Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 30 May 1952 — Page 17

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‘Inside Indianapolis By Ed Sovola

“IT'S LONESOME--sort o' lonesome—it's a Sund'y-—day, to me, ..” James Whittomo Riley began his poem about Decoration Day with those words which haven't lost their meaning.‘to many who work hard to keep May 30 sacred. : ° They are intent on fulfilling as best they can the requirements of General Order 11, issued by Gen. John A. Logan, commander -in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic in 1868 which established Decoration Day, today-commonly referred to as Menidrial Day You don’t have-to talk long «0 persons such as Mrs. C.-K. McDowell, memorial chairman

of the General Memorial As- 2

sociation, to learn she {s highly o concerned about activities on May 30 that have nothing to do with remembering ‘the sturdy people who preserved our freedom.” : SS 0b MRS: “McDOWELL doesn’t condemn events “which, in her t ng; detract from the spirit of Memorial Day, but she feverently hopes the growing lack of interest can'be stopped. She has been a director of the General Memorial Association and ha: been active in the organization for many years “I grew up with the idea of obligation to the men who handed us our heritage by forfeiting their lives,” said Mrs. McDowell. Her friend, Mrs. Edna E. Pauley, 1032 N. Olney St., secretary of the General Memorial Association for the past 18 years, recalls when Memorial Day services throughout the city drew immense crowds, a LI THE LACK of interest in the last three years has been more noticeable than at any other time in her long experience, She frankly admits it is hard to keep up the spirit of the day. Any mention of the suggestion which has been made to change the day receives immediate opposition. “I'm strong for staying with May 30, the day instituted by the Grand Army of the Republic,” is the way Mrs. Pauley ended the discussion on that point.

It Happened Last Night

By Earl Wilson

NEW YORK, May 30—Lucky old- me—this country boy was invited to go up into the very top of the TV antenna on the Empire State Building —1472 feet above Fifth Ave. Ray Milland was just coming down when I reached the 102dafloor, going up. “I'm not going back up there now,” he said.

" He looked chilly and windblown.

“You go on up,” Mr. Milland said. “There's a 52-mile-an-hour wind up there. You can feel it sway.” . He went down and I went up. A guard pulled back a chain. I went up a stairway, then a series of ladders. Finally I was in the very needle-point of the building . . .on a platform eight feet square very firmly fenced in so I could hold onto the gides and look down. ° ‘Don’t grab those antenna,” Mr. Milland had told me. “They're live. You grab those and you've had it.” > ¢ 9 HERE I WAS, higher than anybody else in the city of New York, and I hadn't even had a drink. Down there were seven or eight million people, and here was I, with the wind blowing my hair like crazy and making balloons out of my pants legs. 5 took out my notebook. The wind almost blew it out of my hand. “Wo00-000-000000000,” sang the wind. What was this about wanting to jump if you looked down? It had aever bothered me. I looked down . . . down there was the spire of the Chrysler Building. The roof of Gimble’s. The roof of Klein's. The streets seemed to be moving. h, oh. That meant I was moving in my swaying tower. - SS BUT I FELT no uneasines. All I felt was the whining wind that blew my topcoat into strange shapes. And then there was the sensation of standing astraddle the Island of Manhattan, with one foot in one river, one foot in the other. I went back down and had lunch with Mr, Milland. He was there making some shot for a picture without dialog, called “The Thief.” “The thief gets chased into the Empire State Building and goes up into the tower,” Milland sald. “And gets out.” “What does he do? Use a parachute?” “I'm not telling,” Milland said. Milland finished his lunch and said, T've got to go back up. How do you feel?” “Tired,” I said. “The wind exhausts you up there,” he said. “We were up there higher than anybody goes except the steeplejacks. Well , , .,”

“Well,

Americana By Robert C. Ruark

NEW YORK, May 30—It occurs to me that I have not chastened a feature of modern civilization lately, and any boy in this business who chasteneth not once in a while, is a traitor. In looking around for a safe subject, which cannot chasten me right back, I have concluded that golf has got to go. : The main reason I am sore at golf is that I never learned to play it under 100, but we will skip that as prejudice and get down to the real facts. Golf is really” an 'exemplification of what's wrong with us. It is modern civilization in a tidy little capsule, in that we attempt to achieve nothing, with maximum effort. Let us inspect the business of keeping the eye on the ball and the left arm stiff. Human inclination is to take the eye off the ball, and keep the left arm crooked. - Any man of sound mind does not wish to keep his eye on where the ball was; he wants to see where the bloody thing is going. Net result of undue supervision: Ulcers and a tendency to strike the children. > > & TAKING the left arm stiffly back on the swing is contrary to all laws of human coordination. If they started out on a child with this stiff-arm business, he would wind up lefthanded, stuttering, and would probably attack his grandma with an ‘ax some day. But they try to inflict it on adults, with much the same result. ‘- The whole purpose of golf is to get the old man out of the house, so that he can find some excuse for coming home stiff on Saturday and to avoid reading the funnies to the children on Sunday. Golf is not a happy-making sport, either. I never knew a happy golfer. He knows, even if he is Sam Snead, that if he belts the brains out of ‘the one he will hook, slice, top or undercut the other, so that he is not even joyous in a momentary triumph. . pay HE IS the perpetual worrier. He is the eternal frustrate, in business merely to make himself angry. I used to cover golf as a comparative child, and the free lunch was nice in the clubhouse, because salaries were small, but I never saw such an unhappy bunch of people as amateur golfers, If they shot a consistent 80 they brooked about getting the score down to 78. f they had their swing grooved, they fretted about the day it would come ungrooved, They busted mashies and kicked chunks out of the sod and worried and grieved and cursed and

pulled out their own hair, sulked for a week :

after they blew the short putt or took three to get out of the trap. “ie : : { <°

' . GOLFERS are worse liars than fishermen or

hunters, and they will cheat on themselves in-

’

Memorial Day... Are We Callous?

“Seems like a Yew of us can pound our heads off year after year while others take the day light-

dy,” Mrs. Pauley said, And it wasn't with a feel-

ing of resignatipn. She left you with the impression. “the few” would continue to pound “to perpetuate their memory for the generations who are to follow.”

& oe oo oe

THE ASSOCIATION accepts the responsibility of decorating the.2000 military graves in (rown Hill Cemetery and the.1500 in family plots in other cemeteries .in the city. Their aim is to reach every soldier's grave in Marion County. General Memorial Assoeiation was organized in 1915 primarily for preserving the memory of Civil War dead. The idea of paying homage to the nation’s heroes has now encompassed all@of her déad, civilian- and military. ’

Mrs. E. C. Rumpler, 50 N./Bolton Ave. who _

will give the invocation at the Mt. Jackson Cemetery services, believes we “have grown callous.”

She is the daughter of the former commander-, in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic in 1898. As she said, “I was brought up by my tather to believe Memorial Day is a sacred day in the calendar of the United States. We should keep it that way.” da . I DON'T THINK the majority of Americans would consider not keeping the day set aside to honor the dead. Of course, the rub comes in because work is involved. To have programs, music, parades, decorations, someone has to do the work, There are a great many worthwhile projects which need civic and widespread action to ‘make them successful. When you view them from an easy chair, or when you place them side by side with an event that offers pleasure, excitement. and an opportunity to let off steam, we have a tendency to let the other fellow worry, It's the easy way out. Moral support costs little, I'm just glad it-takes all kinds of people to make a community hum. .And it takes all kinds of emotions to live. If we were perfect, we wouldn't he human, My main worry (a human trait) is whether we drive carefully during the

long holiday. Safe driving should be of interest:

to everyone.

Empire State Not His Roost

“The wind is five miles faster now than when you were up,” I said. “Thanks,” grinned Mr. Milland, and started back up to the top of the. town. a

THE MIDNIGHT EARL . . . Bookie Harry Gross’ kid brother Jackie—who claimed he was mysteriously attacked—has requested that his police guard be discontinued. Why? . . Mrs. Jose Ferrer plans no divorce or separation action. His newest companion: The singing star, Dolores Gray, of Los Angeles. Bill Saroyan’s latest admirer: The West Coast artist, Bess Leonard. . . . Lenore Lonergan, playing a Southern belle, gets a yell in “Of Thee I Sing” when she says: “I haven't been so happy since I saw Grant's Tomb.” It's a great

Miss Bartel show. The producers told the

cast last night they've no plans to close in the

. Jean Bartel (ex-Miss is Miss Lonergan’s

foreseeable future. America, from California) understudy. Jerry Lester may go back on NBC-TV with two or three shows. (He denies a suit with the network.) . . . Some Hollywoodians expect Bob Taylor and Diana Garrett (ex-Mrs. Madam Muntz) to elope. . . . Peggy Hopkins Joyce birthdayed at Armado’s with Jan Falk, the Count who used to bartend as a hobby. > > 2

TODAY'S BEST LAUGH: "No matter what

you say about Marilyn Monroe,” said Author -

Joey Adams, “you can’t deny she has visible means of support.” © <> EARL’S PEARLS . . . When Toots Shor gave Phil Silvers a bone-shattering slap on the back, Phil sajd, “Why don’t you stay out of your place —and just be a legend?” : o & &

WISH I'D SAID THAT: “A vacationing masochist postcarded a friend: “Weather’s miserable and can’t eat the food. Having wonderful time” —Lester Lanin. Audrey Hepburn and James Hanson postponed their wedding till June ’53. (Mack Kriendler gave her a farewell party at 21.) ... Taffy Tuttle says on Broadway you're a traitor to your class if you pay your bills. , . . When Marlene Dietrich saw Georgie Jessel wearing a panama ’'way last week, she doubtless said, “Well, this is the FIRST straw. . . . That's Earl, brother.

Golf: Doing Nothing The Hardest Way

variably, although what this proves is hard to say. It seems to me that if you took six on a par three, telling yourself you only took four is ridiculous. Nudging balls with the foot and playing winter golf rules in the summer is as foolish as shooting craps against yourself with a pair of wrist-heavy dice.

With the exception of a lovely lady named Peggy, most lady golfers take on the more abysmal characteristics of the sport. Even off the fairway they have a sort of grim-faced, spraddle-legged, flat-heeled, shiny-nosed, thickankled, tweed-skirtish approach to society. If a guy ever made a grab at the average distaff golf bug, in two minutes she'd be correcting his stance and telling him not to overlap the grip so much. oh

v .

MEN GOLFERS I. have generally found to be a little too hearty and a bit flushed in the face, due to overexercise, bad temper and protracted dalliance in the locker room with the bourbon jug. That is another odd thing about he-golfers. They seem to go for bourbon over the more delicate sauces. CWe have not treated with the aim of golf, which is to put a’ little ball in a little hole with minimum number of strokes and the maximum of profanity. Any sane fellow would tell you that if you really wanted to get a little ball in a little hole, the thing to do is pick it up, walk over to the hole, and drop the carnsarned thing in. Someday soon I hope to take up tennis, as an idiot’s delight, with polo to come.

Dishing the Dirt By Marguerite Smith

Q—~How can I raise nice chrysanthemums? Mrs. Lee Figg, 120° 8. Butler.

A.~—Divide your old plants every yeart A local nurseryman says it this way. You wouldn't plant a pound of beans ina single hill. So why expect good flowers on mums growing eight to 10 plants in a single spot. Now is a good time to divide them. If you buy new plants you get a single plant. In either case, prepare the ground so they have enough food to see them through to large flowers. That means high phosphate chemical fertilizer plus bone meal and soil conditioning ma-

Read Marguerite Smith's. Garden Column “in The Sunday Times

terials to make it loose and water absorbent. Place them where they get plenty of sun. Then be sure they have good drainage. ' (You wouldn't like to stand around in ice water all winter, would you?) Space them so they can grow. True cushion mums need as much as ‘three feet to develop properly, Taller slimmer sorts should be at least .a

be good to keep foliage healthy, toi

foot apart. Your triple threat rose sprays will’

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500-Mile Appeal Makes Its Fans Tolerate Discomforts With Ease

nm BEN

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~ CONVERTIBLE—The drinks are softer than this bed on bth St. the night before the big race. But five feminine fans looked forward to a box seat in the infield.

PEEK-A-BOO—This youngster gets a mouthful of practical nothing along the Great im Way. outhful ‘of practically

~The Indianapolis Times -

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FRIDAY, MAY 30, 1952 PAGE 15

os photos by D an Timmerman,

BIG WHEEL—Whoever heard of a "Carnival of Fun'* without a Ferris Wheel? Two girls get into the pre.500-Mile Race spirit;

”

“IN TENT" ON SEEING "500"—Thess #0 race fans broke camp early fo get in line at the Speedway gates,