Word: tightwads
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...radio, the venerable Jack Benny Show (Sun. 7 p.m., CBS) began its 19th year before a studio audience so enthusiastic that even the commercial (for Lucky Strike) got as much welcoming applause as any of the cast. By now, 56-year-old Jack Benny's tightwad, pompous radio personality has become a U.S. institution, and the show's humor lies as much in his familiar character as in comic invention. As always, Benny played the foil for the acid comment of his wife, Mary Livingstone, the booming illiteracy of Bandleader Phil Harris, the naive malevolence of Singer Dennis...
...Capitol Hill scurried ECAdministrator Paul Hoffman, who had spent anxious months justifying the appropriations. To Republican Leader Joseph Martin and Republican Tightwad John Taber, Salesman Hoffman made an urgent, timely appeal. The cuts, warned Hoffman, would embarrass Secretary of State Dean Acheson at the Big Four conference in Paris. Hoffman's proposition: let the cuts stand, but let ECA come back for more at the end of 13½ months instead of the 15 months originally intended...
...latest plight of the parsimonious Nizam of Hyderabad was being relished by many an Indian who had never seen moths fly out of a tightwad's purse in U.S. vaudeville. The Nizam, they told one another, had stacked his private vault with some 250,000 rupees in Indian currency long before his country was grabbed by India. When he came to get it, however, the worms had got there first and the Bank of India refused to honor the half-eaten bills...
...story." (Sample quote: "I was in bed alone every night I was away from Jack.") Correspondent James Desmond of the tabloid New York Daily News gravely reported that her shipboard life was not all ecstasy, but "something too unglamorous for the fragile fabric of illicit love." (The headline: TIGHTWAD LOVER HAD ME SWAB DECKS...
None admits to being a tightwad, but 53% say they are certainly extravagant. Most of them live in New York City (alone, with families, roommates, husbands)-pursue a variety of hobbies from "catching up on sleep," collecting sea shells and antique jewelery, to studying economics-see a movie, a play, a concert apiece about once a month-wear an evening dress about once a year, spectacles part of the time. Altogether they own a total of five cats, three dogs and a horse. They smoke steadily (a pack of cigarettes a day), and only one is a teetotaler...