The Charlotte News

Monday, April 3, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President had formally notified Senator Millard Tydings of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, investigating the charges of Communists in the State Department brought by Senator McCarthy, that he had instructed Federal officials to ignore the Senate subpoenas for the Government loyalty board records on certain individuals named by the Senator as having Communist sympathies. The President said that no President had ever complied with a legislative subpoena directed to the executive branch to produce confidential documents and that disclosure of them would be contrary to the public interest and compromise the investigative ability of the FBI and the availability to it of confidential informants, and would harm innocent persons named in the files. He cited precedents occurring during the terms of Presidents Washington, Monroe, Jackson, and Cleveland to support the position. President Washington had concluded that while the Congress could subpoena documents generally, the President then should provide only such papers which the public good would permit.

In an address to the ERP administrators in Washington, General Marshall urged that ERP aid not be cut by Congress but also believed that the program ought end after 51 months, as scheduled, June 30, 1952, as the countries receiving the aid ought be encouraged to lift themselves up without U.S. assistance. He praised the effort which had transpired in the prior two years since Marshall Plan aid was first provided to Western Europe.

The President asked Congress again to enact the Brannan agriculture plan, designed to produce cheaper consumer food prices while providing farm subsidies to keep up produce prices for the farmer.

The Supreme Court this date heard oral arguments in the case of Elmer Henderson, a black man who had been a wartime traveling representative for the Fair Employment Practices Commission, established by FDR's executive order pursuant to the War Powers Act, contending that he was denied, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, equal access to Southern railroad dining car facilities during a 1942 trip between Washington and Birmingham. The Justice Department was arguing the case in his behalf against the policy adopted by the Interstate Commerce Commission to allow segregated dining car facilities on interstate trains. Representative Sam Hobbs of Alabama, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, took up the cudgels against the Justice Department position, having been urged, he said, to do so by other Committee members.

The following day, the Court would hear arguments in the case of Sweatt v. Painter, regarding the claim that the University of Texas ought admit to its law school Herman Sweatt, who qualified but for his race, contending that the black law school established by the State was not equal to that of the University of Texas. It would also hear argument in the case of G. W. McLaurin, complaining that the seating arrangements provided him in classes at the University of Oklahoma in response to court orders for his admission for want of separate-but-equal facilities, were improperly segregated from the white student seating.

In Tokyo, the Army reported that engine trouble in the two-engined plane piloted by husband and wife, Dianna and Bob Bixby, during their attempted round-the-world airspeed record, had caused them to return to Calcutta two hours after takeoff. They still had a chance to beat the record established in 1947 by the late Bill Odom, killed in an air race crash the previous year in Cleveland, provided they could get their engine repaired within three to four hours.

In Munich, Hermann Goering's buried treasure, once estimated to be worth a million dollars, was valued at less than $2,500, after being discovered the previous Friday in a castle near Nuremberg which Herr Goering had once occupied as his residence.

In Charlotte, a 15-year old boy, awaiting a preliminary hearing on the charge of murdering a service station operator in Charlotte the previous Saturday night, utilizing a tire hammer, pictured on the page, was observed in his cell by reporters reading a book of Bible stories. If the judge found probable cause that he had committed the crime, he would be bound over to Superior Court for trial as an adult, facing potentially the death penalty. Police said that he had admitted lying in wait for the man inside the man's panel truck, bludgeoned him with the hammer, then robbed him of $550. The man died in the hospital about an hour later. The boy was arrested by the County Police within 24 hours, locating him through a check of the man's contacts who would have known his truck and that he carried money. The boy had worked odd jobs for the man at the station.

Ralph Gibson of The News relates of an interview conducted at the jail with the boy. Mr. Gibson had asked him if he had planned the attack during Saturday afternoon, to which the accused responded, "No, sir, I didn't mean to kill him; I was just going to take his money."

He is undoubtedly going to receive a fair trial when the case is called.

Isabelle Howe, on page 12-A, begins a weekly column, "The Shop Talker", regarding a survey of Charlotte shops for the budget-wise shopper for clothing, furnishings, and services.

We look forward to each installment.

Not mentioned on the page, this date in 2017, the University of North Carolina basketball team defeated that of Gonzaga University, 71 to 65, to earn the N.C.A.A. national championship for the year. We congratulate the Tar Heels for their victory, achieved in the last 90 seconds of the game, and offer kudos as well to the Gonzaga Bulldogs for a game well-contested throughout. The game was back and forth, with neither team ever getting more than a briefly held seven-point advantage. The final margin was the largest obtained by UNC. Neither team shot well, but it was a lesson in defensive excellence on both sides of the court. It is, we think, the most enjoyable UNC championship game, win or lose, which we have ever seen, which includes all of them save a couple, the latter of which was the 1957 game, through which we slept—not because it was not exciting in hindsight but rather because it started past our bedtime, not unlike the New Year's Eve Georgia Tech game this year, albeit starting too early. We also missed the one in 1946 for a pressing appointment elsewhere, but later heard about it personally from one of the participating players.

It is UNC's sixth national title, not counting the 1924 mythical championship before the start of the N.C.A.A. Tournament in 1939, going back to their first one in that undefeated season of 1957, and represents only the second time that UNC teams have gone to the finals two years in a row, the last being 1981-82, when they also won the national championship on the second consecutive attempt, having failed on the first one. The Tar Heels have advanced to the finals on eleven occasions and to the Final Four twenty times, eighteen times in the past 51 seasons since 1967. Last year was the only time they have lost in the finals since 1981, and only the fifth time overall, the others being in 1946, 1968, and 1977. It is the third national championship for Roy Williams, in his fourteenth season as head coach at UNC, following championships in 2005 and 2009. This team has the most defeats of any UNC champion, but they were only seven nicks in the armor, making the victory all the sweeter in the end.

We did predict the final score, incidentally, as is evident from our Saturday offering, viz., UNC defeated UT-Chattanooga the first time they met, December 21, 1982, 73 to 66, and Elvis Presley, on April 3, 1956, on the Milton Berle Show, aboard the U.S.S. Hancock, sung a lyric which perfectly correlates on our calculus to 71 to 65, that is "one for the money" from 66, and "two for the show", from 73, and another three in the bucket and go, cat, go. (You could also adopt an alternative method of interpolative exegesis to find at least the UNC score from adding xxxix to xx, and then adding the Twelve Apostles, but that is fishing, as we cannot understand the opponent's score from that modality. But maybe you can figure it.)

In any event, you better lay off our shoes. They are supplied by Tarus Heelius Nippin Tuckus, the Greek goddess of basketball, who tells us much of what we know. And it pays to listen to former President Obama, whose bracket final prediction coincided with ours.

Thank ye, thank ye very much.

Parts of chapters sixty-six and sixty-seven of The Greatest Story Ever Told by Fulton Oursler appear on the page as part of the abridged serialization of the book.

That Friday, April 7, incidentally, is upcoming this week, albeit, unlike 1950, not in celebration of Easter in 2017 until the following weekend.

On the editorial page, "Hopes for Natural Gas Jolted" finds that the Federal Power Commission decision the previous week to deny the application of Piedmont Natural Gas Corp. in favor of Commonwealth Natural Gas Corp. to build a pipeline to serve the natural gas needs of Virginia had left, for the present, the Carolinas without access to cheap natural gas. Piedmont was planning to submit a new engineering plan which could make service only to the Carolinas economically feasible, whereas their earlier contention to the FPC had been that service of that limited market could not turn a sufficient profit to justify building the pipeline.