mile-O-Dimes. Michael Anderson doesn't even have fo help Haine as she places her dimes on the line.
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said to Ross, “I gave a dime to that man over there and he didn't ring the bell.”
His Face Lit U
ROSS STARTLED half the street when he clanged the bell for the young contributor. Martin received a donation and gave street directions to a young couple. They had arrived in .town that afternoon and needed a little help. Beginning in front of Kresge and continuing almost the full length of the store, a woman tugged on the sleeve of her escort, Reluctantly, he dug into his pocket and fumbled for a coin.” After his offering was taken by Princell the man's face suddenly | lit up like a Christmas tree. He became a different! man.
A character, obviously not a man of any means,
paused in front of the lines of dimes and began counting. Twice he became lost in his mental calcu lations and started over. After his third attempt
. failed he moved along the street with a disgusted |
look on his face. Hundreds of average citizens paused long enough |
to hand coins to one of the four firemen, smile, | sometimes even thanking the men for taking their| money and then disappear among fellow shoppers. It was almost impossible to count the number of!
smiles that went along with the dimes. Martin moved close to a man who was picking coins out of a handful he held. The man was arguing silently with himself. A full 30 seconds elapsed before Martin got the whole handful of change.
Wanted More to Give
A YOUNG FATHER and mother talked to their young son against the show window of Kresge. Finally the father handed the boy a coin and gave him a gentle ‘push towards the MiJe-O-Dimes. The boy looked at the family offering, took a few steps forward and returned to his parents. He wanted more money.
The boy's arguments must have moved the couple |
because they both began to laugh, both patted the boy on the head and papa reached: for some more coins. I may be mistaken, but I think the youngster told them his first contribution wouldn't buy too much at the present time. Smart lad. Anderson escorted a chubby girl in a bright red snowsuit to the line of ‘dimes, She held two shiny dimes in her hand. It was a small matter to Anderson when the girl stepped on the three lines, scattered coins around and then proceeded to place her two at a right angle with the curb. | It was an endless but not a thankless job the men were doing that afternoon. It's cold on the sidewalk. And it gets colder as every hour passes.| The men work in six-hour shifts around.the clock. | But as Anderson told me, “you don't mind the! cold when so many people give so willingly.”
Widgets and Gidgets By Robert C. Ruark
NEW YORK, Dec. 9—The closest thing to Santa Claus’ headquarters on this earth—if you discount the United States Treasury—is a big building at 225 Fifth Ave,, down in the old Delmonice sector.
Two Twenty Five is home of the gift business for all of the Easthand a lot of the West and Middle West. Its 11 floors are brightly packed with gewgaws and gimcracks, widgets, gidgets, gadgets and gizmos. Ashtrays, china buddhas, cocktail shakers, salad bowls, lamps, figurines, dishes—all the things that Aunt Mamie buys when she tires of impossible neckties, are there. The building, which stands on the site of. the old Brunswick Hotel, in the heart of what used to be the Great White Way, is packed and crammed with the products of more than 300 manufacturers, repregenting something more than 1000 lines of stuff,
Not for Retail Customers
IT IS STRICTLY a wholesale house, and shoos retail customers from its door. Your money is no good at 225—iis sales agents speak only to shop owners, who come in, gander arpund, and then order
two dozen of this and a dozen of that to be sent to
Ye Olde Rat's Nest, The surge of the.gift business from dusty do-funny to big industry is one of the unusual stories of this country. Thirty-five years ago there wasn't any gift trade. Today, I suppose it grabs as much as $700 million annually from the people, maybe more. The oddest thing about the gift trade is that it's the last business to fade in a depression and the first to come back, even though it is ‘completely frivolous and non-essential to the living welfare of the citizens. Such is the demand for dinguses that the wholesale houses are filling orders now for 1952. and a great many firms still won't take on new customers. This, despite the fact that about 150 new shops open up every week. The people who run the business have been trying to squirm out from under the name of “gift,” for years. They fancy something like “intimaté household accessories’ as a descriptive handle for their wares. But they got stuck with “gift” and stuck they are, even though most of the articles are bought
away. This immense industry started in a charmingly! offhand manner. In a way, it is a good example of the American habit of insisting on a combination of function and decoration. “A collection of ladies,” one of the experts was saying, “got tired of wiping off all the old bibelots and trinkets that caught dust in the corner what-not and weren’t- worth a damn for anything else. Some|
inspired dame got the idea of planting a clock in the|
China idol’s navel and boom—gift business.”
All Women Have Perfect Taste THE BACKBONE of the industry is planted firmly in one wonderful, if erroneous, concept. There is no| woman alive who does not consider that she has! perfect taste . . . and that, given the chance, she! would make a marvelous proprietress of a gift bin. All over the land, for the past three decades, nice widder-ladies have taken the $2000 that remained! after they planted pa, emptied the attic, and started Ye Old Gifte Nooke, or Ye Olde Treasure Trove, Some
went bust, but‘ some wound up in Dun & Bradstreet, |
because of the American female's insatiable magpie! complex. | There was a time—not so long ago—when the gift | rooms in department stores opened on the day after Thanksgiving and closed down on Christmas Eve. It's a 12-month operation, now, and {t has fanned out to| a point where there -are few drug stores, bookshops! and jewelry stores which don't send a man to 225 Fifth, to order up an annual batch of glass monkeys, voluptuous candlesticks, and sophisticated vases. The gift industry was perfectly tailored for America. It is the logical end-point for generosity, senti-! mentality, our childish affection for glittery non-es-| sentials, and the fact that most of the thousands of articles are priced somewhere between the five and ten standard and the jeweler’s display. The gift busi- | ness has allowed us to be generous while semi-busted, | and to maintain an illusion of opulence which used to be the property of the rich alone. And it is such a nice thing for the people who run it, especially at this time a year. Because the mark-up from wholesale to retail is a neat, beautiful, 100 per cent. {
Horses one Pants By Frederick Cc. 0 Othman |
i ——— A —— WASHINGTON, Dec. 9—Now our Department of State is confronted with the stupendous case of the two pairs of red pants with the gold braid down the sides. Second-hand pants with shiny seats. Give 'em back to Hungary, or Hungary maybe declares WAT. You know about the 105 pedigreed Hungarian horses that our army liberated from Germany. And how. Hungary is needling our government to send 'em home, Well, sir, the pants belong to the grooms who rode the horses. The ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary wants those pants back. That isn’t all. Our army did a thorough job. of cleaning out the imperial stables.
Pants Would Set a Precedent
IT BROUGHT along with the horses—besides the pants—two jackets to match; two coachmen’s hats with plumes; ,four buggy whips; ‘our buggy whip clinchers; two pairs of boots, and two black-varnished four-wheel carriages with rubber tires. This isn't funny. It may cost us taxpayers a couple of hundred million dollars and I don’t mean Hungarian pengos. Stupendous is right. Sen. Wayne Morse of Ore, and Co. thought at first that the question merely involved horses and, fwhether the army took 'em as legitimate booty of) war or whether the brass hats (why can't you be polite about it, Othman?) stole ‘em. Now pants are involved. Sen. Morse said he supposed if we had to give back those pants, we'd be setting a precedent. He said he imagined there probably were a few galleries full of old matters, a couple of kegs of diamonds, and maybe a warehouse of silverware (with gadroon edges) which the army confiscated from our exenemies. Oh yes, indeed, agreed Joseph A. Todd, a solemnfaced young diplomat in charge of the reparations section ‘of the State Department. He said there were
New Used Cars.
HOLLYWOOD, Dec. 9—Orson Welles; working in “Cagliostro” in Rome, is seeing the. sights with Linda Christian on his arm. Jack Paar wires that the 1948 cars are beginning to roll off the assembly lines, driven by used-car dealers.
Don’t Marry a Cowboy
DALE EVANS, about to marry cowhoy star Roy Rogers, just recorded a new sgng, “It's This Way in the West.” - It's a ballad of advice to girls never, never to marry a cowboy! . . A couple of independent producers fare. the pot XA
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I —— thousands of claims, 10,000 anyway, on file now.
| A———
“It will take a very long time to get a list of the objects,” he continued. “There are hundreds of thousands of individual items involved.”
The senator announced, meantime, that he spent’ the week-end at Front Royal, Va., looking over some!
of the magnificent horse flesh from Hungary. Since we were at war with Hungary a while back, he couldn't understand why we must give back the beasts, but he said he's willing to be convinced. And furthermore, he asked, why did the army go to so much trouble to capture these horses and. bring ‘em to America?
Once We Wanted War Horses COL. FRED L. HAMILTON, a veteran of 25 years in the army horse department, told him. During the last quarter of a century he said the remount service has been trying to breed a first-class war horse, It| spent a fortune seeking one as good as the Hungarian reed. \ “And _these“ horses which we brought over from | Gemany are the goal we have been seeking all these | years in our own breeding operations,” continued | the colonel, He personally selected the horses in Germany, Hardly had he got 'em to the United States before]
the army double-crossed him by announcing it was
through with horses, except for military funerals. It mechanized the cavalry and this, I can tell you, was
enough to break a cavalryman’s heart. Sen, Morse |”
abstained from mentioning that. I got to Col. Hamilfon later and asked him what these Hungarian horses were worth, He said they
were priceless. I said nothing was priceless. He said, |
well, a horse not quite so good went for $65,000 at a recent sale, Would he give $65,000 for a Hungarian | horse? He said he would, if he had $65,000. They're! expensive nags, all right, but probably not nearly 80 costly eventually as the two pairs of crimson pants, If we give 'em back to Hungary, that is,
By Erskine Johnson
boiling for a picture deal with Parkyajarkus, Betty Rhodes and Sheldon Leonard. Patricia Morison goes into San Francisco's Cafe Society for her first th club appearance Dec. 26.
A Hat and a Laugh Pay Off TOM BRENEMAN is opening a new million-| dolar restaurant in Hollywood. Pretty food dividends | from a hat and a laugh. Just discovered that movie villgin Albert Dekker is a stockholder in one of the largest companies selling popcorn to movie ‘theaters. As president of the DWPET (Down with popcorn eating in theaters) I nominate Dekker for ' private doghouse.
/
By Ed Sovola |
I primarily for personal use and secondarily to give ?
. cpr (Ponty. international control au- : hort C1ooi bona bls
| - Yo The Indianapolis SECOND SECTION 3 Y TUES DAY, DECEMBER 9,
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i
1947
Student Nurses Proud To Devote Time To A Worthy Profession -
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PAGE 15
HELP EASE NURSE SHORTAGE -
is a profession which gives great personal RT yy These young women are in
career as a nurse is no easy one, bu
total enrollment of 1265.
of nurses. Resting on the hospital pool's edge are (left to right) Misses Norma Eberhard, Niles, Mich.; Jean Fisher, Ft. Wayne; Emma Selby, Vincennes, and Betty Donahue, Brownstown.
RECREATION PLUNGE—A 48-hour week pounding the books and doing bedside care deserves time off for relaxation. Affter three years of training, these young women will become graduate nurses with a minimum salary for a beginning staft position of $180 a month. But there are not enough graduate nurses to staff Ceonob Hospital adequately. Of the 70 on duty, 30 do bedside care with an average of 20 patients each: A nurse should be provided for every four patients. Unafraid of the future work fecing 4 them are (left to right] Misses Gloria Pickavet, Mishawaka; Jackie Oklitz, Elkhart; Margie Dyer, Worthington, and Mary Klineselter, Cloverdale.
Austin Says Fear - — Dominates Russia
Asks Western Powers To Use ‘Good Faith’
RICHMOND, Va., Dec. 9 (UP)—| Russidh foreign policy is dominated! by distrust and fear that can be removed only by concrete actions of | ‘good faith” on the part of western| powers, permanent United .States! United Nations Delegate Warren R. Austin said here last night, Mr. Austin spoke before the Public Forum Committee of the Richmond Council on Adult Education. The former Senator said the Rus{sian policy of “obstruction” could be {changed only by long and patient [effort to dispel Russian suspicion of other powers, He called Russia's proposals for international atomic control a “fraud and delusion.” Mr, Austin sald Soviet spokesmen “uttered inonsense” when they accused the , U. 8. of blocking atomic control. | “No nation can be. permitted the obstruction of a veto,'she said, com-| {menting on Russia's insistence that | the veto power be retained on| punishment of nations violating an| atomic agreement. | The Russian counter-plan for {atomic energy would provide only an appearance of control,” Mi Austin said “Such a situation is far more dangerous than the honest, though
IN THE SWIM — These trainees have a true love work and the years of training while their friends are earning. Instead they see what goo the future. At General Hospital, to entice more students, tuition has been removed and the recreation program grim acceptance of the fact that no| Nas beén great ly expanded. The course is so thorough that no student need affiliate with any other institution to
linternational control exists.” complete trai ning. The half circle is composeq of The United Nations Atomic
| tH , | C { cela lle: Aro Stephan EErY CoRsion ey uk Fr elandville; Carolyn Stephan, |next week to fit additional details Indianapolis.
into a majority-backed plan for a more than 15 bids have been: re-
ceived from companies throughout] several states for other building bond issues.
Mysuius Seleon ~~ Gome Up Thursday reming Biames Apathy
PORT ALBERNI, B. C., Dec. 9, For High U. S. Fire Toll (UP)—Dr. Alfred -Testen, of thel--Th% Indianapolis Board of School Nn LIF Pacific Biological Station, said to-| Commissioners will meet in special | —~Maj. Gen. Philip B. Fleming, day that he and other scientists session Thursday noon to corisider|pederal Works Adgninistrator, said {had been unable to identify the bids for $885,000 of school building [today the nation’s “apathetic atti- | skeleton of a 45-foot-long sea mon- bonds. ltude was partly to blame for an an- | ster-found at Vernon Bay. The bond issue will provide funds! nual fire bill of 10,000 lives and $600 “The skeleton is definitely not for a two-unit addition” to Broad million in ‘property damage. {that of a whale or shark,” he s2id. Ripple High School and construc-' ° Since firgs are a local problem, he The skeleton found by fishermen tion of a new Manual Training High said in 4 speech here, “We must has a skull measuring nine by 14 School at Madison Are and Pleas- strike at it ‘at the state level” He inches. A hump in the spinal col- ant Run Blvd, lead state conventions and programs umn is‘ about five feet below the School board members are ex- on fire: prevention are “bound to | skull \pecting several bids, In the past bring ‘a reduction ig fire loss.”
a!
Actually the training program should have some 200 students,
(left to right) Misses Anita Jones, Anderson; Helen Winter, Peru; Georgia Evaps and Alberta Ray
Photos by John Spicklemire, Times Staff Photographer, t qraduates in the field are vocal in their belief that it training at Indianapolis General Hospital which has a according to Miss Elizabeth Wivel, superintendent
REFRESHED — Miss Dorothy Haller, Mishawaka, emerges from the pool ready to tackle her duties as a student nurse. Next year a total of 50 will be graduated from the General Hospital school, but only 15 are entering as frashmen in February. Before the war the training school averaged [80 pupils. Gradually more and more are enrolling but the number still is far too few. A graduate is eligible to practice in any state.
of nursing. They were not frighieded away by the herd ey can pring man na mn
both of Vincennes; and Wilma Porter,
are: Mrs, ‘Robert, F. “Shank, president of the Indiana Congress of Parents and Teachers, and the Rev. Errol T. Elliott, editor .of the American Friend and formerly pastor of “the First Priends Church here:
Library to Sponsor Forum on CMT
The Central Public Library will | Mrs Richard “Byland
sponsor a forum on the question “Should We Have Compulsory Mili- Hurt in Car Crash tary Education,” at 8 p. mglomor- Mrs. Richard Byland, 37, of 212 8, row night. 6th St., Beech Grove, wife of Rich~ Sponsored by the library as a ard Byland, that community's public service the meeting will be mayor-elect, suffered head injuries open to the public. last night when the car ih ‘which Affirmative panel members are she was riding collided with a Milt Campbell, national defense di- parked car on 8. Emerson Ave. rector of the American Legion, and Police charged the driver of the Robinson Hitchcock, World War II car, Loran Yates, 20, of R: Ri dl, selective service director in Indiana. Box 254.D, with being Sung And | Members of the negative {fore} vagranch ; & :