The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Congressman Alfred Bulwinkle of North Carolina discussing with Congressman Robert Rich of Pennsylvania the bill for oversight of expansion of the nation's airport facilities, assuring Mr. Rich that the bill would support far more smaller airports than large commercial airline facilities.

Drew Pearson, as indicated by "Gloomy Saturday", reports that President Truman had confided recently to international peace advocate Fyke Farmer, a lawyer from Nashville, that an arms race had already begun and that he disfavored the suggestion of world government, as recently advocated by former Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts.

A piece culled from Time on Frank Porter Graham and the University of which he was president, starts by describing the selection of the site for the First State University, aside a big poplar tree on a hill, as selected by future Governor William R. Davie. The poplar still stood in 1945, on the sesquicentennial of the opening of the University, as fourteen top educators, including Harvard president James B. Conant, gathered for the annual meeting of the Association of American Universities.

The University of Georgia contested that it was first to obtain a charter, prior to the 1789 grant to North Carolina, but, indisputably, North Carolina was first to open its doors to students, or better put, a student, Hinton James, who had traveled for weeks from the Eastern part of the state to get to Chapel Hill.

The piece remarks that the University had always been one of the pre-eminent institutions of higher learning in the South, save for five years after the Civil War when it was closed, but had risen to new prominence under the fifteen years of leadership by Dr. Graham, diminutive, 59 years old, Scotch Presbyterian, temperate, liberal, bachelor until age 45.

"As an undergraduate at Chapel Hill he was a rugged little St. George, who led pious forays against the roughnecks whose doxie plied their trade in Chapel Hill graveyard." Nevertheless, he was elected student body president twice. He obtained his master's degree in history at Columbia and then joined the Marines in 1917, returned to U.N.C. in 1921 as a full professor of history.

The University was wanting for funding and Dr. Graham was assigned the task by Chancellor Harry Chase to solicit money. He returned from a statewide trip with 5.5 million dollars in donations. In the process, he learned much of his state and its needs, giving impetus to his lifelong dedication to improvement of the state's labor laws.

When he was approached by the Board of Trustees in 1930 to become president of the institution, he initially declined, but was eventually talked into accepting by one of his old Marine buddies.

In 1936, the Board had demanded the termination of Professor Franklin Carl Erickson for having eaten dinner in Durham with the Communist candidate for the vice-presidency, James Ford, a black man. Dr. Graham refused, saying that he would leave before he would fire a man for eating dinner with another human being.

He had attracted such men to the faculty as nationally prominent professor of sociology Howard Odum, mathematician and biographer Archibald Henderson, and playwright Paul Green. He had aided the establishment of the Institute of Government by the law school's professor Albert Coates, improved the Playmakers and the Drama Department so that it rivaled that of Yale and Carnegie Tech, developed an outstanding university press, and encouraged the founding of Dr. Odum's Institute for Research in Social Science.

He had lost his fight, however, to clean up college football across the country, to free it from the vagaries of payments to athletes.

Duke had a larger endowment than the University, which had four million dollars and an annual million-dollar State appropriation. But Dr. Graham worked hard to effect cooperation with Duke, sharing instructors and facilities, with the Duke campus but twelve miles away in Durham.

When the Board of Trustees had complained about Dr. Graham spending too much time with his duties on the War Labor Board during the war and demanded that he make the choice of remaining on the WLB or returning full time to his duties as president of the University, a poll taken among students showed 95 percent support for Dr. Graham. After some intervention by the Roosevelt Administration, a compromise had been effected.

All being true, his foresight and dedication would not afford the school the ability in 2012 to stop a final touchdown drive by Duke to win 33-30 in the first game to be played between the two schools in October since 1938, that being the first time since 1926 when, with Duke bearing its former Randolph County name of Trinity College prior to 1925, the schools met more usually in October in the rare season when they met at all.

In 1962 on October 20, the opponent was South Carolina, defeated in Chapel Hill 19-14. Duke won that year in Chapel Hill 16-14, the reverse of the score the sad following year in Durham, the game delayed from Saturday until Thanksgiving Day, won in the closing minute by a 42-yard field goal of Max Chapman, which, as we have previously related, we witnessed, and, for its poignance, shall never forget.

For a generation accustomed to saturation coverage of major news stories for days, or sometimes even weeks on end since the advent of 24-hour news channels, it should be noted that, in 1963, regular network programming resumed on Tuesday, November 26, following four days of unprecedented cancellation of all regular programming on the three networks at the time, NBC, CBS, and ABC. Ordinary network news coverage lasted but thirty minutes per day, plus occasional updates through the day of five-minutes duration each, and the Sunday press programs. Whether that situation, insofar as the Kennedy assassination, the resumption of life in relatively normal fashion on Tuesday, while all of normal sensibilities still realized that things were dramatically changed, was a proper reaction of the society or a callous reaction, can only be gauged perhaps by examination of how a family reacts when it suddenly loses a family member tragically and unexpectedly. The tendency is to want to forget the tragedy and move on after paying proper respects. At that time, in 1963, with the sole assassin apparently caught and dead, there was little else the country felt it could do except to follow the advice of its new President and go forward.

And, indeed, even in retrospect, there is little else the country could do, especially in tense times of Cold War. The country could not afford the luxury of prolonged grief. Had there been the sort of prolix coverage of the story which occurs today with far less momentous stories, whether the country would have been better served is debatable. It could have led to such an overstatement of the tragedy as to have turned the enormity of the crime into something of a farce by overexposure and magnification.

But psychologically, the question remains whether the country was afforded a proper opportunity to grieve at the time for the loss of its young leader. On that point, it is probably the case that a void was left unfilled, perhaps one, however, not capable of being filled, no matter the time afforded for grief. There was, we posit, great wisdom in Lyndon Johnson's leadership at the time, even if seeming, in certain lights, insensitive.

An editorial culled from the Lexington Dispatch gives praise to the editorial staff of the News and its contributions to the world of letters, finds the early work of new Associate Editor Harry Ashmore, assuming the reins from Burke Davis, to be first rate, says that Editor J. E. Dowd had indicated that Mr. Ashmore would handle most of the editorial writing as he would provide mainly oversight—the way things had always generally worked under Mr. Dowd.

A letter writer, as mentioned in the column, discusses the unrelenting and indomitable discussion of the atom "gone fission", presumably for a chain reaction of the long pull.

Marquis Childs reports of the testimony during the week of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer to a Senate subcommittee chaired by Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia, anent the atom bomb and the impossibility of keeping the secret from the scientific community for long.

Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas summarized the Los Alamos director's testimony by saying: "We have everything to gain, then, and nothing to lose by sharing the information we have. If we can learn that in the little time that is left, then we may still hope for a future."