October 28, 1947
Los Angeles
Los Angeles
It’s ant season, which means it’s that time of year when little kids find and gobble up big gooey handfuls of honey-like ant poison and end up in hospitals getting their little tummies pumped.
Two terrified families raced their babies into Georgia Street Receiving Hospital within an hour of each other, each complaining of ant paste ingestion. 19-month-old Janet Aiken of 1511 W. 99th Street and 10-month-old Cheryl Mayo of 3028 W. 36th are both doing fine after treatment.
Parents: lock up that ant paste!
‘PAUL REVERE’ RIDE EAST
Sen. Glen H. Taylor, Idaho’s singing cowboy who turned world statesman overnight, threw a leg over his roan horse at Seal Beach yesterday and began his much-publicized cross-country tour although, he said, “I probably won’t make it.â€Â
The 43-year-old legislator and marathon conductor of filibusters said his ride will probably be interrupted because President Truman has called a special session of Congress for Nov. 17.
Taylor will be accompanied by his brother-in-law, Harold Pike of San Jose, whose car will pull a trailer carrying a spare horse. The first leg of his route will be through Santa Ana, Riverside and Indio. He expected to ride all last night and most of today.
Before leaving, the uninhibited senator dipped his feet in the salt water near the pier “so I can say I traveled from the ocean.â€Â He then sang one of his own compositions, “Cowboy Joe From Idaho,â€Â and gave the small crowd the benefit of some of his opinions on world affairs.
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Taylor (D-Idaho) gave up after three days, arriving in Phoenix by car with the admission that “he bit off more than he could chew.â€Â One of the more colorful politicians of the 1940s, Taylor made news in 1946 when he knocked a legislative committeeman to the floor of a Boise hotel over a political dispute.
By 1948, he was deemed vice presidential timber and joined Henry A. Wallace’s third-party ticket, opposing a peacetime draft, the Marshall Plan and advocating a “Golden Ruleâ€Â with the Soviet Union.
During a 1948 campaign appearance at the Southern Negro Youth Congress in Birmingham, Ala., Taylor was arrested and put in jail for refusing police orders to use the white entrance and instead entering by the door reserved for blacks. In 1950, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld Taylor’s sentence: a $50 fine and 180 days in jail, saying that he was guilty of disorderly conduct rather than protesting segregation.
Defeated in the race for a second Senate term (The Times editorialized “He Won’t Be Missedâ€Â), Taylor became a wealthy executive in the toupee industry as the inventor of the Taylor Topper, which he credited for his own political success.
Bonus factoid: Taylor and his wife, Dora, made the first Taylor Topper in their kitchen, using a pie tin lined with pink felt, covered with hair from the dime store and held to his head with double-stick tape.
Quote of the day: “The study of Latin is supposed to improve your mastery of the English language, but it is only reasonable to suppose that the same time and effort spent in studying English would be vastly more effective.â€Â
C.H. Ristad, Pasadena, letter to The Times on the American educational system.
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