MANNERS & MORALS: Sorrows

MANNERS & MORALS

It was a week of frustration for many:
¶After gathering farmers for miles around to watch a demonstration of his fire-extinguishing bomb, an enterprising salesman set it up in a tobacco barn near Dillon, S.C., gleefully built a fire of hay and leaves beneath it, then waited for it to put out the fire. It didn't—at least not before the spectators had to run out. And after that the barn burned down.
¶Mrs. Janice Pollock, who was chosen as Mrs. America of 1946 but turned down the honor (and a chance to make $2,500) to stay home with her husband, filed suit for divorce.

¶ Nick Drujinenko, illegitimate son of a White Russian woman and an Englishman on the International Settlement police force in Shanghai, was 19 when the Communists swept into his native city last year. Afraid to stay, he stowed away for the U.S. on the American President liner General Gordon. He was found, put ashore in San Francisco, sent back across the Pacific on a freighter bound for Tientsin. He jumped ship in Japan, was surrendered to the U.S. Army and put back on the U.S.-bound General Gordon. Last week in San Francisco immigration authorities were waiting for another ship on which to re-deport him to China. Lawyers of the American President Line shuddered at an awful possibility: that the Chinese Communists might refuse him entry, and he would spend the rest of his days a man without a country, crossing and recrossing the Pacific, at the President Line's expense.