The Commissioners had invited the Rockefeller Foundation to assist in the healthcare program for undernourished children in the county, those attending school without breakfast and unable to purchase lunch.

The City of Charlotte was also engaged actively in trying to improve health care, pushing for control of typhus via a tough ordinance and a model school health program, also aided by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Yet, there would be present on the front row 257 members of the One Thousand Club, well-heeled Democrats who had provided some $250,000 to the President's late campaign. A quarter of them were from the South, eighteen from South Carolina, only two from North Carolina. Anyone contributing more than a hundred dollars was included as a member.

The disparity between the two Carolinas in their relative membership was remarkable given that North Carolina had given 527,000 votes to the President for a 66% majority, while South Carolina had provided but 90,000 votes, albeit an 87% majority. The relative paucity of votes from South Carolina bespoke the presence of a poll tax and consequent lack of freedom of the franchise, leading to voter apathy.

Now, there were 35 industries deemed "critical" or, secondarily, "essential". It enabled draft boards to obtain men who were in industries which were either not deemed in either category or were only essential rather than critical. Rather than blanket deferments for agricultural jobs, as before, those jobs were now also ranked by criticality and essentiality.

It concludes with the opinion that, had these new standards been put in place three years earlier, the critical shortages in war goods and war workers, as well as men for the Army, each of which shortages had arisen during the latter half of 1944, might never have come to be.

As reports had indicated, Major Preddy on August 6 had shot down in six minutes six Luftwaffe fighters and received the Distinguished Service Cross for the feat.

The night before, he had won $1,200 in a dice game, gave the winnings for a purchase of war bonds.

Recently, he had been home with family in Greensboro on 30-day leave, but had been eager to return to the theater of war.

His name, says the editorial, while it might not live on historically, was nevertheless representative of the great valor and service of the American airmen who died young in this war and whose daring exploits had turned the tide against the Nazis.

His suggestion included, as supplement to Comparative Literature, Comparative Illiteracy; that the curriculum would likewise make provision for courses in the Superficial, the Obvious, the Hit-or-Miss, the Go-as-you-please, the By-and-Large, the Topsy-turvy, and other forms of Truth which gave of itself readily to ordinary intelligence, but not so always to Ph.D's.

He might have also included J.D.'s.

Mr Mansfield praised the job of General Stilwell in training Chinese troops, especially those of the First and Sixth Chinese Armies, who were now beginning to fight efficiently in Burma.

He also reported to the President that Americans were now being held in high esteem within China.

Chiang had taken charge of problem areas domestically and was suiting remedies to the people's desires. For instance, when he heard complaints of problems in conscription, he undertook an investigation, eventually had the conscription director court-martialed and jailed.

Mr. Mansfield had met with General Claire Chenault, head of Chinese air operations of the Fourteenth Air Force. Unlike the generals of the other air forces, General Chenault downplayed combat aces and gave them no special attention. He told Mr. Mansfield that his reasoning was that it harmed the concept of teamwork and also made the aces targets for the enemy.

Lt. Col. Bill Reed of Iowa had been the leading ace in the outfit, with sixteen kills to his credit, but had just been shot down and killed in combat just after Mr. Mansfield had returned to the United States.

The Congressman had become the first American civilian to ride over the newly completed Ledo-Burma Road, spending three days in a jeep tour of the jungle. He had found morale among the American men and nurses quite high, despite difficult conditions.

He also reported that the Americans, British, and Chinese soldiers were now, for the first time, getting on well.

Mr. Mansfield was unable to contact the Communists of Northern China, told the President that, in his opinion, Stalin had been correct in sending supplies only to the Chiang Government and not including the Communist rebels, under the leadership of Mao Tse Tung.

Other reports during the summer and fall, however, including those of Donald Nelson and Vice-President Wallace, as Mr. Pearson had reported, had stressed that the Communists in the North were more skilled and determined fighters against the Japanese than those of the regular Chinese Army of the Chiang Government, and urged that they be incorporated into the fighting forces rather, as was the case, having Chiang's troops engaged as much in fighting the Communists as the Japanese.

By contrast, the Russian offensive, continues Mr. Grafton, aimed at the strong points of the German lines, not their weak points, as had the Germans in the Ardennes and Hurtgen Forests. The Germans had sought a localized test in the West; the Russians in the East were striking all along the 2,300-mile East Prussian-Polish-Hungarian front. The Russian winter drive would tax the entirety of the German Army down to the last reserve.

The new offensive movement by the British Second Army as well as the closing of the Bulge by the First and Third American Armies were involved in this mighty push to end the war once and for all.

Thus, Mr. Grafton puts the Ardennes offensive of the Germans in its correct perspective, as nothing compared to the present combined Allied offensive on two fronts.

Still, the toll in the Battle of Bulge would reach 19,000 Americans killed, another 50,000 missing, wounded, or captured, while the Germans suffered 100,000 casualties, possibly more. Most of those casualties on both sides had already been suffered during the first two weeks of the campaign.

The presence at the White House of the President's daughter, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, had been a remarkable buoy to his spirits during the previous year. While her husband was in the Army and assigned overseas, she had become a personal assistant to her father and relieved a lot of the routine tasks which had weighed upon his time in earlier years. She had the advantage over other confidantes in that she could speak frankly to Franklin.

His former confidential secretary, Marguerite "Missy" LeHand, who had been at the President's beck at all hours, had suffered a stroke in June, 1941 and died at the end of July, 1944.

Mr. Childs concludes by observing that the immediate coterie of persons around the President had always been small and tightly knit, too much so for the perceptions of many. He remarks that the President had given no comprehensive statement after the conference with Churchill and Stalin in Tehran in November-December, 1943, and professed hoped that matters would be different following the upcoming Big Three meeting—slated to begin within two weeks at Yalta in the Crimea.

As we shall explore somewhat in April, rumors began surfacing by June and July, 1945, even involving an early June report to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover by none other than then FBI Special Agent Guy Banister—the same of 1963 New Orleans anti-Castro Cuban gun-running notoriety, with an office in the same building on Camp Street as the address of the "Fair Play for Cuba Committee", the pro-Castro organization for which Lee Harvey Oswald was handing out leaflets in the summer of 1963, activity consistent with that described in the nixed Operation Northwoods, first approved in March, 1962 by Joint Chiefs Chairman, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer—, that the President had been suffering from prostate cancer diagnosed in October, 1944 and allegedly concealed from the public by his White House physician, who had given him a clean bill of health prior to the election. The story went that on Friday the 13th of October, 1944, the President had been given six months to live, that he looked at the calendar, saw that six months hence coincided with Friday, the 13th of April, started laughing.

Merely setting forth the data without commentary, he had left it to the reader to discern patterns. He reported that of 480 person 90 or older who had died during the prior year, 331 had been women, a hundred of whom were married, twenty to clergymen.

Mr. Boyle provides some of the 12,508 deceased persons of whom Mr. Gabb had maintained track through the three decades of his pursuit. Among them had been a champion bowler of New South Wales, who died at 98, a reverend who passed at 99, an authority on birds of South China who took his flight at 93, the last commissioned officer of the Confederate Army, who had crossed the river at 99, and a woman of Southampton, precise age not provided, presumably out of discretion, who had refused to go to a bomb shelter no matter the intensity of the raid in progress.

Mr. Gabb had wished readers a happy New Year, not wishing in the coming one to become one of those nonagenarian statistics, himself.