The Charlotte News

Saturday, August 1, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page tells of the first inkling of the Guadalcanal offensive about to begin against the airdromes being constructed since mid-June by the Japanese in that region of the Solomon Islands.

Two Japanese Imperialist Fifth Column groups operating in the United States, Hokoku-Dan and the Black Dragon Society, are reported to have been infiltrated and their leaders arrested, along with 66 Germans and 16 Italians, also alleged to have been conducting Fifth Column activities in the country. The Black Dragon Society, the FBI said, led by a Filipino national, Mimo De Guzman, was sowing the seeds of disunity among African-Americans.

And whether or not the Japanese, after occupying since early June the outlying islands of Attu, Kiska, and Agattu, some 600 miles from Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians, prompting periodic Allied bombing raids of those islands since, had now occupied the much closer Pribolof Islands, only 250 miles from Dutch Harbor, making the Alaskan mainland much more susceptible of invasion, could not be yet, for the fog enrolling the islands, determined. That is, in itself, odd: that they knew no more and could report of no more than that, because the four islands of the Pribolofs included, after all, not only Otter and St. George and St. Paul, but also Walrus.

On the editorial page, "The Big Stick" suggests that the May Act, allowing for military designation of certain establishments as being off limits to soldiers when found to be promoting illicit activity not conducive to the welfare of the soldier, might have to be applied to Charlotte, notwithstanding its depressing impact on local business.

Reported one observer, there was on a recent Saturday night a queue downtown consisting of fully 250 soldiers awaiting distribution of prophylactics.

There was also, according to one "responsible officer" who "knows whereof he speaks"--just how so though not being imparted by the piece--a concomitant increase in pregnancies in the community among unwed mothers. Responsibility for these, however, obviously could not be laid to the 250 in queue.

That is, unless, instead, the observer of this queue simply mistook the whole affair as one in reverse of its actual purpose and it was instead merely to effectuate the patriotic motives of those dedicated souls devoted to turning in their fair allotment of scrap caoutchouc to accommodate the President's drive initiated between mid-June and July 10.

Meanwhile, back in Londonderry, Ernie Pyle tells of the Public House called "Rising Sun", a kind of long, low white farm house, the name of which the owner, Mother O'Conner, would not change simply for it having been co-opted in spirit by these animals for the nonce. She knew that it was only a temporary setback which none of the locals obviously accorded, imbuing their common sense as le personnel des ambassades with enripened virtue extolling the incongruity between the name of the inn and the Japanese Empire's emblematic suggestion of servitude, with any more than serendipitous coincidence devoid of any philosophical similitude underlying both of each, the two obviously disparate sigla.

Of course, the concierge, Mother O'Conner, would probably, circa 1964, come to revisit the dilemma, animalistically so, and once again have to contend with the burden and price set on by the rabble's ascription of meaning to the name in competition with that of her estimable Public House.

Whether this tale of Londonderry air bears any relationship to "The Big Stick" affair, we do not know or opine.

"Even for Thee" continues the theme of John Donne's poem begun in relation to Morganton back in early June. (We have in the meantime, incidentally, watched the film which, as we mentioned, we happened to have bought at a book store's sale the night before running across that earlier piece, the film with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman; suffice it to say, we found it quite dated in its approach to the subject matter, though we did find it interesting that it was filmed near Sonora, California, the illimitable mountain wilderness nearby which we hiked through for four arduous days nine years ago this very week.)

In any event, the piece tells of five members of the Governor's Committee investigating the institution, having met in Charlotte on Friday "well into the heat of the night".

Well, we shall soon have imparted, no doubt, what their recommendations were from that night of heat. We hope it included dispensing with the White Horse gravy with rat on the side as exemplary of haute cuisine. And, that they requisitioned for the place at least a bit of itching powder and sore medication for the head of the gent dispensing to the patients their daily bread.

Whether they would recommend for the inmates walks nearby the cool, white marble in the closest cemetery, we shall have to wait and see also.

They called him Mr. Jimison.

The quote of the day was: "His Only Fault Is That He Has No Fault."--Pliny the Younger