HYSTERIA AMERICANA.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 110, 12 May 1930, Page 6

HYSTERIA AMERICANA.

The average New Zealander prefers Melbourne to Sydney; the visitor from the United States feels at home as soon as his luggage is passed through the Sydney Customs. Recent news ot the prevalence of purposeless "stunting in the New South Wales metropolis shows how far ite people have gone in imitation of the hysterical section of the citizens of the United States. Record-breaking endurance piano playing seems to have died out in the Dominion. In Sydney the perching of misguided "stunters" on the tops of poles is attracting wide attention. This is in strict imitation of a wave of "perching" that has passed over the United States in recent months. Some time ago one "Shipwreck" Kelly effected the most supremely useless act ever committed by a human being when he sat for two hundred and ten hours on a thirteen-inch ball at the top of a flagpole sixty feet high on the roof of the highest building in town. The daily papers excited feminine as well as masculine interest m his folly, and photographs appeared of Mrs. "Shipwreck" hoisted aloft in the act of giving her husband his morning kiss. And flapdoodle of this kind appeared in the form of daily interviews: "I have sat through six hundred hours of rain, sleet and thunderstorms. Seventeen hours I have been hidden from the ground by snowflakes of blizzard, and two hundred and sixteen of my aerial hours have been spent below freezing temperature. My success is partly a gift and partly it is the result of study." During last summer the flagpole disease broke out all over the United States. Kelly had become a hero, and foolishness is never charged against a hero. The eminent Mr. Kelly had imitators, many of them. "The world's champion fifteen-year-old pole sitter" took his blankets, food, water and other articles to the top of a seventeen-foot pole with a nice, roomy platform on top. Avon Foreman defied his parents, who told him eventually that he could stay "up" as long as he liked. For that rash promise they had to wait ten days with odd hours and split seconds before the youngest of the family decided to return to earth in the presence of four thousand cheering spectators. The Mayor gave him a "welcome home" with an address which set forth that the misguided youngster had shown "the old pioneer spirit," and the admiring neighbourhood subscribed for a gold crown bearing the words "Champ" thereon. Other children all over the country were soon attempting to break this "record"; within a few days there were eighteen boys and girls with their daily temperatures being sent over the telegraph. Flagpole sitters from twelve to twenty years of age bobbed up everywhere. When the last mails left Willie Wentworth, twelve years old, had been "on the air" over a month. In St. Louis a general order by the chief of police and an official ruling of the city health commissioner put the "endurance sitters" out of action. This nauseating stuff was eagerly swallowed by the hysterical Americans.

To-day Sydneyites arc rivalling one another in pie eating, endurance dancing, pole sitting and "marathon" piano playing, while an interested public applauds. We have heard much lately of the need for economy, the urgency of balancing budgets, and the general seriousness of the financial situation in the Commonwealth. Meanwhile rival pie eaters provide daily Sydney holidays. We seem to remember one Nero who fiddled while Rome burned. —JUNIUS JUNIOR.