Word: customs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...generally been the American custom to assume a person innocent unless proven guilty. From all that I have read, Mr. Furtwängler was cleared by a court which I must assume had all the records, and it seems a pretty sorry business that a group of musicians high in box-office estimation feel that they know better...
...news was good; yet few consumers seemed to be setting off rockets. Maybe it was just a perverse American custom to worry when prices went up, and worry also when they went down. There was certainly some caution in the air. Florida had never had so many tourists, but along Miami Beach, where workmen had labored overtime under nightlong floodlights to build 19 new hotels for the booming luxury trade, that trade was no longer booming. In Seattle a waitress complained: "Things are starting to tighten up all right; you get twice as many 10? tips...
...Eighty-year-old Scott Pillsbury took advantage of mild weather at Scarborough, Me., hurried to a public cemetery to dig his grave before the ground froze. He explained that he expected to die soon, and disapproved of the local custom of storing bodies through winter months and burying them in the spring...
Besides making the trains run on time, Mussolini also made Rome's turbulent traffic run smoothly. He prohibited the Roman pedestrian's custom of reading newspapers in the middle of the street. Once, interrupted in his meditations by a horn insistently honking in the Piazza Venezia below, Mussolini shouted an order that all "acoustic signaling" be forthwith prohibited in Rome. Romans whispered sadly that their "city of noise" had become the città del silenzio...
Largely to appease the cops, hard-pressed Romans revived the prewar custom of handing out gifts to the police on Feast of the Epiphany-Jan. 6, the day on which Italian children get their Christmas presents. (The gifts are brought by Befana, a green-shawled lady who travels on a broomstick and wears dark spectacles to protect her eyes when she dives down chimneys.) Last week, Roman drivers halted their cars to hand over their presents to "off-duty" policemen who were especially stationed for this purpose next to the regular ones...