Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1956. január-június (5. évfolyam, 1-26. szám)
1956-02-02 / 5. szám
February 2. 1956 AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZÓ 15 .wiiiminI hm in i min ...... nr~munrI ||y 1 gangway The little man was pushing the cart through the crowded market. “Coming through,” he called merrily. No one moved. “Gangway !” he shouted.- A few men stepped aside. Ruefully he surveyed the situation. “Watch your nylons,” he warned. The women scattered like chaff in the wind. ★ That Explains It The prison chaplain found that a hardened convict had made a pet of a rat and noticed how the convict’s scowling face softened into a smile when he fed it. Going up to the man, the chaplain put his hand on his shoulder and said, “How did you come to take such a fancy to this rat?” The convict hesitated: then said, “He bit the jailer, sir.” ★ T ough “A divinity student named Twedlee Once wouldn’t accept a degree ‘It’s tough enough being Tweedle Without being Tweedle, D.D.” k Looking Ahead A minister was soliciting money for his ■hurch and approached an Indian to contribute. The Indian gave $5, and asked for a receipt. “You don’t need a receipt," said the minister. But the Indian insisted. “Some day, I go to Happy Hunting Ground,” re said. “Great White Spirit called St. Peter ask ne a lot of questions. He ask is I pay preacher. say yes. He ask for receipt. I reply, ‘Preacher (ays I don’t need receipt.’ He say, you get ireacher and bring him here. Then I say, I rave to go look all over h—1 to find preacher. \To good!” ★ Dutting On Airs A department store clerk was showing a nodernistic trash can to a customer. “The most remarkable thing about this trash an,” the clerk said, “is that it has a music box •lilt into it. Lifting the lid of the can causes he music box to play an appropriate tune.” “What tune does it play?” the customer want- 1 to know. “Nobody Knows the Rubble I’ve Seen,” the erk replied. k I’PLIED PSYCHOLOGY College Senior: “What would you advise me ) read after graduating?” English professor: “The ‘Help Wanted’ eo- mns. 86,000 Bricks An Hour Polish engineers and workers have designed id built a machine which lays 60.000 bricks an >ur. A demonstration of the “mechanical brick- yer” was given on January 5 in the city of czecin where it was constructed under the liervision of Zdzislaw Szezesnv of the Munici- .i Building Enterprise. The elctrically operated machine also spreads ortar, spaces the openings for doors and win- ws, and can build walls of any height and knes. The equipment is run by one man at i cost and does not require bricklaying skill. Experts who attended the demonstration said ie machine would revolutionize the building iustrv. Lipstick and Cancer Research The American people spend more for lipstick than for cancer research, more on ballpoint pens than for heart studies. We spend more thanlö BILLION dollars for liquor and tobacco . . and a very small fraction of that amount for medical research. The facts behind the President’s request for health research funds are: lit happens that the United States is one of the most unhealthy countries in the world today. That statement, it happens, was made by Dr. Paul Dudley White, the noted cardiologist who is treating President Eisenhower. He was telling a congressional committee last May of the ravages of heart disease which killed more than 800,000 persons in the nation in 1954, nearly twice the number of victims it claimed in 1935. At this rate, it is estimated, 83 million Americans now living will, sooner or later die of heart disease. Our unhealthiness, Dr. White said, is largely due to this serious coronary threat. While evei*yone knows, he testified, about the very bad health conditions in South Asia and Africe due to infections and undernutrition, not so many have realized that at the opposite ex- ttreme in countries like the United States which boast of their sanitary conditions the health of professional and business leaders is constantly threatened and apparently more and more each year. ★ Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, Republican of Maine, quoted Dr. White in introducing a bill calling for the government to spend a billion dollars or more over the next five years on an expanded program of medicel research. Sen. Smith would use the money as follows: Doubling the research and training expenditures of the National institutes of health to 200 miliőn a year; 30 million a year to construct laboratories, the funds to be matched by the institutions receiving them; 70 million a year, also on a matching basis, to expand medical schools. She stressed the need for long range planning, hence the five-year framework for her bill. ★ Is this overdoing it? Is a billion really necessary ! Well, the Senator quotes congressional commmittee testimony to the effect that heart and three other major diseases, cancer, tuberculosis and arthritis, have caused an annual loss of 370 million man days of productivity. Illness, according to the evidence, cost the United States 30 million dollars a year — roughly äquivalent to all money the government collects in income taxes. Even so, is the Senator’s request in proportion to other needs? Figures indicate it is out of proportion, but in reverse. In 1954 the US spent about two billion on all kinds of research, more than 85 per cent, of it on military weapons research, only a fraction of the total on medical research. ★ Still can the taxpayer make the sacrifice? Mrs. Smith summons part of her answer from editorials in the Bangor, Maine, Daily News. There is something wrong in our thinking, the paper says, when, Amercians spend more on lipstick than on cancer research; more on ballpoint pens than on heart studies. To bolster her case, the Senator motes that the country spends 10 billion a year on liquor, more than five billion on tobacco. Our annual expenditure for chewing gum, she reports, $264 million more than “I am asking for researsh to save human lives.” ★ The need is there staring us in the face, so high in the incidence of casualty. If we don’t insist that the government respond to it, we’ll have to acid national shortsightedness, I think, to the other maladies so urgently needing cure. CÜLLES, THE “BRiRK ARTIST” The following letter appeared in a recent issue of the “Labor Daily”: “When Mi-. Dulles admits that he pushed us to the brink of war, he admits that the men in Washington are quite capable of pushing us beyond the brink any time they feel like it. He admits that entry or nonentry into a war is not in the hands of the people. “If John Foster Dulles came out of the platinum world he lives in and came down to talk to farmers around here, or to ; workers in the I plants anywhere in , I the country, he would find out a thing or two about how people like his “edge of disaster” tightrope act. Maybe it sounds all right in print, especially in the shiny pages of Life magazine, but when you bring it down to concrete reality, it doesn’t look so good or smell so good. It smells, in fact, of death—and of dollars—the kind that lay behind partisan politics. Why is it everytime Eisenhower made some statement intended to ease world tension, Dulles would trump it with another calling for more arms, more belligerency, more sparks and smoke. Let thd Democrats come out now with a dramatic, sensible and comprehensive plan for ending the cold war. Let Kefauver, Stevenson and Harriman, if they are men of peace, speak out now. Let them express the sentiments of the average person, not the lobbies or corporations. If they do this boldly, they will walk away with the next election. More important, if they follow this up with actions and throw off their fear of the Ghiang Kai-Shek followers and the so-called patriots who consider all negotiation appeasement, they will have renderedAnankind a profound service. Who knows, maybe they will have prolonged mankind’s existence on this little planet of ours. I also think all pee pie of good will who feel the way I do should not sit back and wait for things to take their course. They shoulld write and express their sentiments—in newspapers,, in Wasnington, everywhere. MRS. LAURA MILLER FÖN I» fflk0ÜRY Tn a survev titled: “Tourist Facilities Beyond the Iron Curtain” Jack Raymond, European correspondent of the New York Times had a few interesting comments on what the Western visitor may expect in Hungary by way of hotel and restaurant accomodations. In view of the obvious interest of our readers in the possibility of travel to Hungary this year, we publish these excerpts from the report which appeared in the Jan. 8 edition of the Times: “In Budapest, Hungary, the visitor can have fun. There are more nights spots, more cafes, and the people themselves are a rather gay and irrepressible lot. But the city strets have a sha- bv look. In only a few of the top hotels does one see the chic women for which Budapest once was so famous. (Editor’s comment: Maybe the Times correspondent is not aware of it, but it is quite possible that a lot of decent Americans and Hungarians might want to visit Hungary whose primary object is not gazing at “chic women”) “Service at the Hotel Düna, where most foreigners go, indicates that the reception clerk and the porters remember a time when a hotel guest could expect good service. It is possible also to cash travelers checks at the hotel desk when the bank’s exchange booth in the hotel is closed. This facility was not available in Bucharest or Warsaw. If one leaves at an odd hour, it can be quite a nuisance trying to figure out how to get enough money to pay a. bill. “Budapest also has several restaurants where it is possible to get a fair-priced meal even at the unfair exchange rate. The Duna Hotel dining room itself offers pretty good food and. fine Hungarian wines.”
