READERSVOICE.COM continues with more items from New York newspaper columnist Norman Mockridge’s book A Funny Thing Happened…, published in 1966.

A lower Manhattan restaurant owner gets mad if you put a pack of matches advertising another restaurant on his table. Usually he tears off the cover. “If you do that,” I told him, “a customer might burn his fingers and be unable to come to your restaurant.”

“Yes,” he said grimly, “but he can’t go to the other restaurant, either.”

There’s a sign in a tiny elevator in a building on West 34^th Street that reads: “Occupancy by one or more is unlawful.”

I saw a man in a small sports car pull up to the far end of a bus stop on Fifth Avenue in the 30’s [probably means cross-street numbers, not the year] and get out of his car. He slid a note under the windshield wiper and then let the air out of a rear tire. He waved to a doorman and walked into an apartment house. Curious, I spoke to the doorman. “Oh,” he said laughing, “he does that every night. Leaves a note for the cops saying a mechanic is coming. Then in the morning, he just pumps up that little tire.”

-continued next page