The Waterbury Democrat., 1941-05-01

much Of It's color and charm, make 1t a real capital with 6 cosmopoli- tan air and graciously give 8 touch of spaciousness that would be sorely missed on hot days when the southern sun beats down meri- cilessly.
 FRIENDLY r. BUT NOT FRIGID
 Yardless houses, packed wall to wall and without cross ventilation for block on block, may typify close knit frtendliness but they would be both formidable and uncomfortable without the breaks for a circle or square to confuse the stranger and ball Up traffic. Washington, there fore, uses and blesses these parks even while cursing them.
 It's on bright Sundays, though, that these parks get their heaviest workout. People who can't escape the city by car come there to read, feed the pigeons mad squirrels, and make-believe they're having a day in the country. On these informal Sunday gestas you see a side of Washington life you'd never know exists. No, Washington is not all White House and Capitol Hill and are gallery and museum and di- plomatic row and high-hat func- tions. .4a .t'.
 It is a city of lonely, forgotten folks too,. old gaffers with wan smiles out from cheap rooms to revitalize their burned out souls in sun.
 Walters from the all-night ham, burger stands, barbers and dis washers who work in cellars, of- flee and store clerk moles bring their sallow faces out to bling in bewilderment at this unaccustomed light, bright without benefit of neon Or man-made 1llament.
 Ladies of the evening, carefully shading their blanched complex ions with dark glasses and sailor straws. paint their flngernails an ungodly red under the pureSt light In the world. Soldiers, sailors and marines on leave look for divertise- ment under any name in their vocabulary.
 Tough tenement kids in cotton drawers and scapulars blister their bare feet on the hot stone walks and cool them and splash in the shallow fountain basins.
 Middle-aged married folk drag their half-lost hopes from one- room kitchenet apartments. Nice girls from out of town, defense workers dressed in their Sunday best, come with their beaux to take each others snapshots before a Towering shrub or a passionless stone faced statue.
 Real 'bos, red-necked and ragged, always wear their overcoats no matter how hot the sun, for your real Do hangs on to his ulster al- ways, against the chill of inevitable night when 1t must serve him as roof and house, bed and blanket. RELIGION IN THE PARKS
 The spirit of God walks in these parks, too. Tn Franklin square this spring promptly at Ii there has come each Sunday troupe of Negro evanglists. They arrive on bicycles with trailers full of picka- ninnies. Three men, two women, 10 children.
 Captain Philip simms, the preach CT. wears a typewriter convention badge with the Identification, "In Gods Service" He is short, practi- cally toothless. and carries home- made, sleighbell-studded dishpan tambourine on which is painted, "In God I Trust"
 He Is big and black. He wears & pith helmet, @ Sweetshirt under a blue coat, a motorcycle riders wide leather belt, in the pouches of which are Q series of Bibles He does not read, But tall slim boy in his twenties reads the gospel phrase at time as the preach- CT repeats 1t and expounds. Two guitars and a triangle furnish the accompaniment as they sing spirit uals such as you never heard out of the deep south.
 Their service lasts two hours. It is the strangest assortment of nun bo-j jumbo, politics and primitive prattle ever conceived. It is given emphasis with dirty unclothed rubber doll, held aloft as the sym bol of "your baby or mine, the ir- fant Franklin D. Roosevelt or the Child of Bethlehem" The sermon Is punctuated by frequent "amens'' from Captain SimIns.
 The agnostic crowd of park habi- tues sits around on the grass in stony silence or listens brifiy, then drifts on. And when the service is over, the preacher and followers rest moment, then they drift on, too.
 All this in downstown Washing ton, D. O., the capital of your coun- try, where freedom of worship is a