Wednesday, December 12, 1945

The Charlotte News

Wednesday, December 12, 1945

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that at Dachau, 40 Nazi defendants, including Martin Weiss, commandant of the infamous concentration camp, had been convicted by an American military tribunal following a 24-day trial for atrocities committed at Dachau. The defendants were to be sentenced the following day.

Not covered on the front page were the proceedings this date at Nuremberg, which included an exposition of the Mauthausen concentration camp, presented by American assistant prosecutor Thomas Dodd.

In Manchuria, Chinese Government troops entered Mukden as others began landing by plane at Changchun, following permission of the Russians to do so.

President Truman indicated that the Marines would remain in China until the surrender terms with the Japanese had been fulfilled. The terms included American transportation of Japanese troops back to Japan, and so it was assumed that the President meant fulfillment of this condition.

Dr. Alvin M. Weinberg, chief of the theoretical physics section of Clinton Laboratories at Oak Ridge, Tenn., told the Senate Atomic Energy Committee that in the event of nuclear war, safest refuge would be had deep below the surface of the ocean. He offered that collateral benefits from nuclear energy would be in treatment of certain types of cancer by neutron rays, laboratory duplication of plant photosynthesis of the energy from sunlight, settlement of the arctic regions, travel by spaceship, and production of energy in areas with water power.

The joint Congressional committee investigating Pearl Harbor received a report that on December 2, 1941, the Office of Naval Intelligence, through Rear Admiral Mayfield, then a captain, had discovered through a report from the phone company the presence of a single phone tap on the Honolulu Japanese consulate, placed by the FBI within its own building on November 1, 1941. Captain Mayfield acted out of concern for international complications should the presence of the tap have become known to the Japanese. The FBI had not been aware at the time that the tap had been removed. While in place, it was indicated, the tap had revealed information that consulate officials were burning their documents, an indication of expected imminent war.

General Marshall also continued his testimony before the committee, saying that he knew as early as August, 1941 that if events continued as they had been going, war with the Japanese was inevitable and that the United States was not prepared for a war in the Pacific.

It mght be noted that the press of the day openly discussed these prospects at the time also.

A previously top-secret report was presented to the committee from the Army Board of Inquiry which quoted second-hand Navy Captain Alwin D. Kramer as having stated in 1943 that he had predicted to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox on December 7, before noon Washington time, that the fourteenth part of the fourteen-part message to the Japanese Embassy in Washington, intercepted and translated by ONI that morning, indicated, in his opinion, a surprise attack imminent on Pearl Harbor and possibly a midnight attack on Manila. Just how Captain Kramer had supposedly divined this pinpoint accuracy at the time from the fourteen-part message, which made no per se mention of any imminent attack anywhere, was not explained. Nor was there any indication that the late Secretary Knox had received the captain's supposed message, though it was claimed that it was presented along with the fourteenth part of the Japanese intercept.

Specifically, the fourteenth part of the message read:

Obviously it is the intention of the American Government to conspire with Great Britain and other countries to obstruct Japan's effort toward the establishment of peace through the creation of a new order in East Asia, and especially to preserve Anglo-American rights and interest by keeping Japan and China at war. This intention has been revealed clearly during the course of the present negotiation.

Thus, the earnest hope of the Japanese Government to adjust Japanese-American relations and to preserve and promote the peace of the Pacific through cooperation with the American Government has finally been lost.

The Japanese Government regrets to have to notify hereby the American Government that in view of the attitude of the American Government it cannot but consider that it is impossible to reach an agreement through further negotiations.

In other words, the message was a load of gibberish, rejecting as a bottom line any further negotiations to try to avert war, a foregone conclusion since latter November, in actuality a foregone conclusion from the outset of negotiations in the spring, as the Japanese were indeed hell-bent from at least July 1 onward on waging war, only seeking through the negotiations the facade of wanting peace and trying to create the illusion that their own aggression into China, then Indo-China, was somehow prompted by restrictive trade practices of the United States in not bowing to their territorial aggression, the exact opposite of matters as they occurred in temporal order. The Roosevelt Administration underwent harsh internal criticism for allowing American companies to continue too long the shipments of oil and scrap iron to the Japanese, until late July, 1941 when they occupied, with Vichy consent, French Indo-China, the second step, after Manchuria, in the process of establishing their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a fancy sounding name given to raw militaristic and brutal plunder of foreign lands, just as lebensraum had been the Nazi excuse in Europe.

In Manila, it was reported that Americans and Filipinos were involved in "gangsterism", consisting of stealing of military property, sometimes utilizing speed boats to obtain entry to ships for the purpose of plundering the booty.

Surplus Property Administrator Stuart Symington proposed to Congress two new plans to grant veterans priority in obtaining surplus property, one to grant them priority ahead of Federal, state, and local agencies in obtaining the property and the second to permit them to purchase it for personal use, not just business use. The two proposals were part of a bill submitted by Congressman Lyndon Johnson of Texas.

President Truman directed that price controls be re-instituted on dwellings and that the priority system on building materials also be renewed, with preference to be granted veterans on housing. The White House later clarified that the priorities system did not require legislation and could be implemented by the President under the War Powers Act, still in effect until six months after the end of the war. The President had originally stated that the price ceilings were covered by the War Powers Act also, but it was clarified that he had misunderstood the press question, thought it pertained to priorities, and that legislation would be necessary for renewal of price controls.

The President named North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Walter Stacy to a fact-finding board inquiring into the strike at G.M., a board to which the UAW promised its cooperation. G.M. did not comment. Justice Stacy had chaired the failed Labor-Management Conference, concluded the previous week. Also on the board would be Lloyd Garrison, chairman of the War Labor Board, and Milton Eisenhower, president of Kansas State College and brother of General Eisenhower.

Optimism was being expressed meanwhile by both labor and company officials that Ford could effect a compromise with labor to avoid a threatened strike, possibly through compromise of the demanded 30 percent wage increase and compromise of Ford's demand for a security plan against wildcat strikes in violation of union contracts. Ford and labor appeared on the latter point ready to accept a smaller wage increase coupled with benefits, including profit sharing, plus the UAW proposal of a $3 per day fine to any wildcat striker on a first instance of violation of a union no-strike contract provision and a $5 per day fine on a second instance, compromising Ford's demand for a $5 per day fine ab initio, rejected as unreasonable by UAW

The House Education Committee killed by a single vote a bipartisan Senate-House bill to provide 150 million dollars of Federal aid to state education over a two-year period.

The Senate passed a 700 million dollar five-year program of Federal aid for hospital construction.

Tommy Manville was married for the eighth time at Mamoroneck, N.Y.

In Fairmont, W.Va., a nine year old leukemia patient had Christmas early, as she was expected not to make it through Christmas.

Freck Sproles provides excerpts from letters of contributors to the Empty Stocking Fund, now up to $3,102.30, to provide Christmas for the needy children of Charlotte, an increase of over $400 since the previous day.

This day, there are spirits of 20 school children in Connecticut who will not see another Christmas in this life because of the violence again in this country perpetrated by a mentally ill individual, with too easy access to two handguns owned legally by his now dead mother.

We urge sending to your Congressman a Christmas card demanding, in the name of those 20 children, that an amendment be passed and sent to the states for ratification, repealing the Second Amendment.

Unfortunately, because of a recalcitrant five justice Supreme Court majority two and four years ago, in D.C. v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, it is the only method left to correct the country's gross misapplication and misunderstanding through time of the Second Amendment, clearly, to anyone who can read the English language with objectivity divorced from cheap politics—kowtowing to Fascists masquerading as "conservatives", bent on destroying this country from within by use of the supposed freedom of the Second Amendment to crush the First, the foundation pin of democracy—intended only to enable arming of militias, at a time immediate to colonial America when there was no standing Army and the chance and opportunity for armed foreign rebellion on the soil of the United States was real and ever-present.

It had nothing to do with an individual's "right" to bear firearms at will or to thwart a despotic government, a concept, as we just pointed out a few days ago, prior to this latest massacre yesterday, which James Madison, writing in Federalist Paper No. 46, regarded as fanciful and ludicrous, given the right of the people embodied in the Constitution to change the Government every two or four years.

Mr. O'Really, we pose a question to you as a former high school teacher in Florida: Would you, as you recently posited with respect to yourself and moviegoers in Colorado, favor arming now school children, ages 5 to 10, for their self-protection, elementary school and kindergarten school teachers? even though many schools have armed guards on the premises for the last thirty years, during which time school violence has only increased, just as do theaters and shopping malls where such carnage has taken place, even as have banks for decades, which nevertheless are robbed at gunpoint. Surely, you must realize the utter absurdity, complete and mindless vacuity, entered with a firearm upon your premise.

Again, we say that hunters and gun collectors rationalizing their habit of wishing to kill something, anything, be damned. Every time you look at that gun, think of those twenty children. And then turn in to local law enforcement that gun, which serves no earthly purpose than to kill innocents and destroy the fabric of freedom in this country, already turned nearly into a military dictatorship by the very presence of freely obtainable guns creating a military camp environment, in short, Nutville.

Obviously, gun control does not work. All of the recent mass shootings involved legally obtained firearms. None, so far as we have heard, involved unregistered guns.

Teach your son basketball or football or baseball, not hunting, not target practice. If you have bought a gun for your offspring for placement under the tree at Christmas, think of what message you are sending. Joe Friday had it right on that one. Take it back and buy something else.

The number of people killed annually by gun violence versus the one in thousands who manages to use a personal gun for protection against imminent death or serious bodily injury settled the argument long ago, except among those in the gun lobby, fueled by arms manufacturers who want a thriving business of national and international fear to perpetuate their pocketbooks. And among the cheap politicians who obtain votes by continuing to support the supposed right to bear arms, promoted by the gun manufacturers and the culture of violence which follows them. And cheap radio and tv talk show hosts who trumpet these notions to appeal to their right-wing listeners, despite the obvious daily carnage, increasing with time, of which they are well aware, the while implicitly, sometimes explicitly, calling for curtailment of freedom to stop gun violence, not curtailment of the offending weapon itself, always the first resort for Fascist revolutions.

How many more episodes like this sad Christmas in Connecticut does the country have to endure to resolve to stop it once and for all at the source?

Sure, a knife or any number of other potentially deadly instruments can kill, and will kill into the future, but not 26 people, or likely even two people, in one attack by one assailant. The utility of the instrument has to be weighed against its potential for deadly use. One cannot cut bread and butter with a handgun or rifle. One has the potential for escape from a knife attack.

Nor will improvement be had by shredding the First Amendment Establishment Clause, while preserving as somehow godly the precious Second Amendment, by trying to "put God back in the schools", whatever that is supposed to mean. The killer of John Lennon had grown up a Fundamentalist Christian and Christian camp counsellor in South Carolina, and... If anything, too much right-wing religion impressed by dogmatic parents is often the problem in these scenarios, repressing normal adolescent drives, turning then to violence. Religion is a matter of choice, not dictate, by school or another government functionary, a long ago discarded theory. Did misplaced religion in schools in the period prior to and during the 1920's and 1930's in the South and Midwest stop the notorious bandits and bank robbers of the period? Or were they just quaint aberrations of the Prohibition and Depression era? Just as was the S.L.A. of the mid-70's.

No place is safe until these deadly instruments are confiscated under law and automatic ten-year Federal prison sentences are instituted for mere possession by anyone, not in law enforcement, in the military or National Guard, of any gun, save genuine and inoperable antiques without ammunition or a firing pin, including hunting rifles. Once the amendment would be ratified by 38 states during a seven-year period, the zero-tolerance provisions of the law pursuant to it would go into effect within 60 days, enabling gun owners in that period to surrender to law enforcement, for distribution to the military or recycling, all guns, legally or illegally possessed, along with ammunition, with immunity against use of that gun as evidence of any crime or as a means to obtain other evidence of any crime involving the person surrendering it.

The Second Amendment long ago outlived any conceivable utility, except to chill freedoms to protect persons who insist on playing Wild West and prairie days in the 20th and 21st centuries, trying to relive something they fancy their forebears did, but not from a truck, going home to an electric or gas range to cook the kill of the day. Our forebears were glad to be done with those days where hunting and gathering were requisite to survival.

That weekend outing you take in your air conditioned and heated SUV to go hunting with a high-powered rifle equipped with a telescopic sight, not a walk through the woods and fields with a musket, resembles the life lived by your great-great-great granddaddy as closely as you resemble a monkey.

We have a suggestion for Christmas greetings to the gun possessor you know or for the radio and tv talk show hosts who regularly promote the Second Amendment: Send them Christmas cards with photographs of the twenty children who lost their lives in Connecticut. What you write on those cards is for your own discretion to determine.

On the editorial page, "A House, Then a Home" discusses the suggestion of the president of the Charlotte Real Estate Board for resolution of the Charlotte housing shortage, a problem all over the country in light of the vast numbers of returning war veterans and displaced war workers returning home, combined with wartime restraints on building because of the need of wood and other building materials for the military. He had called for the Home Builders Association to provide a minimum of 2,000 low-cost homes in 1946. The president of the Board was careful to distinguish "homes" from mere "housing units"—maybe, in the latter case, only a tarpaulin strung across a ditch.

"We want homes for our citizens, a place where they can have a garden and a place where they can have dogs and cats if they want them."

Yeah, but can they have Sally in the Garden with the dog and the cat?

The piece finds it a worthy goal and hopes it would be achieved. None of the other plans put forward, conversion of Morris Field barracks to temporary housing, the use of trailers, or Government pre-fabricated homes, competed with the suggestion of real homes.

"We are in complete sympathy with Mr. Ballentine's contention that every Charlotte homeowner should be endowed with an inalienable right to keep a cat, but we hope that the effort to provide 2,000 home units will not be allowed to stand in the way of the effort to provide 2,000 housing units."

Well, a house is not a home without a cat around. Everybody knows that.

"A Note on Bedfellows" presents the plausible argument against President Truman's proposal for creation of fact-finding committees to settle major industrial wage disputes, as articulated, even if vituperatively, by John L. Lewis in his testimony before Congress. For if the Government sought facts from corporate books, coercively, if not by law, to settle strikes, that is, either the company having to reveal its books or be accused of withholding information to avoid the prospect of revelation of sufficient profits to support labor's claim for wage hikes or the wage hikes would be recommended, then there would be the specter of undue Government intrusion into the collective bargaining process. It would also work conversely with respect to labor and its demands.

Yet, the only alternative provided by Mr. Lewis and others advocating the position that Government fact-finding was out of order was for the Government to release price controls and allow industry to pass on to the consumer the cost of higher wages, unsatisfactory as it only would raise the price of products, producing an inflationary spiral while nullifying most or all of the wage increase, prompting demands for yet higher wages, ad infinitum.

The piece posits that the thesis would have made good sense in 1938, before the war, and would probably again in 1948, after the economy would have an opportunity to rebound into a state of equivalency between supply and demand. But for the present, pent-up demand during wartime shortage, together with substantial savings during the war from higher wages and no place to spend the excess, required that the economy first adjust to increased demand against slowly increasing supply before wartime controls would be fully released. That lesson had been harshly imparted after World War I, when inflation was rampant, leading eventually to the housing and farm collapse and the 1929 stock market crash, which became the Great Depression.

So, those who were siding with Mr. Lewis's stance that the President had advocated a plan which was a "vile and evil-smelling scheme" were taking an "extremely dubious moral position".

"Descent from Valhalla" discusses the fact that on January 1, about 500 of the 1,540 generals of the Army would lose their temporary wartime ranks and revert to their permanent ranks, with another 500 set to be thusly adjusted in rank by July 1. Some would be allowed to carry their wartime rank into retirement, but others would be reduced, as far down the ladder as 1st lieutenant.

The piece offers that the Army would not benefit much from a brigadier general during the war reduced suddenly to 1st lieutenant, that some might be deserving of the reduction for their arrogance, but others were quite deserving of better treatment. It proposes instead a gradual reduction over a period of years.

But would that prospect have much improved morale, to have it understood that one was working down the ladder of rank, as appreciation for wartime effort, rather than the other way about?

A piece from the New York Times, titled "Season of the Long Dusk", offers a poetic ode in prose to Old Man Winter and its inevitably shorter days and longer nights, this time bringing with it relative peace on earth for the first time in nine long years, since the Christmas of 1936, before the outbreak of war in Manchuria the following July, the first peacetime Christmas in the West since 1938.

The piece does not relate it that way, but, we suggest, that such was the hidden sentiment within its innermost recesses. We leave it for you to read.

It concludes: "Fires burn with a steady flame. The year approaches the turn. The season of the Nativity is close at hand, and wise men look to the stars and search their hearts for understanding."

With the war now over, no doubt, the families and friends of some 300,000 Americans who did not return from that war, as well as the many millions of families throughout the world who lost close relationships in the war, or as a result of it, would have more time now to reflect on the absent person by the hearth, the one who could at long last become a ghost and lead to thought of why that terrible war had to be and how to prevent one like it from ever recurring.

Drew Pearson reports of a secret State Department dinner attended by Congressional leaders at Blair House in Washington for a "sales talk" on the proposed loan to Britain. The Congressional leaders present, including Senators Tom Connally and Walter George, were displeased with the facts that they had not been consulted before the terms of the proposed loan were set, and that not enough assurance had been exacted that Britain would not resume discriminatory practices in trade as before the war. They were also concerned that loan fever might be catching and other countries would seek and obtain such loans. Secretary of State Byrnes had replied that Russia did not need a loan and, if sought, he would not approve it. But Senator Arthur Vandenberg, Republican of Michigan, rejoindered by asking whether such a stance would improve relations with the Soviets, a question about an hypothetical issue which had not yet even arisen.

Next, the column reports of the contrast in style with FDR, often observed since Harry Truman had become President, that the new President in conferences was more a listener than the talker his predecessor had been. An example recently was a visit by Congressman Kopplemann of Connecticut anent GOP strategy to get amendments going in the House regarding the bill to define the U.S. role in the U.N., amendments which would be as crippling as those which had been proposed in the Senate by GOP Senator Robert Taft and then defeated. The President listened attentively, taking notes the while, and then promised that he would raise the issue with the House Speaker and Majority Leader.

In contrast, when Senator James Mead of New York and other members of his committee came to visit the President to present a report on Army hoarding of surplus property, the President, formerly chair of the Mead Committee, interrupted and proceeded at length to explain his own plan for distribution of surplus property, turning it over to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and their crack sales team. But Senators Harley Kilgore of West Virginia and Owen Brewster of Maine pointed out to the President that such a move would not address the issue of the brass hats holding back surplus property, not declaring it as such, in order to hoard materials. The President stated his understanding of the distinction and that he intended to address the matter to the military leaders.

On exit, Senator Mead said that he was worried about his old friend "Harry" because he had never taken such a leading role in discussions even as chairman of the committee which once bore his name—the committee which had given rise to his image as a no-nonsense fighter against military waste and which was primarily responsible for his rising star as a Senator, causing the party leadership ultimately to favor him over Henry Wallace and others, prime among whom had been James Byrnes, who might have replaced Vice-President Wallace on the ticket in 1944.

Dorothy Thompson remarks that "The Society for the Prevention of World War III", under the leadership of Rex Stout, had for months campaigned against her column, misrepresenting in the process what she had said. The latest attack had appeared in The New York Post, in which Mr. Stout had accused Ms. Thompson of attacking the principles under which the Nuremberg Tribunal was operating. She responds that she had only raised contradictions in the principles and the pits into which the concepts of American justice might fall in such an attempt to justify war crimes on the basis of the outlawing of war by the moribund 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact. She cites Chief Justice Harlan Stone, former Justice Owen Roberts, and Judge Learned Hand of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, as having voiced similar concerns to that which she had raised.

She also takes issue with the charge that she had defended Nazi murderers by voicing the view that the entire German population was not to blame for the atrocities committed by the Nazis. She quotes Justice Robert Jackson's indictment of the war criminals, that there was no purpose intended to indict the German people, as her first alliance on the subject.

She responds to the charge that she harbored "dangerous illusions about the alleged good Germans" by saying that she had known Germans who had been hanged for fighting against Hitler, that Mr. Stout was being advised by Germans who criticized Americans and all Germans, while having remained afar from Hitler's ravages in Germany during the war. Nor had she mocked the torture of Hitler's victims or favored any master race, as Mr. Stout had also charged.

She concludes that those who wanted to eliminate all Germans in Germany were motivated by the desire to create new victims more than to seek justice for the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis.

She points out that the Colmer Report of eight Republican and eight Democratic members of Congress had gone further than she had in favoring de-Nazification without dismemberment and de-industrialization of Germany, the latter having been the policy of Henry Morgenthau, adopted in the Potsdam Agreement. British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, former Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and even Foreign Commissar V.M. Molotov and Stalin himself, she ventures, had foreseen what she had foreseen months earlier as transpiring during the period since the end of the war.

She took issue with Mr. Stout's campaign that her writings and talks be stopped. She would not cease to raise her concerns, for that would in fact lend her name to being justly ridiculed.

"I do not care a hoot for the judgment of organized claques. I care greatly not to betray those who fought 'for a new and better world.'"

For our part, we do not question Ms. Thompson's judgment regarding Nuremberg and the Nazis versus the German people. She was not only "there" in the time frame of these events and writing about them daily, but was physically present in Nazi Germany in the early days of Hitler's coming to power, was ordered deported by Hitler from Germany for her unvarnished criticisms of the early Nazi regime. Her predictions during the war and before the war had broken out were most usually quite accurate.

We do, however, question her judgment on some of her more recent editorial pronouncements, in 20-20 hindsight, on the atom bomb and its demonstration. Her advocacy in two editorials that it should have been demonstrated first to Hirohito and the Japanese High Command before its use, and to the entire assembled delegation of the U.N. Conference at San Francisco was preposterous. Aside from the impracticality of the latter, unknwon to her at the time, as the bomb simply was not ready while the San Francisco Conference met through June 26, was not ready until shortly before its detonation at Trinity on July 16 because of varied delays in obtaining parts and the final assembly, to have breached secrecy and allowed the world to see the visible demonstration of the bomb in the desert would have likely merited nothing but a shrug of the shoulders from the Japanese at the sight of some fused sand into glass, and merely increased their readiness against any form of air attack from a B-29 formation, no matter how small the contingent, for months accustomed to the sight of small formations of B-29's being for reconnaissance purposes only and dropping no bombs, thus usually left alone to fly their missions undisturbed by flak or pursuing interceptors.

The kamikaze raids would have no doubt been intensified and the reserve of Japanese aircraft being held back for the final land invasion would have been placed into action in defense. Whether that would have made the flight of the Enola Gay more difficult to reach target is equally speculative, but no one, certainly not President Truman and the chiefs of staff, was going to take such a foolish chance on the hunch that Hirohito and company might back down, realizing the while the central motivating force behind Japan's refusal to have backed down in the face of certain and complete defeat, obvious to anyone for more than a year prior to August, 1945, that motivation being the ultimate need to save face, together with their belief that they were a chosen people in the eyes of their deity, never previously having lost a war, inculcated beliefs through centuries of brainwashing which were manifested even after the surrender.

Samuel Grafton comments on the glimmer of hope extended to journalists by the announcement of President Truman that there would be a Big Three foreign ministers conferenmce in Moscow in April. It was reassuring that the tenuous alliances of the war were not completely dead and forgotten, had a chance for renewal.

But, he adds, the previous three months of experimentation at seeking to outvote the Soviet Union in its desires had not been wasted, that in September the Big Five foreign ministers conference had outvoted the Soviets 4 to 1, that since, U.S. foreign policy had flirted with letting the U.N. General Assembly handle matters, promising an even more overwhelming opposition to the Soviets.

At least these votes had demonstrated to both sides that issues had to be squarely faced.

There were now two choices, to follow the trend of letting the UNO handle matters with the prospect of hopeless deadlock in future votes of the General Assembly, decisively to be against Soviet interests, leading to inevitable alienation of the two sides, or to have Big Three meetings in which the divisions could be potentially ironed out, rather than foreclosed by Iron Curtains, on closer terms. The latter, concludes Mr. Grafton, was more preferable, as it did not rule out the U.N., while going only through the U.N., apart from the unilateral veto afforded in the Security Council, eliminated the possibility of accord because of the prospect of the Soviets being outvoted in the General Assembly.

A pair of letter writers appeal for Christmas contributions for children of striking textile mill workers of the Erwin Mills in Durham, Erwin, and Cooleemee. The writers explain the basis for the strike, to oppose the stretch-out system increasing the work of weavers and spinners.

Another letter writer forwards a clipping from Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper, indicating that in Shanghai, the Casanova Club had been declared off limits by the base provost marshal, who, it was said, had complained for being charged $1.20 American for three glasses of water.

The editors note that they were always sympathetic to servicemen, but that $1.20 would not buy a place to sit down in most American nightclubs.

The provost marshal might have replied, however, that $1.20 was nevertheless outrageous for three glasses of 2¢ plain, perhaps commonsense, even to Casanovas.

Framed Edition
[Return to Links
Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i><i><i>--</i></i></i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.