The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1922-1965, 1936-05-25
Our
Town
By
ANTON SCHERRER

INDIANAPOLIS has II extermi-
l. mating companies, counting the
termite people. Without the termite
people, the exterminating companies
wouldn't be worth mentioning in
this column.
The reason we have so few ex-
terminating companies is because
we have so many architects.
Architects, it seems, keep on
specifying concrete and linoleum
and goodness knows what else and
it cuts frightfully into the exter-
minator's business.
AT least, that's what one exter-
minator said when interviewed. He
was pretty blue.
The termite people, on the other
hand, we're jubilant. Termites are
now up to Sixteenth-st and headed
in all directions. There's no telling
where they will go from there. They
like everything, apparently-even
school buildings, but that's prob
ably because they are blind.
They can go through tin, lead,
glass and modern architecture but
they still like wood best. That's
because of their prediction for
cell'.lose. They can't themselves
digest cellulose but they get around
that, too, because their entrails
are packed with protocol which abb
sorb particles of wood, digesting
them and then dying, to be digested
in turn by the termite.
n II
THEY' RE as slick as artists. In
l. deed, the way they turn to art
makes ones wonder whether an I'M
happy home life may not, after all.
be at the bottom of it.
A termite is really a white ant.
At any rate that's what Maurice
Maeterlinck called them in his
book Seems Mr.. Maeterlinck turned
to white ants after he got done with
blue birds.
Mr.. Maeterlincks book (Dodd,
Mead & Co.. is chock-full of coed
stories about termites and their
tricks. The best one is about two
policemen in st. Helena who stopped
under huge tree to think. That's
what Mr.. Maeterlinck said they did.
One of the cops leaned against the
trunk and it collapsed, burying the
policemen so that nobody ever knew
what they were thinking about.
Nothing like that has happened
here and the termite people don't
know why, because everything else
mentioned in the Maeterlinck book
has. The cop on this departments
beat, when asked about it, said it's
because indianapolis policemen are
not allowed to think under trees.
y y
HBEYING a very old impulse, I
~ went to Brown County the
other day and observed that there
are more white horses than any
other kind between here and Nash
vile. I also came home with an
Indiana orchid grown on the north
side of hill near Trevlac.
It's gorgeous yellow flower that
looks for the world like a lady's
slipper. AS matter of fact, that's
what the natives around Trevlac
call it. The garage man at Helms
burg said it was a Cypripedium par
viflorum, and suggested that if I'd
stick around a little longer might
find Cypripedium pubescens, too.
It's the smaller kind and just as
pretty, he said.
looked it up in book when
got home and discovered that the
parviflorum is one to two feet high
whereas the pubescens is only IL to
"a inches high.
There's no mistaking the smile,
however. An inflated sac, open at
the top, easy for bees to get into
and hard for them to get out, rep
resents the slipper part. And two
narrow twisted petals striped with
purple madden are the shoe laces.
The fact that it has a sterile sta
men isn't any reason to prejudice
you.
Which leaves the white horses to
be accounted for.
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