SENSATION-MAD

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3713, 5 October 1926, Page 7

SENSATION-MAD

America, despite her many virtues, despite her humanness and virility, is to-day a sensation-crazed country. From this kaleidoscopic continent, which revels in a Ixury unknown to Babylon, and in an insatiable craving for sensation of which even Home, never dreamed, two pictures stand out (writes Shaw Desmond, in the ‘ London 'Magazine ’). They are New York and Florida—the Alpha and the Omega of the loom of pleasure along which the Hying shuttle of American life, rushes to and fro. Magnificent Pullmans, furnished with everything that money can buy, from a barbers shop to an alligator pear, rush backwards ami forwards, dav and night, between New York and Florida. Tho millions made m New York are sent Hying into Florida, there to be scattered at (he. hand of a Fortuna(ns: and the millions made overnight in Florida “real estate” are sometimes taken back to New York, there to bo poured out in a. golden stream in an unceasing round of that sensation which itself is the only antidote to sensation that (he pleasuredriven American knows. Superb liners, some of them 25.000 tons., laden to the bulwarks with a heterogeneous mass of millionaires and ministers, bootleggers and senators, Congressmen and “ confidence men,” beautiful women of both worlds, speculators mid society debutantes, the finest chefs and tho most perfect cuisines to be. bad for money, " million-dollar ” bands with music that might lure tho angels out of the starspangled skies above, steer spaciously through the night to the throb-throb of the propellers and the throb-throb of the ukulele and the drum—Florida bound! From out the bell that is modern New York, with (be grind and tear of the underground subwavs’ and mazy streets on the Manhattan Hock to which the city of seven millions is clamped, pour an unending stream of human beings to the El Dorado of the south, where fortune and pleasure beckon. From all over America tired men and harassed women. witli little children dragged at (heir tails, arc hurrying Ford flivvers, by train, oven on fool, lo Florida. This trek after money and the pleasure that money can bring is going on all over the money-mad continent day and night; although in todays Amcrca there is no night—at least, not in tho cities, where the glaring electric sun (urns night into day. I have seen the blackbirds in Pershing square, Los Angeles, uncertain when to roost because of the pitiless glare of (he electric suns that ring the garden at. night.

Special rubber suits, which enable a man let float upright in the water, were recently lesied More oflicial experts in a London swimming hath.