The Charlotte News
Friday, March 10, 1950
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska criticized Secretary of State Acheson for recommending that convicted Russian spy Valentin Gubitchev be deported to Russia in lieu of serving his 15-year prison sentence handed down the previous day in the case, suspended on condition of deportation as recommended by the Government. Judy Coplon, former Justice Department employee convicted of taking secret documents from her job and attempting to give them to Mr. Gubitchev, whom she claimed was not a spy but her lover, had received an active term of 15 years. The State Department suggested that Russia provide the same treatment to American citizens accused of spying in the satellite countries, as Hungary and Bulgaria. Senator Wherry said that it was a travesty of justice to sentence one person to fifteen years imprisonment while another went free after conviction under the same facts. He believed that there was no basis for assuming Russia would reciprocate in its treatment of Americans convicted of spying.
In Bonn, West Germany, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer told the Parliament that he would protest to the Western Allies the recent agreement between France and the Saar, granting the latter, claimed by West Germany, greater autonomy in return for 50-year control of its coal. The West German Government wanted the region placed under international control.
In Salt Lake City, a Navy C-54 transport carrying Undersecretary of the Navy Dan Kimball and eleven others clipped a power cable while landing, but no one was hurt.
In Manchester, N.H., the jury in the trial of the doctor accused of first degree murder for the euthanization of his terminally ill cancer patient by injecting air into her veins, acquitted the defendant. The doctor would still have to face the State medical board to determine what if any action would be taken regarding his license to practice medicine. The jury apparently accepted the testimony of a physician who said that the victim was dead when the accused reached her bedside prior to the injection. The chief medical examiner who performed the autopsy had also testified that in his opinion the doctor could not have injected air to the woman's veins because the veins in her arm had collapsed. The defense had also presented expert testimony that 40 cc's of air, that which the prosecution alleged was the amount injected, would be insufficient to produce a fatal embolism in the bloodstream.
In Jonesville, La., a fisherman's wife gave birth to one child for each of three days in succession. The doctor who delivered the triplets said that he had never heard of such a case before and the AMA had no record of such births. The couple had seven other children.
Tom Fesperman of The News tells of an official ruling that Charlotte was able to reserve Federal funds for slum clearance and redevelopment almost immediately. The director of slum clearance in Washington had ruled that the city did not have to await authorization of receipt of the funds by the State Legislature, which next met in 1951.
In Geneva, Switzerland, U.N. officials had realized that there was no Piffelheim, which someone had nominated as the site for a world tariff conference, naming the consul general making the nomination "Rott" and referring to Piffelheim's famous spa as "Bad Odor", "effective in relieving constipated protocols".
In Los Angeles, a man who had recently returned from Mexico City said initially that he had seen the wreckage of a flying saucer which had crashed in Mexico about three months earlier with a pilot 23 inches tall, killed in the crash. He later changed the story, saying that he had been told the tale by two business associates. But he claimed to have seen a piece of metal from the craft.
At the University of Denver, a man appeared before a science class, telling of midget pilots having recently flown three flying discs from Venus. An advertising salesman had brought the man to the school for the presentation and said he believed the story. The students found it of little value.
In Houston, a man was cited for speeding and his employer had thought it a joke because it was signed "Yawn Goodnight". The Sheriff told him that Deputies Yawn and Goodnight had been working together recently.
It could have been worse. Deputies Driver and Weaver might have been on duty.
A part of chapter twenty-seven of Fulton Oursler's The Greatest Story Ever Told appears on the page as part of the abridged serialization of the book.
On the editorial page, "Atlanta and Charlotte" contrasts with Charlotte the program of slum clearance underway in Atlanta based on receipt from the Federal Government of three million dollars of the 200 million available to the cities of the nation for the purpose.
But in Charlotte, because the 1949 Legislature, through lobbying by the real estate interests, had defeated approval of receipt of the Federal funds, there could be no receipt of such funds before 1951 when the next biennial session of the Legislature convened. Also, the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce had taken an active role in slum clearance and the piece suggests that the Charlotte counterpart ought look into that effort and begin its own drive to rid the city of slums.
"A Double Tragedy" finds the death of 14 prisoners at the Sandia guardhouse in New Mexico to have been a tragedy not only for the deaths of the prisoners but also because they were locked up without ready means of release in an emergency. The building in which they were housed was one of the last structures on the base to be heated by an oil stove. It recommends a full investigation of the matter and holding responsible those who were negligent or reckless in the incident.
"Object Lesson from Palmetto Land" tells of two white men being sentenced to life imprisonment in South Carolina during the week for the murder of an elderly black farmer the previous November during the course of a robbery. The robbery and shooting had been witnessed by a 14-year old friend of the victim who had been ordered by the perpetrators not to report the shooting of the man the rest of the night or they would come back and kill the boy, a directive which the boy obeyed while the man slowly bled to death.
The News had wondered at the time of the arrest, following formation in Oconee County of a posse to track down the men, whether a jury would return guilty verdicts. The people of the county had shown that the life of a black man was just as valuable as that of a white man, presenting an object lesson for the entire South.
"A Way to Make New Men" tells of the Salvation Army having been in existence for 85 years and having solidified its presence and worth during World War I, going to the trenches of France to assist the men. It had also done so in World War II, and since the war had been working with citizens who were down on their luck.
During the week, the local office of the Salvation Army had announced creation of a Men's Social Service Center in Charlotte, to aid those suffering from mental or physical handicaps to help themselves by repair of discarded household goods. It welcomes the new center to the city.
A piece from the Raleigh News & Observer, titled "Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce", tells of Wake County having shouldered its responsibility for the St. Agnes hospital for indigent black citizens of the community after the City had been paying for their care. It suggests that it would be nice if the responsibilities of the City and County were so delineated for other government services, to assure that the taxpayers of each entity were held responsible for the appropriate services.
Drew Pearson predicts that it would take 25 to 50 years of prodigious effort to construct a permanent peace. To achieve such a peace, he suggests bringing about greater unity of the American people, appointing Republicans to key positions in the Administration, keeping the people better informed, pushing Russia into calling an international conference, and holding the next session of the U.N. General Assembly in Moscow so that the Russian people could see a democratic body in action. If Moscow refused to call an international conference, then the West would have an excuse to call several conferences under the auspices of NATO, set up to handle political as well as military problems. Most important of the suggestions, he says, was to construct friendship with the Russian people, who formed the heart of the iron curtain which the Politburo sought to maintain. The Kremlin feared most any contact between the outside world and the Russian people. The latter program would alleviate the need for an arms race.
While none of these things would be easy, war also was not easy. The process of building such a peace would be a long and tedious job, but might be achieved sooner than the hundred years predicted by Frederick Osborn, formerly the U.S. representative on the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission.
Robert C. Ruark supports the equal rights amendment for women, provided an amendment to it, tacked on by Senator Carl Hayden, would be removed. That amendment had provided that women would not lose any of the rights previously obtained under law.
Mr. Ruark believes that women, to achieve full equality, must endure kicks in the pants along with the benefits. A man would still be subject to a slap for patting a woman rather than kicking her.
He wants equal rights to alimony, equal holding of doors open, etc. Fainting of women would be out in the new world, as would lifting a woman onto a chair while a mouse was pursued. Women in the home would no longer always be considered correct.
Consequently, he hopes that the House, about to take up the amendment passed in the Senate, would knock out the Hayden provision, for, about six months after ratification, he believes, women would be seeking to rescind the amendment if it gave them true equality with men.
James Marlow discusses the loyalty board investigations in the Government, set up three years earlier. In that time, 182 Government employees had been fired for disloyalty and another 2,476 had quit while being investigated. Of the 182, 76 were newly hired. Some 11,600 had undergone a full investigation.
Senator George Malone of Nevada wanted changes in the current structure of the 21-member board, as he believed that department heads had ignored the board's findings. But an official of the board said that not a single department head had maintained in the employ of the Government an employee found to be disloyal.
A
letter from Leon Gutman tells of
playwright Paul Green, Betty Smith
A letter writer finds a previous letter writer, who said he was a Yankee but objected to the comments of Mrs. J. Waties Waring, critical of Southerners and advocating tolerance for interracial marriage, to be missing the point and Mrs. Waring to be unduly complicating the point. For intermarriage was not a major goal of the civil rights program, formally or informally, had nothing to do with the right to vote without a poll tax, the need for an anti-lynching bill or fair employment practices. Equality need not necessarily entail intermarriage. Thus, he finds that Mrs. Waring, as well as those who had spoken out against her, had disserved the cause of American justice and democracy.
A letter writer praises another writer for standing up for the rights of the man accused of hiring the person who had sought to blow up the WBT radio tower. A previous writer had urged the City Council to remove him from his position on the Park & Recreation Commission, but the responding writer had found such a move premature, denying his right to the presumption of innocence. This writer favors more favorable publicity in the newspaper for those accused of crime.
A letter writer finds the Circus of Saints and Sinners remiss for not adding H. V. Kaltenborn to their "pot of scrambled character assassins".
Framed Edition
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