The Charlotte News
Saturday, October 3, 1942
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page tells of a bad collision between a tanker truck, a wagon, and a bus, near Lumberton in the early morning hours.
The inherent dangers of such trucks had been the topic of regular discussion in the editorial column during Cash’s tenure as associate editor, but such pieces had largely disappeared, becoming since Cash's departure an editorial subject only once, July 16, 1941. It may have been that the topic lost its reason for comment once Judge Sims of the Recorder’s Court ruled unconstitutional an ordinance seeking to re-route gasoline trucks around downtown Charlotte, as he, himself, recounted in a letter published July 18, 1941.
This time, the damage was not limited as before. Per the forebodings of previous such accidents chronicled in the column, this one had gruesome consequences. At least eleven people died and another eighteen were injured. But because the remains of those on the bus were so badly burned, the number of dead had not been fully determined.
It was announced that South Carolinian James Byrnes, appointed just the year before in July to the Supreme Court, had now resigned to become the President’s chief price controller, authorized to implement limits on 90% of foodstuffs to curb inflationary trends. The official name for the agency he would head was the Office of Economic Stabilization. After the death of FDR, Byrnes was appointed by Harry Truman in July, 1945 Secretary of State, in which position he served until the beginning of 1947.
The World Series resumed in New York after taking Friday off for the teams to travel from St. Louis. The Series stood tied at one game each, as the Cardinals won the second match-up 4-3, the Yankees scoring all of their runs in the eighth inning, the Cards adding one in the seventh to the two from the first, making the go ahead run in the bottom of the eighth for the final score.
As the report indicates, with the earlier start time now affording a synopsis of three innings, the score stood one to nothing in the third game. And, that was the way it stood at the end of eight innings, with the Cards adding one more run for the final victory, making it a 2-1 Series.
Sunday would bode no better for the huge home crowd at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees would score a run in the first, but the Cards would begin a slug-fest with six runs in the fourth while the Yankees pulled even with five runs in the sixth, only to see the determined Cards score another pair in the seventh and a final run in the ninth for the 9 to 6 victory.
The save or cave game for the defending champion Yankees would be played Monday.
Some things, even in the midst of a world war threatening all freedom on earth and not going all that well thus far for the Allies, remain nevertheless a polestar constant.
Another constant to which humans in distress have tendency to turn was referenced by Dick Young in his piece on the editorial page, recommending the quietude and aesthetic appeal of the Charlotte Mint Museum of Art. He indicates that it was a favorite place of refuge for soldiers stationed in the area. So, take a leisurely stroll through a part of it from home 67 years on and see if it lives up to the recommendation provided by Dick Young in 1942. Despite the rather ominous suggestion by the concluding remark of Mr. Young, there appears within its walls no warning of the Apocalypse, at least among its currently featured selections.
Or, is it, as with any other such urban museum, when viewed holistically, in contrast to the past's abstracted, sometimes overly idyllic, lenses through which it affords one's view, standing as the perfect symbol aesthete existential of man's increasing decadence and profligacy exerted against his natural environment, ultimately thereby spelling out, albeit for the most part sub rosa, the coming See?
Indicative of the omnipresence of war, even the piece describing the church habitats of the Eastern chimney swifts populating a neighborhood block in Charlotte could not resist consistently analogizing their behavior to that of fighter pilots and their piloted vehicles transcendentally unitized with the pilot. Apparently, the observation was not without basis, as the piece informs that at least one stunt flier from the 1920’s, Al Williams—who three months before Amelia Earhart’s disappearance in the Pacific in 1937 had written a newspaper article criticizing her flights which he believed were stunts to raise money rather than as promoted for scientific study--, had fashioned some of his maneuvers from astute examination of the swift in flight.
And we feel compelled to point out that the list of comparisons from The Atlanta Journal for the change of commodity prices eventuated by war during the previous three-year interim shows the greatest change occurring in price for hogs per hundredweight (100 lbs., or handfuls as you please, of fine, ripe hogmeat), up from a paltry 95 cents in September, 1939 to a whopping $14.75, an increase of 1550%! That, while the other increases in staple prices were attenuated at no more than 100%, or slightly more than that in the case of eggs, most holding the line at around 60%. The consumers obviously liked their bacon in 1942. Maybe that's where all of that pre-rationed raw sugar, necessitating the sacrifice down to a mere two pounds per person per month, had been going prior to the U.S. entry to the war, to curing hams. Or, maybe the same couple who had purchased the three pounds of coffee in Charlotte during the week had bought up all the hogs as well, sending the price precipitously skyward.
The bootleggers, no doubt, took notice of that statistic as well. With the liquor trade drying up for want of sugar to make it and rubber on which to run it, they could always begin bootlegging hogs.
"Check the trunk? There's no oinking in that trunk. Have you been drinking, officer?"
Framed Edition
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