Site Ed. Note: …And the steel door to the boxcar did open suddenly as the aperture on a camera nearby; the ray shone through the aperture, borne by the whirlybird in the distance hovering among the stars, away from the battlefield; and, in an instant, the steel door slammed hard shut again, the camera having provided the whirlybird its homing signal for achieving its prey, the doors affording the keyhole through which its ray could reach the predator's eye, the bull's cape mating the fixed line for the aim of its beak, the umpire in his vest sweeping his arms to begin the count for the texas leaguer.

Here, incidentally, is a little piece from Time about the wheat deal with the Russians, transacted amid some controversy, in mid-November, 1963.

For 1964, to combat over-production of wheat and avoid the large surplus of 1963, Secretary of Agriculture in the Kennedy Administration, Orville Freeman, had proposed a program, subject to two-thirds approval by wheat farmers in a national referendum to be held in the spring of 1964, whereby there would be, if approved, bushel per acre limits as well as acreage limits on how much wheat the farmer could produce. Thus to forestall excess production would minimize, as with other bumper crops not saleable readily on the open market, the necessity for the Consumer Credit Corporation to loan to farmers an amount at parity prices equal to the value of their crop. The government, in such circumstances, then took the crop as security and placed it in storage. The farmer later could either repay the loan, provided he could sell his crop at higher prices than the amount of the loan, or, in the converse scenario, keep the loan and instead assign ownership of the consigned crop to the government for sale by the government.

The problem with this system of subsidy, however, was that most of the time the government got stuck with the bumper crops, a recurring problem since the establishment of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration by its empopwering Act of 1933, as amended in 1938. Markets rarely responded quickly enough to raise the price to a level greater than the rate on which the loan was premised.

In the case of the wheat deal of 1963, the creative solution to this dilemma came in the form of an international sale of the excess wheat to the Russians, who were short on grain in the Ukraine.

But, many bitter-end anti-Communists, always looking for any reason to ring the bells of the Red Scare Gremlin among the populace, believed this wheat deal to be another form of coddling Communism, feeding the enemy as it were, in their time of dire need.

Let them starve, brothers! One less Commie Pinko we have to kill in the end!

In fact, it was merely a sensible effort to provide stability to the market without thereby, through absorption in either higher taxes or budget cuts of other vital programs, placing government subsidies on the shoulders of the citizenry.

But, if you were not a wheat farmer, nor a farmer at all, nor even Red, and could not understand this simple notion, it was simply time to see Red again.

This here's the last straw. No Commie Pinko sympathizing government is going to tell us what to think and do down heya!

And so, the Time piece, which said in November, 1963 that the corn was stacked as high in Hannibal, Missouri as an elephant's eye, even higher, might have resorted to the story of Ben, the fence, and Huck Finn, for further elucidation to the slow of understanding, that story having been, said he, one of the favorites of former V.P. Nixon's, as set down by Samuel Clemens of Hannibal-on-the-Mississippi fame.

This creative arrangement, however, was repeated through time by other Presidents, not so seemingly stimulative of irascible traits in some segments of some sections of the country. In 1987, for instance, the New York Times reported of one of those subsequent deals. In 1972, Time reported that President Nixon engaged in one.

In the latter case, however, there were questions, manifold questions, which arose:

How was it, for instance, that a former Assistant Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, headed by Mr. Earl Butz--who had an interesting sense of humor, you will have to admit--one Mr. Palmby, could take a job with the Continental Grain Co. without, around his neck, having hung thereby either an albatross or a string of orient pearl? For it became known subsequently that on July 2, 1972, the 109^th anniversary of the Battle for the Wheatfield at Gettysburg, Mr. Palmby conducted some Russian friends on a tour of Washington, winding up with a 150 million bushel wheat deal with his new comrades, based on wheat at prices well above those then allowable for foreign export. But, miraculously, the figures on which Mr. Palmby based his sale were the same as the prices subsequently established by the government, when, three days later, on July 5, the government announced its wheat deal with the Russians: 440 million bushels for 700 million dollars. This deal was greater than all of the wheat exports for the previous year of 1971, the equivalent of 80 percent of the annual domestic wheat consumption for the previous five years.

Vice-President Agnew said that, in answer to these manifold questions which had arisen, there was ongoing an investigation by the FBI, one, however, when questioned by the press, which the FBI had yet to undertake or even be informed. Whereupon, thereafter, the FBI, started their investigation into whether there had been some insider trading on the whole operation, or whether Mr. Palmby was merely psychic in his advance reading of the tea leaves to determine that the government would allow substantially higher export subsidies than had been the case, such that his promised price to the Russians, gracious of his tour provided them of Washington on July 2, could be met without government interference, shutting out thereby all the competition who weren't nearly quite so psychic.

As a result, in the ensuing year, farm commodity prices rose sharply, by 66%, and, with them, food prices, wholesale prices rising 29%. A year later, even after wholesale prices began to decline, retail food prices continued on the rise. (This little pamphlet from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis issued in October, 1973 is a bit slow to download, but is nevertheless interesting, if you're a little patient with the harvest. October, 1973, you will recall, incidentally, was when the V.P. Agnew resigned after pleading nolo contendere to accepting bribes while Governor of Maryland, sometime before his being placed on the ticket by former V.P. Nixon in 1968.)

All of that wheat deal business, of course, came just a couple of weeks after the June 17 break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters there in Washington, near the Potomac, the one known as the Watergate Affair.

All of which may explain, in part, why the country elected a peanut farmer in 1976 as its 39^th President.

But we digress.

The front page tells of the Japanese insurgency yet again in Yunnan province, attempting to capture yet again the mountain surrounded town of Kunming. Kunming was a vital refueling stop for the transport link, established since the fall of Burma and the Burma Road to the Japanese, by which gasoline and other vital supplies were being shipped over the Himalayas via the Hump in the “W” Pass to the Chinese under Chiang Kai-Shek, whose combined Allied forces were under the command of General Vinegar Joe Stilwell, (no relation to former Congressman Vinegar Bend Mizell).

The San Francisco, first ship to receive a Presidential Unit Citation, had come home to port to great celebratory greeting, after faithful service in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, November 13-15. The heavy cruiser had been hit in the early hours of November 13 by a Japanese torpedo, killing 15 men and wounding 25. The ship nevertheless continued in action, firing inadvertently at one point on the Atlanta, until it was finally stricken by a second enemy hit, killing another 62 men and wounding an additional 80. The crippled vessel, nevertheless, remained afloat, and, after temporary repairs, sailed back to San Francisco Bay. After undergoing refitting at Mare Island, the San Francisco returned to action in the South Pacific in March and eventually survived the war.

During its voyage to Espiritu Santo for temporary repairs on November 13, it was escorted by the Juneau, itself already hampered by a torpedo driven into its hull by a Japanese submarine. The Juneau shortly thereafter was hit again and destroyed, killing 687 sailors, including all except ten of the original hundred men surviving the sinking but who perished in the waters during eight days in which rescue could not be effected. Among the dead were the five Sullivan brothers, as we made mention on November 14.

On the editorial page, Samuel Grafton focuses on the folly of rationing, as rationing one commodity managed inevitably to create a shortage in another, having in turn further dire effect down the food and commodity chains.

Raymond Clapper stresses the growing resistance in the country to the Administration's regulatory policies designed to curb inflation via both price and wage controls, including full-page ads placed by Montgomery Ward, decrying the regulations established by the War Labor Board. (In 1939, an employee of the retailer had created the character of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.)

For the rest, the editorials repeated ground which had been covered before in recent weeks, topics on which we have sufficiently made comment, and so we shall leave it for you to peruse as you wish to enable your understanding.

We conclude that Rudolph had a very, very shiny nose.