Given a Sign, They’ll Keep Faith

--In a sign of the times, Lewiston, Me., police are offering amnesty this week in the hope that thieves will yield some of the hundreds of street signs, barricades and traffic cones stolen in the city every year. Maj. Laurent F. Gilbert said no questions will be asked and Public Works Department personnel will even pick up the signs. “You would be surprised where they (stolen signs) turn up,” Gilbert said. “I saw one of our No Parking signs on a second-floor porch in Augusta recently, and just the other day we found one on a lawn over in Auburn.” He said the amnesty is timed to take advantage of the end of the academic year, when Lewiston’s Bates College students may be more willing to part with signs that have been decorating their dorm rooms. The city spends about $1,000 a year to replace signs, Gilbert said.

--Their heroine has been dead for 170 years, but that didn’t stop devoted Jane Austen fans from throwing a party--18th-Century style. There were scones, cucumber sandwiches and clotted cream as members of the Jane Austen Society of North America celebrated their favorite novelist by taking a step back in time to her world of English gentility. At the Chicago chapter’s annual convention, the main luncheon consisted of dishes bearing Austen-related names, such as fruit Donwell Abbey, chicken Mansfield Park, vegetables Lyme and bombe glace Woodhouse. The beverage of choice was proper British tea. Even though society members enjoy re-creating the past, Patricia Latkin of Chicago, regional coordinator for the national organization, said Austen is still relevant today. “Everything she wrote about still holds true. It’s only peripherals that change--we have cars now and so forth. Human nature is still the same,” she said.

--A bunch of jerks got another taste of the past in Omaha, Neb. About 100 former soda jerks and 2,000 others attended the third Soda Jerk Reunion at the Omaha History Museum in the former Union Station. “I think it’s sad,” that soda fountains are gone, said Dottie Tiffin of Omaha, who served customers from 1945 to 1950 at a drugstore soda fountain. “My grandchildren don’t even know what a soda fountain is.” The reunion helps kick off the museum’s annual membership drive by luring ice cream lovers for hot fudge sundaes as well as browsing, museum spokeswoman Betty Davis said. Bill Hagerty of Lincoln, Neb., said he worked his way through the University of Nebraska in the 1940s by tending a drugstore soda fountain. Hagerty said he recently went to try out a new, “old-fashioned” ice cream store in Lincoln. “It wasn’t quite the same,” he said.