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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Brussels Post, 1959-05-28, Page 2HER BIRD'S FOR THE ARTS-. Parakeet feathers are used by Mrs. Florence Bishop, of Knackhelt England, at right, to produce landscapes such as this. Her pet parakeet doesn't go around bald; she uses molted feathers only, on q painted background, An example of her work is shown, below. ...May x broot a iJitri TA BLE TALKS (2kmedttews syrup decade or two everybody who goes aboard will want to be whisked to his destination in hours. On the contrary, the faith is firm that there will -I- ways be enough persons who en- joy luxury on the surface of the seas to make additions to the world's• fleets profitable. In- deed BritaiWs only fear today is that of being left behind in the clamor for 'passage. — Baltimore Evening Sun, Great Waterway Half a century ago the Panama. Canal in-the-making was the wonder of the world—an engi-, neering celos Sus that would dwarf all the ancient and mod- ern wonders—"the most note- worthy contrbiution toward the material imp.rovement of the world ever made by the Teutonic race." That was before the skylines of Chicago and Manhattan were punctuated with spectacular pin- nacles of steel and concrete, be- fore Hoover Dam, Grand Coulee, and Bonneville walled back small inland seas, before TVA and the St. Lawrence Seaway, before the era of eight-lane throughways, skyways, and the Golden Gate Bridge, before the incredible construction miracles of World War II, The importance of Panama has not diminished in those fifty years, but so many other man- made miracles have been crowd- ed onto the continents that the Canal has long since lost its pre- eminence as the earth's major tourist attraction, When the great ditch was empty of water and the concrete walls naked, the sight was stupendous, the awe-inspiring grandeur too mag- nificent to comprehend. Now the real wonder of the Canal is submerged, cohcealed behind the unimposing control towers or inside the giant walls where acres of intricate machin- ery have been functioning with scarcely an interrupation since 1914. Transit through the locks is made so smoothly, so effort- lessly that a spectator unfamili- ar with the hidden Workings sees little to marvel about, 'end the ride through the Cut where ter- rifying slides. and ,upheavals ,kePt engineers on edge for decades is no more exciting than a river- boat trip down 'the Hudson. To • • the "special." extras — are as singular and varied as life itself. "We could come up with four teams of football players," said Bronson. "For,camel drivers we get cowboys, Our elephant boys are real Indian boys who have done it, We have fifteen. We have men who can handle bulldozers. And roller coasters. We have a stable of jockeys. We have fif- teen gondoliers and 39 casino dealers, One of the toughest or- ders we ever filled came in this morning, Someone wanted a. man with a just-broken knee. We be- gan by trying to remember who had been in an accident recently, and the fourth one we called was a bad-knee man," Ordinarily, Bronson and his three assistants work in reverse of the old Hollywood saw: "Don't call us, we'll call you." Central Casting seldom puts in a call; extras are expected to keep phoning in each day, and they do—to the jingle of 4,500 calls an hour between 4 and 7 pm. Most call two or three times in an afternoon, "Our four switch- boards light up like Christmas trees," Bronson said. "The oper- ators shout to us ten names at a time and, since we know by memory all about each extra, we pick the ones we need in a mat- ter of seconds." As one might imagine, the de- mand for cowboys is currently at an all-time peak, "We have 200," Bronson concluded, "and with the boom in TV film Wes- terns, they don't lack for work." Cowboys get $29.04 a day, un- less they perform, a "silent bit." The classic example of a cow- boy's silent bit: A bystander pointing the direction the vil- lains rode. This pays $61.33. How does a cowboy extra earn more? By shouting, as he points: "They went thataway!" That makes him a $90-a-day actor. MAPLE SYRUP FUDGE 2 cups maple syrup 1 tablespoon light corn 34 cup thin cream 1 teaspoon vanilla 8 cup walnut meats Combine maple syrup, corn syrup and cream in saucepan and cook over low flame. Stir constantly until mixture begins to boil. Continue cooking with- out stirring to' soft ball stage. ,Remove from fire and cool to lukewarm. Beat until mixture thickens and loses its gloss. Add Vanilla and nuts and pour at once into 8-inch hutered pan. BAKED' LIAM SLICE 11/2 inch center slice ham cup maple syrup 1/2 cup dried bread crumbs 1 teaspoon prepared mustard 1/4 teaspoon powdered clove 2 cups milk Place ham in baking dish and cover top with mixture made of syrup, bread crumbs, mustard and cloves. Pour milk around (not over) the ham. Bake slowly (325° F.) for 11/2 hours. Desert River Behind The Scenes In Hollywood Hollywood's.Central Casting, an organization which furnishes people en masse to plug the gaps In the screen between the stars and the scenery, received a phone call from M-Q-M. "We need twenty African pyg. plies for the new Tarzan pic- ture," a frantic Metro man said. A Central. Casting representa- tive asked when the pygmies Were wanted, "Yesterday!" screamed the Metro, man and hung up. Before the last war, Central Casting had 30 midgets avail- able to serve as pygmies, but they went into aircraft work and never came back, Now the mov- ies' captive midget population, like that of the whooping cranes, is down to a half-dozen. So how —short of amputation—to come by twenty African natives under 5 feet tall? This puzzler was solved by husky, silver-haired Art Bron- son, Central's manager for the last seventeen years, As he ex- plained it last week to News- week's Los Angeles bureau chief Simon Bourgin: "All we had to do was get twenty Hawaiian, Negro, and Mexican boxers in ,,the flyweight class, With make- rip they made damn good pyg- mies." The "pygmies" belong to a small army of part-time movie extras who stand in corners, serve as parts of mob scenes, en- gage other extras in silent con- versation, or escort a featured player', They may also perform any else of 115 skills listed by Central Casting. In fact, as union extras, they may do anything but speak lines. Set up as a nonprofit agency in 1926,13y the Motion Picture Producers Association, Central Casting performs with efficiency what was formerly done in con- fusion. In the early '20s, extras made daily rounds of all the studios, were picked haphazard- ly by the casting managers on a "You! You!" basis. CC changed this, categorized extras by types and skills, and whittled down the lists, from 17,000 to the current 3,000. The hard core of movie extras are the "general" and "dress" extras. The former serve, at $22.05 a day, as convicts, church- goers, passers-by in street scenes. Dress extras are paid an addi- tional $7 to supply their own wardrobes. A third category — Liner's Future CANDY DANDY — Old-fash- ioned rock candy and sour balls are the inspirations for a new style in summer jewelry. Ear- rings, multistrand necklace and braCelet make up the ensemble. Winning Against Big Handicaps lead an ordinary life doing ordinary things,"`Said the short, sandy-haired woman waiting to be called as an honored guest to the platform in Washington's De- partmental Auditorium, "I'm just doing what other people are do- ing"Dr. Anne Carlson, 43, was right in a way. She just does "what other people are doing," but with a difference: she does it with no arms, and with arti- ficial legs. The President's Corn- mittee on Employment of the Physically Handicapped could have found no more logical re- cipient for its annual trophy award to the "Handicapped American of the Year," When Anne Carisen was born in Grantsburg, Wis„ she had only stubs of arms ending above the elbow, her right leg ended above the knee, and the left was mal- formed, ending in a clubfoot. Left motherless at four, Anne got tire- less encourageirient from her fa- ther, an elder sister and four brothers. On a coaster wagon, she le-arned to take part in a modified version of baseball—At eight she was pronounced ready for school, but only after a psy- chologist had gone over her and solemnly pronounced her "edu- cable," Anne raced through two grades a year. There was time out for a long hospital siege, to straighten out the contractures in Anne's one knee. She went home able to walk, but only with a device so clumsy that she soon discarded it, When she was in ,high,school, her left leg,was,amputated below the knee. Then,' with artificial legs and crutches, Anne could really walk. But as•sirre advanced to college (St, .Paurs Luther Junior College and, the Univer- sity of Minnesota? 'Anne found if harder to win acceptance than it hid been arming .,young, chil- dren, and-harder still to get the training she, wanted to make her self-supporting as a teacher. After discouraging years of baby-sitting and 'of writing, which brought only rejection slips, Anne Carlsen got the break she longed for: a chance to teach are 'special school for crippled children in Fargo, N. Dak. The children, she found, quickly ad- justed to her multiple handicaps, soon seemed not to notice them. Summer studies won her an M.A., and in '1949 Anne Carlsen got her Ph.D. in education from MinneSota. The next year Dr. Carlsen moved in as superinten- dent of the Crippled Children's School, which had moved to Jamestown, N. Dak. There she lives alone in a two- room apartment over the school. The one thing she leaves to others is cooking. In the office she usually dictates letters, though she has learned to write —far more legibly than most peo- ple with normal hands—with a special pen hoeked to her stump. Dr, Carlsen attends conventions all over the country, traveling easily by plane or train if it is too far to drive. But driving she loves, in a car with special con- trols, like those forliandicapped veterans. "It's the only thing I'm proud of," she says, And since Dr. Carlsen got her license in 1954, she has safely driven 42,000 miles. But when•Vice President, Rich- ard Nixon presented ,the trophy last week, Dr. Carlsen had no hands to receive it. Nixon ,held it while, with good poise on her crutches, she made •an apt ac- ceptance speech. Developed New Fruit 'By Chance Feasting will take place in Oakland, California, in 1960 to celebrate the birth eighty years ago of a fruit which is to-day enjoyed by . millions of people all over the world, The sweet and luscious logan- berry is named after its origina- tor, Judge James H. Logan. He produced it in his sunny Oak- land ,garden in 1880 while car- rying out a series of grafting, experiments. His "man-made" new fruit• was entirely unexpected. He was actually trying' to produce an improved strain of garden black- berry. This he did by crossing the local wild berry, whose fla- vour he had always liked, with the "Texas Early," a cultivated' blackberry. But the gardening judge had also planted some raspberries in the garden and he was amaz- when loganberries appeared. A new, permanent and distinct fruit had come into the world. The Judge himself never com- mercialized the loganberry. "I never received one cent for it," he said years later. "'After its origination delivered it to a professor ,at California Univer- sity for ,,the use of the general public and true to trust 'he dis- tributed it to' anybrie wanting it, without cost." Next year's celebration feasts will all feature loganberries on the menus and many, a keen gar- dener in California will drink a glass of raspberry or black- berry wine and toast the mem- ory of the man who became known throughout the United States as "The Loganberry's Father." We travelled through 'the desert for hours. There was nothing but pale yellow sand, scanty stunted thorn-bushes and a stony dried-up river bed, with here and there a couple of wretehed Bedouin straw huts. No birds sang; not a sound broke the solitude. At the most a cam- el caravan passed by with silent ghostly tread, the asses going ahead as leading animals. Suddenly a remarkable scene appeared on the hbrizon, as if conjured up by the touch of a wand; towering palaces, gleam- ing white as marble, and cup- olas, and slender pinnacles. The surprising thing was that every- thing seemed to float in the air as if painted on the blue back- drop of the sky in the most deli- cate of colours. As we drew nearer, we could make out the broad outline of a town, square brown houses huddled together and firmly rooted in the soil, And now the reason for the illusion was clear; the towering structures have white upper stories, but are earth coloured below, so that this part is invisible from a distance. The landscape, too, had chang- ed suddenly. The river bed be- side which we were travelling, dry a moment ago, now contain- ed water. It was led off to the fields, which were luxuriant with verdure, via countless gut- ters and channels. The tops of the slender date palms, heavy with fruit, bowed overhead, the thoroughfares were thronged with the town's inhabitants go- ing home from work at sunset. Brown supple young lads, naked to the waist, drove the small Arabian cows ahead of them. They shouted friendly greetings, while the women in blue shawls cast curious sly glances at us. A lofty wide mud-brick gate swal- lowed us up. We were in LahejX — From "The Yemen— Secret Journey," by Hans Hel- fritz. NET VALUE — Jane Harvey pretties up some drying fishing nets in Florida on the Atlantic. From time to time in the last ten years it has been suggested that the day of the big trans- oceanic ship is fast running out, that the liner's future approach- es vanishing point. Prediction would be rash indeed as we en ter, supposedly, the age which, the more fancifully sanguine say, will offer us "space" picnic grounds, weekend excursions to the moon and perhaps two-week guided tours of the nearer plan- ets, The fact is, however, that the postwar age has brought us a number of new large lux- ury ships and all of them seem to be doing quite well during' the tourist seasons. Now Britain has begun ,o talk about r e placing the "Queens," the Elizabeth and Mary, In London it is pointed out that France has project:1d the building of a fine new liner, that our own country may con- struct a sister ship of the United States, that Italy expects to add to her passenger fleet. So Brit- ish shipping, it is contended, will need some handsome fast "shop- window" vessels too. Whether or not the argument is sound, it does appear that neither ship- ping companies nor the govern- ments which often provide the subsidies for them are° yet act- ing as If the age of travel by swift and elegant oceanic liner is dead and done with. In times when travel seems to be increasing with every now year even the advent of jet plane service has not discourag- ed the plans for designing and running handsome hew passen- ger carriers of the kind that once raced for records. No longer do these plans emphasize size and ever greater size, but speed, efficiency and comfort are still considerations of the first order, There is no disposi- tion to believe that in another inured globe-trotters the slow, eight-hour passage across the Is- thmus can be rather tedious. From the Caribbean a ship noses past the twin cities of Col- on and Cristobal into the channel leading to Gatun Locks. Great gates swing open and close; in three steps the vessel is magical- ly lifted eighty-five feet to the level of a broad inland lake that bridges the American continent at its narrowest point. Skirting little exotic islands and jungle peninsulas, the ship winds across the lake for twenty miles, then at a dawdling pace moves maj- estically through the nine-mile Cut in the Continental Divide, pauses at Pedro Miguel for the first Pacific lockage, at Mira- Flores for two more steps down and in a few minutes is sweep- ing past Balboa toward the open Pacific. Altogether from deep Atlantic to deep Pacific the trip' is only fifty miles, instead of ten thousand around the Horn. Seamen in their' sixties and seventies still remember when they had to take that long way around, when the distance by water from New York to San Francisco was over 13,000 miles rather than some 5,000, when the passage to Ecuador Was 7,000 ,miles longer than it is now Old men—the veteran, diggers of the Panama campaign — remember when the terrain through which the waterway was to pass was a swampy morass, the bed of turbulent rivers, and inapenetra- bid hillside jungle, But almost everyone else has forgotten, People back home, and the new generation, take the Canal for granted, as though it had always belonged to the geography of the Western. Henipishere. .From "The Strength to Move a faun- fain," by. W. Storrs Lee, The following recipe for un- cooked cheese cake is planned for 16 servings. But. you can easily halve the quantities, al- though it will keep for a week or longed in your refrigerator: UNCOOKED CHEESECAKE (Serves 16) 1 package lemon' gelatin 1 cup hot water 1 large package cream cheese, 1 cup white sugar 1 9-ounce can crushed pine- apple (drained) 1 large can 'evaporated milk 18 graham crackers- (crushed) 3 tablespoons powdered sugar 14 pound butter Melt butter and add crushed crackers and Powdered sugar, mixing well. Spread half of 'mix- ture in bottom of two 9-inch cake pans, 11/2 inches deep, or in a 151/2 x 101/2 x 1 jelly roll pan. Save half a crumb mixture as topping. !Dissolve gelatin in cup of hot water and allow to cool, Chill and whip milk, set aside. Mix sugar and cream cheese together -in large bowl and add drained crushed pineapple. Add milk and gelatin and stir well. Pour Into pan and top with remaining crumb mixture. Chill in re- frigerator overnight. ,. A small recipe which may well become a favorite at your house is for date-filled cookies, You make them as follows: DATE-FILLED COOKIES 2 cups flour Vs. teaspoon salt i4 teaspoon soda 1/2 cup butter Vs cup brown, sugar 1/2 cup white sugar 1 egg, well beaten Vs teaspoon' vanilla Sift flour. Measure and resift three times with salt and soda. Cream butter. Blend with. the brown and white sugar, add egg and vanilla and beat until light. Stir in flour and place in refrig- erator to chill. FILLING 1 lb. chopped dates Ve cup water 1/2 cup white sugar 1 cup chopped nut meats Place dates, 'water and sugar in suacepan and cook until thick — about five minutes. Cool and add nuts. Divide dough into four parts, Spread filling over sec- tions and roll up like jelly roll. Wrap in waxed paper and store in regrigerator. When ready to bake, slice thin and bake on oiled cookie sheet in hot oven, 400' F. seven minutes. Makes 10 dozen. * * * Although this year's maple syrup "crop" deesn't seem to be anything extra, the following recipes all making use of that delicacy are well worth passing along. NUT BROWN BREAD cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 34. cup milk 4 tablespoons maple syrup 1 egg 1 cup chopped Mita or raisins Sift dry ingredients together, add milk, syrup and beaten egg. Add chopped nuts or raisins, Pout into greased bread pans and bake 1 hour at 350' F. * ti* MAPLE PECAN PIE Heat Va cup pure maple syrup With 2 beaten eggs in top of double boiler, beating at high speed till very light, Remove from fire and add 1 tablespoon gelatin dissolved in 1 tablespoon 'gold water, Mix well but not stiff. Add I cup Omani whipped, rola into syrup arid gelatin Mists 400. Paw into baked Pie abaft and top with pecans. Chill for i few bout's before serving. JUST LII(E THE BIG ONE - bollard blegal, top,"sets ufl d remarkable niiiitatUre 'verstori of 6- traveling European big top,. the Circus, lobtfOrti. As perfect as human ingenuity dart Make the Model circus' parts actually "pack into the &WS wagons, OS does the gear of the real-life read show. "Why is your car painted red on one side and blue on the 00;01" asked Smithers of a rtietorist acquaintance, "Oh, it's a fine said the motorist. "You should hear the witnesses contradicting one an- other." ROYAL ADMIRATION - The Shah of Iran smiles as lie looks Of a radibirit Pfiricets Margaret on his arrival it tdridon for ES three-day state Visit. Following his official visit, the OlatiS la irrtjoy 6 two-week holiday irf , Etigland,