Evening star. [volume], February 04, 1962, Page 11, Image 131

About Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972

Image provided by: Library of Congress, Washington, DC

                
Statistics ,
*' ■ o
By LESLIE LIEBER
This Week's Roving Editor •
Last year 10,000 surveys found out all about you. Just look at these crazy-but-scientific statistics
One of the great things about this country is
that any average child can grow up to be a statistic.
In fact, he can grow up to be a whole set of them.
There is scarcely a facet of your life that hasn t
been probed by questionnaire, digested by giant
computer, indexed by Dewey decimal system and
hung as a*graph. The Census Bureau alone collected
75 million individual statistics on family life last
year and no fewer then 10,000 independent surveys
were made of the tastes, habits, views and behavior
of America’s 53 million households.
This awesome mass of data has already inspired
an upcoming CBS show, "Henry Fonda and The
Family” (Tuesday night), to devote itself entirely to
statistics. We don’t know where it will all end, but
we’ve decided the time has come to try to put all the
figures together into a statistical portrait of all of us
—a sort of United Statistics of America.
You may think some of these figures are
cockeyed but they all come from honest-to-gosh
■< scientific surveys. And if some of them startle you
as much as they did us, well, we warned you in
advance.
For instance, did you realize that we as a nation
4 ate 3,000 carloads of rutabagas last year? This is
comforting because some of us had gotten the
disheartening feeling that nobody was eating ruta
bagas. In another survey, by the way, turnips
turned out to be the least popular vegetable on the
list. Furthermore, only 5.8 per cent of our popula
tion had nice things to say about canned squash and
a bare 5.2 per cent were on speaking terms with
canned cabbage. We’d say the whole cabbage family
is in the soup and better look to its laurels.
During the last year, 3,500 married couples
with children were asked whether they made their
kids wash their hands before dinner. Ninety-seven
per cent replied with an emphatic and righteous
"Yes.” However, when the children of these same
parents were asked, "Do your parents ask you to
wash before eating?” only 17 per cent acknowledged
that the subject had ever been brought up.
One research corporation interviewed a consid
erable number of Americans and found that enough
to "cause concern” are of the opinion that the
electoral college is a "school for Congressmen’s
children.”
The government reveals that 6,000 mailmen
were bitten by dogs last year. The Postmaster
General, J. Edward Day, has not yet been bitten. A
high official of his department categorically denied
that recent demands for higher postal rates were
due to the high cost of repairing mailmen’s pants.
Incidentally Americans wrote 18 million letters
to their Congressmen last year.
It seems that 82 per cent of all American
families eat in the dining room only when company
is present. When nobody more important than the
husband comes home to dinner, the kitchen table
is used.
r
The International Kitefliers Association reports
that 40,000,000 kites were sold in this country
last year but, for one reason or another, only
1,000,000 got into the air.
A survey conducted for an electric shaver com
pany has computed that the average American male
spends two months of 24-hour days of his life
shaving. They have also cmMmmW m aaxt pope
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