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The Seaforth News, 1962-08-23, Page 2tt Thieves On The Prowl i.nl Britain Thieves who speeialtze in steal- ing cats are on the prowl again, [:very day, especially in big towns, eats are reported missing. Some turn up after the lapse of a few hours; or days, or weeks. But many pet eats never come back—and at least 230,000 are stolen each year in Britain. Those that don't may have been killed for their tur, espe• cially if they are Persian. But other missing cats have got into the hands of a so-called "pet dealer" sontewlwre. A stolen eat is worth at least $2.25 to him when he delivers it to a science laboratory. The same thing applies to dogs, but they are protected by law. Cats aren't, except as property. And to stop the racket you must be able to catch a cat -stealer in the act or identify the animal in the shop, It's difficult to establish the fact that a. cat has been stolen and few owners of "lost" cats do more than put a notice on their gates or insert a small advertise- ment in the local newspaper, A high official of an animal welfare organization asks: "Why are we—professedly an animal - loving nation—so callous some- times towards cats?" Urging cat -lovers to protect their pets, he went on: "I have every reason to suspect an organ- ized traffic in cat -stealing, sup- plying skins for a scandalous oheap-fur industry and procuring live and healthy cats for vivisec- tion. "Judge one of our staffs horror when he discovered a cat, lying in the gutter, skinless but still quivering with life. Around its throat was a well-defined cut testifying to the work of that fiend—the cat fur merchant." A livestock dealer who was tined $255, a few years ago for possessing stolen cats was stated bya detective to have done a large trade in the animals, selling them for $4.00 each to univer- elties and to laboratories. An elderly, silver -haired little SEA SIREN — Gail Jones rightens this beach scene, bt. Thor -nos, Virgin Islands. woman was so keen on protect- ing cats from thieves that the recruited her own "spies" in Lees don's East End to look out for the activities of cat -snatchers and receivers. All her "spies" were traders working in the streets—coalmen, firewood men and many. others. Their vigilance saved the lives of many eats. They reported promp- tly to the woman what they had seen and she, with equal promp- titude, told the police or animal welfare officials. What A Wonderful Person You Are; No matter what other assets you may have or not have one thing you , can be sure about is that you have 206 bones in your body and that these are sheathed over by 500 muscles. These muscles act like rubber bands and enable you to stretch your limbs and move them about. Next time you stoop to pick up a pin from the floor just remem- ber that you are making use of about 300 muscles to do so, Each year, you walk about 1,000 miles, That's in the course of living a normal kind of life, If you go in for hiking at the weekends, or you are a postman or something similar then of course you will walk very much farther. To give you energy, you will probably eat during your lifetime more than five tons of bread, five ions of potatoes and a ton of meat. You will also drink more than 20,000 gallons of water or other liquids. Sleep plays an important part in your life; in fact almost a third of your life will be spent in sleep, A baby requires twenty- two hours of sleep when it is first born. As he grows he needs less and less sleep until in maturity eight hours sleep are enough, In addition to bones and mus- cles, your body is made up from fluids—each human body con- tains about ten gallons of water —in fact, some fifty-nine percent of your body is plain water. Fat also plays an important part and a 154 pound man prob- ably has enough fat in his body to make eight bars of soap. The average man also contains enough carbon to provide lead for nearly 10,000 pencils, enough phosphorous to start a match factory, about a quarter pound of sulphur, magnesium and iron as well as enough lime to white- wash the inside of a small garage. Every twenty-four hours your heart beats over 100,000 times and pumps about 5,000 gallons of blood through your veins. The energy it needs to do this is equal to that required to move a train at 60 m.ph. along a mile of track. If a man allowed his beard to grow unrestricted, right from youth, he would, at the age of seventy, have a beard that was 30 feet long! BABY WHISTLES OWN WARNING Ar. early -warning device to keep baby's wet diaper from be- coming a source of irritation to the baby and the sleeping house- hold is being marketed. The "Di- aper Cry" gadget consists of a 2 -inch -square, moisture -sensitive rubber pad that is placed in a strategic area on the baby and is wired to a small battery - powered speaker hung on the crib. Contact with moisture completes an electrical circuit within the pad, causing a high- pitched whistle to issue from the speaker. The sound is not loud enough to wake baby or dad, but it brings light -sleeping mother on the run with a dry replace- ment. By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity — another man's,I mean. Mark Twain. SECOND CHORUS — Following in the footsteps of her late father, singer Mario Lanza, Colleen Lanza, 13, is embraced by her grandmother, Mrs. Maria Cocozzo, in her Pacific Palisades, Calif., home. Colleen is studying ballet and singing in preparation for a future screen test Mrs. Cocozza is the mother of the late famous operatic tenor and actor. Last evening was a real treat — we had to shut up some of the doors and windows! But during the night it got close and humid again. Anyone who wants it can have my share of hot weather. I just can't take it, especially if it is a damp heat. Sometimes the humidity here gets io 102 — perhaps higher - I don't know for sure as that is as far as the hygrometer will register. And yet in spite of the heat, last week was one of the busiest we have had for some time that is, company -wise. Not a day without someone drop- ping in, sometimes several, and generally from a distance, One couple wanted to do some shop- ping at a nearby Plaza if we would go with them. It was nearly six before we got through. We were all hot and tired so I suggested that they be our guests and we would have supper at a restaurant. Everyone was agree- able so that's what we did — and it saved a lot of time and work. Another day I was out to lunch at the home of a friend, The house was in a subdivision, the front more or less ordinary but the back had a wonderful setting — like a small section of primi- tive forest, Tal! trees of every description, a virtual paradise for birds, For a while we sat on the back balcony and watched them, flitting back and forth, absulute- lIy fearless because of their sheltered location — and possi- bly because there are few cats in that neighbourhood, It is a good thing we don't live there because I might be spending half my time on the balcony. And a good thing for the birds too because where we go Ditto goes — and Ditto is a bird -watcher of another va- riety. Nor is her watching re- stricted to birds. The other day she came home with a baby rab- bit. I might have felt sorry for the bunny except that I knew had it been allowed to live that same bunny would have been feeding off our garden in a few weeks. Speaking of felines, two other visitors who were here last week NNFANTS ARE SAFB ,— Nuns and a woman doctor attend to children after evacuation of the maternity ward of St, Mary's Hospital, Brooklyn, N.Y. A three -alarm fire swept that Mattioli of the building, told me a wonderful cat story, At the moment Ditto was going from one to the other taking all the attention they would give her. Then said Miss M — "You know, at one time I was living in the country with a married niece and her family. There were also two cats, Winky and Blinky, to whom the children were de- voted. One day Winky disap- peared. The whole family went out looking for her. They even put a "Lost" ad: in the local paper, but without any success- ful result. Eventually they had to face the possibility that Winky had either been killed or picked up. Over a year later Mother was preparing supper when Diane said — "Look, Mummy, there's a kitty on our window- sill. It looks like Winky." "Nonsense," said Mother, "it couldn't be Winky. But I agree, it does look like her." So for the sake of sentiment they opened the door and let the cat in. She ran straight to the corner of the kitchen where the cat -food dishes were always kept, an there, also, was Slinky, The two cats immediately became very excited and made a terrific fuss over each other, Then the visiting pussy sought attention from the family and was so much at home they were finally driven to the happy conclusion that their long lost kitty had actually come back to then. Probably she had been lost but had finally found her way home. She had obviously been well-fed and was in good condi- tion. Winky never wandered very far from home again and when T last heard from my niece the two cats were still very much alive.'" I thought that was a delighttu] story and should be encouraging for other families who may have lost a well -loved cat or dog. Our last visitors for the week came in on Saturday night and were from our old "Ginger Farm" district. I need hardly tell you we had plenty to tack about. Is there anything nicer, I wonder, than meeting and talking with people from your old home town or village? You may ask — "Well, why did you ever leave it?" That's a good question so I'll try to give you a few of the reasons. It wasn't a particularly good shopping district and the transportation to nearby towns in any direction was very limit- ed, Only one bus a day to and from Toronto; the same to Ham- ilton and none to Guelph, Rail service was about the same. We had to depend on the car for go- ing places and since Partner's arthritic condition makes driving difficult for him, it all depended on me, And now our friends in- form us that conditions for pub- lic transportation are ever worse, which means every family must have an automobile and depend on it for work, pleasure and shopping, Where we are now situated there is a bus station within two miles and buses go in almost every direction almost every hour, We miss our old friends, but we think, as far as convenience is concerned, we made a wise move, Maybe if small town districts want to grow and improve, public tran- sportation should be taken into consideration, even if it means the setting up of a local bus service. Wonder of wonders — it Is ac- tually ralnine! !Shells 32 — 11162 Brief Story Of Th Stratford Festival There is a wild improbability to all the best ideas. In its tenth season, the Stratford Shake- spearean Festival of Canada stands as prospering proof. If one were to write a how to Start a Festival" manual purely on the basis of Stratford's fan- tastic decade, it would haveto read like this: 1, Find a town with the sant' name as Shakespeare's birth place. Never mind if it turns put to be an tndustrelized Caner'an city where no theater has exist ed for 50 years. 2, Find a hometown boy -- ❑} this case, a young newspapt r - man named Tom Patterson — who has the necessary Mmes./tee to dream the dangerous festival dream until — most astonishing of all — he believes it. 3, Give him $30,000 and let him travel to London, as guile- lessly as Dick Whittington, to invite the prefessional assist- ance of directors like Sir Tyrone Guthrie and Michael Langham, and actors like Sir Alec Guin- ness, An absurdly Quixotic recipe. is it not? Yet no more remarkable real- ly than events as they happened. Only a little more than a year after this preposterous begin- ning — on July 13, 1953„ to be exact — Sir Alec Guinness, in the role of Richard III, stepped onto the stage of the material- ized Stratford Festival tent to proclaim: "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York." The first years of the imme- diately successful festival bear the signature of Sir Tyrone Gu- thrie, a professional Irish dreamer who brought technique and toughness to amateur Cana- dians' dream. By 1954 he was prepared to state the need for a permanent theater, grumbling wittily about the tent, In a high wind, he wrote, "the gallant Tabernacle rocks and creaks like a wind- jammer." When it is hot, audi- ence and actors are "fried in their own fat." When it is cold, one cannot hear the lines for the "castanet obbligato of chat- tering teeth." Within ten years, he hoped, the tent might be an expedient of the past. Peering into what he thought was a safely distant future, he recommended that the' permanent theater "should look welcoming. Too many theaters aim to look like royal palaces. But Theatre Royal is apt to be Theatre Pompous. And anyway a royal palace nowa- days is bound to be mistaken for an insurance office," A mere two years later the eminently "welcoming $2,150,000 Stratford Festival Theater was being built, with 2,258 seats and a modern -Elizabethan stage de- signed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch and Sir Tyrone. Advances on other fronts were nearly as prompt and vigorous. The festival added concerts, opera, and films to its program- ing, and the drama extended from its Shakespearean base to range from "Oedipus Rex" to a contemporary Canadian comedy, "The Canvas Barricade." This year — to put the whole venture in crass and splendid perspective — the box office had an advance sale of half a million dollars, sent in from Canada, the United States, and 30 other countriev writes Mel vin itifaddoelcs, le'ev, York like:i t Critic of the Christian Scieee Monitor. These historical facts, thus, statistics cannot suggest the artistic Integrity and civic de eorttm with which alt this hat happened Just why lu'.s the festival sec• ceeded, arid so speetncu1arly when pedestrian logic said it had only the right to fate? The usual. box. -office analysts explanations do not acid;, The only convincing see -wee is broad and general. Canadiams rn• tie e i r • pude war prosperity have felt the dissatis- factions that aceumparty the satisfaetions of material swee ss. As Sir Tyrone bluntly put it, they are in a "seller': market" for "culture," end a new geese of prestige requires thnt It he ]tome -grown, not imported It there is, along with litter things, an element of .nut'hery here, can "culture" exist any- where without a tittle of it? Overwhelmingly the Stratford phenomenon argues that honest hunger for the arts exists mere widely and deeply than le as- sumed; and that when te.eder- ship gives the public an ant ee- live chance to feed this hunger, people respond beyond the Iim'ts so-called realistic promoters van anticipate. In Its 10th season Stratford stands to this vital grassroots restlessness as a symbol that says: If it can be done here. it can be done wherever the desire is strong enough, Modern Etiquette By Anne Ash'eti Q. Is is quite proper now to type social letters? A. Yes, and it's increasingly popular, too. Typed letters should be written on a single sheet, with only one side of the paper used. And be sure that your signature at the end of the letter is written by hand. Q. I'm always uncertain as to just when to open my napkin when sitting down at the dinner table. Will you advise me? A. Guests wait until the hos- tess has taken up her napkin before opening their own. Q. When the ceremony is over at a church wedding, should the members of the immediate families be permitted to leave the church first, before the other people? A. Yes, this is the proper pro- cedure. Q. What amount of tip should be given to the porter who hoe carried one's luggage to or from a train? A, Twenty-five to fifty cents, or according to the number and weight of the luggage. "I have six of these so far, All I have to do is promise to marry." SENDOFF FOR GLENNS -- Astronaut John Glenn and hlpl family march in a farewell parade in Arlington, Va, Ti* Glenns are moving to Texas,