Americana

MANNERS & MORALS

¶The manager of the Multnomah Hotel in Portland, Ore. reported that the old-fashioned traveling salesman is as extinct as the old-fashioned farmer's daughter. Modern commercial travelers register as "traveling executives."

¶Three thousand robed and hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan gathered in a field near Stone Mountain, Ga. for the largest Klan ceremony since 1924 (see cut). They fired up oil buckets hung on a cross of iron pipe, initiated 700 new members, and cheered a prediction by Grand Dragon Samuel Green that "blood would flow in the streets" if civil rights for Negroes were enforced in the South.

¶Macy's, neatly fusing politics with haberdashery, offered its customers the Candidate Cravat—a 99¢ necktie of "rich, fullbodied rayon" bearing a picture of either Harry Truman or Tom Dewey.

¶A brunette with a jealous husband got the Dade County, Fla. sheriff's office to give her a lie detector test, went home with a letter certifying that she had been a faithful wife.

¶United Industrial Associates, Inc. reported that the average U.S. house & lot now costs $11,094—as compared with $4,599 in 1939.

¶The sky over the U.S., which had been remarkably vacant since the last of the flying saucers wheeled off and vanished (TIME, July 21, 1947), was suddenly full of whizzing lights and large shining objects. A pair of Eastern Air Lines pilots saw the first—some kind of wingless plane with two rows of lighted windows and a plume of red flame at its tail. Then two CAA employees saw a "gigantic silvery ball" floating over Yakima, Wash.