SO DIFFERENT!

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 98, 24 February 1947, Page 7

SO DIFFERENT!

LIFE IN MIDDLE WEST WRITER’S COMPARISON Travelling from Manhattan you know you’re in the Middle West when—you see a sign saying “luncheon, 55 cents,” states a message from Cincinnatti, Ohio. The waitress says “thank you ’ when you leave a 15-cent tip. You can stand up and stretch in your hotel room—without hitting a knuckle against either wall. They put more than one dipper of

ice cream in a sundae and throw in

a spoonful of whipped cream free. An the malted milks are thicker than chocolate-flavoured hydrant water.

You meet more women carrying children than leading dogs. You notice there are spaces between the houses.

If you ask a stranger what time it is, he doesn’t suspiciously grab his wallet pocket with both hands. The people begin to speak in complete sentences instead of a series of grunts.

The Pekineses thin out and you come across lop-eared hounds that aren’t ashamed to scratch themselves in public. Copies of “The Best-Loved Poems of James Whitcomb Riley” replace ‘The Lost Weekend” on the drugstore bookstands.

You can go all day without hearing more than a couple of foreign accents.

People’s words come out with a soft slur, but nobody bites a word in two after the first vowel.

The boys wear caps with ear flaps. The .Chinese restaurants fail to outnumber the barbecue stands. You can ask a clerk for*a threecent stamp—if that’s all you want to buy—and walk out feeling reasonably sure he isn’t muttering ‘Tightwad” behind your back.

You can’t read your newspaper through restaurant butter slabs, and they leave the sugar bowl on the table.

You can buy a man-sized steak and still get some change back from a five-dollar bill.

The cop§ say “mister” instead of 'bey, youse!”

Somebody speaks to you first. They take off their hats as a woman enters the elevators.

The man at the cash register pushes out the toothpick bowl and says pleasantly .“Come see iis again.” The people talk their time going to work instead of hurrying to work to loaf.

Folks know their neighbours as people with first names—not just strangers behind a series of closed doors. You can see a squirrel without wondering why he isn’t in a museum.