The Key West Citizen Newspaper, September 19, 1947, Page 4

, Vas KRY Wass Cimizan on | Oo eee 6 oe meee eR NE ne neat ¢ ‘ S (Copyright, 1947, Mason Rossiter Smith) London, July 10. hewspapérman writing in the Eevéning News of | described it as “grey, rain-swept, battered, uncon-' a — He was writing of the King’s unveiling of the! of Memorial chapel in Westminster Abbey this, but the phrase would be apt on any occasion in this in long—the tedson, indeed, why the conventional caricature of a British = ype mice shows him with a furled umbrella in one, @ raincoat in the other. Years of coal soot from lit: | millions of chimney pots—the outstanding characteristic | of British *owns—have darkened the ati monuments | ones buildings, old and new, and the scars of the war are! on every hand. The “Jetries”, so the British said, made! no attémpt at precision bombing but scattered their sticks of | The résult is that while occasionally | _ are slightly improved (just slight- | ly—for in général they do not | ere have machinery such as that used | ,in American coal mines); and ithey have a fjve day week. But as you 80° there are frequent “wildcat y street, to note j strikes” and work stoppages— | sudden, great gash in the face ! condemned by the unions and the ania og is he ol ed government alike. The latter is | empty and desolate, threateing to prosecute. | @) ¥ interiors of rooms gapping "és ne reason for the low produc ifite the street, weeds and ' on seems to oe the food sit- fistiers growls in the de- | “8%. As one Briton put it fills what was the base- | “I used to have a lot of drive; (up early in the morning, work may be 2 church, with ‘hard all day. I know that my ra- cok A Pr sticking ‘up ‘tions are not enough—for before | the sky, or it may be the morning is over I’m all tir- an | apartment or office buiding, now ,c out. Although the miners get 'a larger ration, they too, don’t mad aie laetine taianea ye ‘Bet enough. Coal mining is hard pockmarked from the blast. mevaaniia tokes fone. Other structures are framed in| A sign outside the entrance to outside steelwork to hold them | the Hotel Russell dining room together, and some are padlocked ;€@4s: “Don’t ask for bread un- The rain comes down lightly and intermittently all day gigers : g te : as unéate {less you need it.” But the hotels . —and their dining rooms are occu- he 4 ye ag ipied largely by travelers, British = ee. and foreign—serve meat with ev- damage, but reconstruction and ‘ery meal. restoration are held up for scar. j ; s city of building materials. Housing is equally bad. Some Briton “takes it” without ) dwellings have been erected but fly noticing it—not light-! 4te unoccupied for months for Send ai grimly, though he re- | lack of plaster and wall board— calls the ( of those days. And ;“fitments” as the British call although Nazi bombs have des-|them. “Prefabs” have sprung up weyed much f what he has lov. all over England but these are ead and = cherished, Britain Will Come Through | - ) % AP Newatfedtures OME of the parents who complain that their children are drug store co ys and cowgirls might profit by what Mrs. Floyd Neumann of Néw Orleans did to solve the prob- lem. Mrs. Nétimann says shé e€ so concerned about youngsters, including her own son, who hung around stiéet corhers for want of somethin better to do, that she decide to action. All she did was give them a start at home entertainment by offering the kids the use of her parlor every Wednesday night. It caught on like wildfire .. . now the boys and girls have organized a club, tentatively called the Teen Timers—com- plete with constitution, by-laws and rules of order. They charge 25 cents a month for dues and this money is used to defray expenses of wiener roasts and other parties. Any members who doesn’t get in the spirit of the right kind of fun is dismissed from the club. The membership has grown until now there are 16 girls and 23 boys in the club. So great is the need or a club of this kind that some of the kids journey a long dis. tance to get to the meetings. Mrs. Neumann says: “, ..When I was wrotig, the old folks were mighty strict about kids having dancifg and such, so I missed out on a lot of fun. I always enjeyed danc- enough the Londoner seems to bear no hatred tword the Ger- mans. “Pethaps it's because,” a Lon- don potter told me at tea this afterriaeh, “We have so much to da.” It nas been said for years— British are most splendid and | glorious when they are “in the ." They are in such a po- sitien now. They are grim about it—as they look toward another Fuel Crisis this winter, and a Pood Crisis before that. The newspapers, magazines and the comedians in the muscial shows are all inclined to blame | it all on the Labor government, but a careful study of notes tak- en th hundreds of conversations with the people in all walks of life suggests that in general the people favor the Labor party, though they think Mr. Attlee’s goverment has made some ser- ious Mistakes. Mistakes which, one conservative admitted, might | well have been made by Church- ill’s Coalition if it had been kept in power. “The times have a lot to with it,” he said. There is a terrific shortage of dollars in Britain, and the money loaned by the United States is very nearly all used up in Amer- ican marketa—food (especially), building materials, machinery— peng dows dollars. Money she ; has te countries in the socalled sterling bloc has in many cases been converted into dollars, which puts a further strain on Britain. Se she is exporting all that she can, to obtain more American dolars to obtain her way up again. This means that the people must @tand by to watth all kinds of goods which they themselves seriously need—automobiles, ma- chinery, textiles, even whiskey— shiped abroad. it hurts, but they have it stol- idiy “because we HAVE to do it te survive.” They don't like the food rations—‘the ration for one person per month would not cov- er your teacup saucer—one egg a month, half a pound of meat a week.” . And they don't like the cloth. ing ration. A businessman who fels that he “must be decent to meet the trade,” finds it hard to! obtain the clothing he needs for lack of coupons. If he buys clothes for himself, the rest of his family must go without. There is, acordingly, a_ black market in coupons—sold by “shiftless people ‘Who always wear old clothes anyway”—and @ pound ($4.03 in our money) will buy one person's clothing ration. Britain's situation becomes all the more grim with the falling eff of production in the coal mines. These are now national- iwed there are about the same woriber of men “in the pits” as before the war; their wages are bettér and working strangely cttiieg temporary until eonditions matically become his own.” better | homes are available. “I'm a bit worried,” one Bri- tisher told me, “the prefabs put fup in 1917-18, after the First World War, have been occupied ! ever since. I rather think these new ones will be, for a long time to éome.” The big, complaint against the Labor gévernment is principally that they have tried to impose , their socialistic program too soon. “It would have been better,” you hear people say, “not to have at- tempted that now. We need to ,get back on our feet first. The program is a good one, in the long run, but now is not the time.” A number also expresses the fear that the change from the Churchill! government to the La- bor Party may have injured Bri- tish relations with America. They | can fot theni. .. He and I sit are frankly worried that it has.| 6n the outside and watch them {There is an earnest desire for! have their fun, and sometimes, friendship cooperation —genuine | when he isn't working on thé friendship as well as political and |! night shift, we go in and dance /economic—and a deep fear that | with them.” ‘something may happen to mar it.| Now the parties are so crowd- That something might be what jed that they have overflowed many people to whom I have !from the living room into other ‘talked consider the extravagance|rooms of the house. Mrs. Net: ,of the Labor government. For ex- |mann says, “It looks like we'll ‘ample, estates have been pur-|have to pave our side yard in or- i¢hased for “regional offices,” at|der to have enough room. In several hundred thousand dollars!fact, the kids are already mak- ,each, when existing facilities ing plans in this direction.” ,used during the war might have; There are so many ways young been’ occupied until the present| people could organize get-to- crisis is past. a 1 gethers it seems too bad that The future for Britain—as seen] more of them don’t do it. Some iby, the average . Britisher —- i§]modern mindéd groups of teen- ‘gloomy indeed. They—like ‘We—lagers sit around and enjoy dis- are tired of slogans, tired of|cussing world affairs. They do ‘shortages, tired “of queuing up” | this by reading the newspapers jin breadlines and meatlines and} all week and then when they ‘for trams and cinemas and what-jmeet they discuss the pros and ‘not. For escape they are jamming cons of universay problems. jthe theatres and movie houses Other kids who enjoy “just ‘night after night, travelling to|parties” get together and discuss iScotland and Ireland when they at each meeting exactly what can. form of entertainment they will They are a very old people. The |have at the next meeting. ‘sooted buildings which surround One crowd of teeners iri New ‘them have looked down upon! York has an excellent system. ‘hundreds of generations who have| They bring the food to their \gone before. The symbols of Brit-| meeting place on a rotating sy3- ain’s mighty days are all about) tem. One week one group them—the political leaders, the| brings the sandwiches: another | great generals and admirals, writ-| the beverage. The following .ers and clergymen look down). week the groups shift around. ing; and I know most teen- agers do. I didn’t want to see the children around here miss out of it when they were young, just because they had no place to go. We don’t have much to give the kids, but my husband, who is a machinist at a paper mill, Says we'll do whatever we ‘from heroic statues and in many! Some of the kids énjoy having lan ancient painting. But these a real literary evening by dis- ‘people look forward and up- cussing a book which everybody , ward, stolidly but with a kind of has read. And if you have never ‘gallantry, too. itried it, this form of amusement The tall Nelson monument with |is really not as dull as it sounds. jthe grim lions at its base on Tra- | \falgar Square is a powerful piece | of sculpture. It is very simple, | Stearn {but strong in its design. f _ It tells you—this monument of |. (You may write Vivian Brown |Strength—that somehow, no mat- im care of this paper about news ‘ter what the worst may be, Brit- of Your own gang.) lain will come hrough. I have yet to meet a Briton who Builders Do Their ‘isn’t absolutely confident that she | Knocking On Parade | Will—regardless of what the fu-| SAN JOSE, Calif. — (AP). — ture holds. | Twenty carpenters entered a float No B fe jin a parade, but started the two- © serrewing jhour-long jaunt with nothing but ' “Your nearest neighbor is 20a pile of boards—and tools. |miles away?” | At the finish line, they were i “Yes;- out Keré, when a man |resting—with a 10 by 14 by 8 buys his garden tools, they auto-|foot housé completed on their float. ie